A fan who unleashed his crude fantasies about Ashanti in a battery of text messages and photos to the R&B singer’s mother has been sentenced to two years in jail.
David Hurd, 31, was convicted in December of stalking and was sentenced yesterday in a Manhattan court.
“Mr. Hurd, I realize you don’t want to hear this, but it’s obvious to me that you need to get help,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Farber said in issuing the maximum sentence for misdemeanor stalking and harassment today.
Hurd, who has been diagnosed with a delusional disorder, sent some 32 disturbing, sex-obsessed texts to the R&B star.
“That’s sex texting, is what it is,” Hurd had explained when he testified in December. “For the ladies!”
But the singer’s mom, Tina Douglas, took the stand to personally tell jurors that the messages left her “terrified” for her daughter’s safety.
“My job is to be her manager,” Douglas told the jury. “But she’s my daughter, first.”
Hurd, who has already been in jail for the past eight months since his arrest, had hoped to be released on time served.
“Yes, I sent some adult text messages. Again, this is something I’ve done in the past,” Hurd told the judge — as if that minimized his crime.
“I’ve always meant the best for her and her career,” he said of Ashanti.
The judge said he’d have rather sent Hurd to some probation-controlled mental health counseling program — but that probation officials in both New York and Illinois, where his family lives, wouldn’t take him.
But lead prosecutor Carol Holderness told the judge that Hurd intended to alarm his victims — and that jail is the best place for him.
“Even if he believed that Ashanti was in love with him, his conduct was not that of a man wooing a woman,” Holderness said.
“It’s not like he was sending her flowers.”