A sex-crazed fan made Ashanti’s manager-mother “terrified” for her daughter’s safety, the R&B star’s mom told a Manhattan jury yesterday.
“I’m thinking, in my mind, rape,” Tina Douglas testified on Day 1 of the stalking trial of Devon Hurd, an Indiana man who allegedly sent a vile fusillade of 32 disgusting messages to her business cellphone — including texts in which he fantasized about sex with the young star and attached pictures he snapped of himself masturbating.
“My job is to be her manager,” Douglas told the jury. “But she’s my daughter first.”
Douglas and her husband, Ashanti’s tour manager, raised Ashanti and a younger daughter in a Glen Cove, LI, home the couple has shared for 30 years.
Yesterday, Douglas described how that happy household, abuzz with the business of managing a successful international music star, was rocked by the intrusion of Hurd’s alleged depravity.
The mom still doesn’t know how Hurd got her business number, except that managing Ashanti means dealing with “thousands” of people in the recording, television, film and theater worlds — too many contacts to simply change the number, she told jurors.
However he got the number — and maybe he’ll explain that when he takes the stand, as scheduled, today — Hurd started calling Douglas’ business phone in 2006, leaving messages that at first were merely annoying, authorities say.
“It was just rhetoric and garbage,” said Douglas, an attractive woman in a stylish brown wool dress suit who looks more like Ashanti’s older sister than her self-described “momager.”
For months, Douglas ignored him. Then she told him to stop — even cursing him out on the phone. But by this year, Hurd’s messages allegedly turned ugly — and frightening.
Last summer, when Ashanti starred as Dorothy in the City Center’s revival of “The Wiz,” Hurd allegedly sent dirty texts indicating that he knew the location of her home and her car and her plans for the night.
When the prosecutor showed jurors a photo that Hurd, 31, took of himself while masturbating, Douglas unflinchingly narrated.
“To look at it now — and I’ve been looking at this — the shock value just never goes away,” she told jurors, her voice firm. “It’s very, very frightening. I’m sickened by it.”
Hurd, whose profession is unclear, argues he is merely a fan who has a bad way with words and never intended to frighten anyone.
“What he wanted was what we all want in life,” said his lawyer, Richard Verchick, in opening statements — “love and work.”
laura.italiano@nypost.com