Actress Eva LaRue says she doesn’t think she and her daughter will ever feel safe following a yearslong experience with a stalker.
“It really is an absolute rewiring of how you move through your life,” LaRue told “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday. “There’s no way to ever go back to innocence.”
In 2007 LaRue, who starred in “CSI: Miami,” and her young daughter, Kaya, first started getting threatening phone calls and letters from an anonymous person. Her story is told in a new two-part documentary called “My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story.”
“What is crazy is we, on ‘CSI: Miami,’ we were solving cases in 43 minutes, not including commercials. In real life we did not have the technology we were pretending to have on the show,” LaRue said.
The Emmy Award-winning actress said she and her daughter had to move twice. At one point, her stalker found her daughter’s high school and pretended to be her father, “and told her to stand out in front of the school and he was going to pick her up.”
The stalking went on for more than a decade and affected her physically, causing hair loss and hives.
“There was no place to hide because you don’t know where he could be, so you are really in a prison of your own making because you are trying to be four steps ahead of what he could do and those possibilities are endless,” she said.
“Take my life back”
LaRue described a moment of an epiphany when a friend invited her and her daughter to Italy while “CSI: Miami” wasn’t filming.
“We weren’t there 36 hours, in the middle of the night, it’s like 3 in the morning and I have jet lag and I’m kind of awake and rolling around. The bedroom door opens up and it is lit from the back,” she said, explaining she couldn’t see the individual’s face at the door, but thought it was her friend.
The next morning, she found out it was a break-in — but not her stalker.
“All I had done was pray all day and all night for months at that point for some sort of guidance. I really felt like it was my answer that God literally said in that moment, ‘If I wanted you dead, I’ll follow you to Italy,'” she said.
“So I felt in that moment, oddly enough, this weird sense of peace. That was the first time I could kind of take my life back.”
Stalker arrest and moving forward
LaRue’s stalker was caught in 2019 through DNA, 12 years after the threats began.
James David Rogers of Ohio was sentenced to 40 months in prison in 2022 — but is now out.
Asked if she feels safe, LaRue said, “I don’t think we’ll ever feel safe.”
“Your brain never goes back to not being hyper vigilant,” she said about moving forward.
She said she almost didn’t do the documentary and understands why some celebrities don’t.
“They just hope that it goes away, that they stop obsessing, but obsession is a mental health issue. They just move on to a new obsession.”
“My nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue story” was released on Paramount+, which is part of CBS News’ parent company.
