Screen star Uma Thurman played herself in a real-life courtroom psycho-drama yesterday.
The slender, 6-foot-tall stunner spent a day on a Manhattan witness stand, describing her two years of terror at being stalked – online, on set and even on her Greenwich Village doorstep – by a love-obsessed, mentally ill fan.
Images of razor blades, threats of suicide and hallucinatory claims of spiritual “connectedness” filled the e-mails, cards and phone calls of accused stalker Jack Jordan, and Thurman was made to describe them, and her reactions to them, virtually one by one.
PHOTO GALLERY: Famous Celebrity Stalkers
Her already husky voice broke with emotion as she told jurors of her fear for the safety of her two children, Maya, 9, and Levon, 6.
“That was terrifying for me,” she said of one particularly unhinged e-mail, in which Jordan claimed, “You have no children.”
“For anyone to fantasize that I didn’t have children or he didn’t want me to have children . . .”
Here, the 38-year-old actress seemed to choke back a sob. She sipped from a glass of water, and, composed, continued in a near-whisper, “I just don’t want my children to have anything to do with this.”
Thurman visibly cringed as she recounted one postcard’s creepy sexual innuendo, or the alleged stalker’s twisted claims of having a vision in which he “helped process the sadness” of her “fetus” after his delusional belief she had an abortion.
“It just looked so – disturbed,” the “Kill Bill” actress said, disgust tingeing her voice, as she described a bizarre postcard Jordan handed to her assistant in November 2005.
Thurman told jurors she read the postcard as she sat in her trailer on Wooster Street, getting makeup applied for an evening shoot for the movie “My Super Ex-Girlfriend.”
“All these crossed-out words,” she told jurors as she stood at an easel holding a giant blow-up of the creepy card, which was crowded with Jordan’s cramped, cursive handwriting. “And then you look at the words that are left,” she said, going on to read the legible writing.
“Chocolate,” she recited, her lip slightly curling with distaste. “Mouth. Soft. Kissing. Seduced.”
“Then I saw the part that said, ‘My hands should be on your body at all times.’
“Well,” she told jurors. “I was completely freaked out.”
By the time she saw the Catholic confirmation card Jordan had also handed the assistant – decorated with an image of Jordan walking along a razor blade – and the photo of a bride with the head portion ripped from the picture, Thurman was in a panic, she said. With Jordan himself still lurking just off set, Teamsters were called to rush Thurman to safety out the trailer’s back entrance.
“It was terrifying,” the actress remembered.
It all reached a kind of craziness crescendo that November, when Thurman got another letter from Jordan, again delivered to her trailer. On this one, the return address was the Maryland mental institution where Jordan’s family had him committed.
In it, he begged her help in getting him released. He also mentioned that he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – but was refusing all medications.
“I was being held responsible,” she told jurors of the letter, in which Jordan rails against being accused of wanting to take Thurman’s life. “I found that very frightening – these repeated mentions of his not wanting to take my life.”
Thurman said she was relieved to learn from a private eye hired for her protection by her “Kill Bill” producers that quickly after his release from the mental institution, Jordan had left the country. But after almost two years of quiet, Jordan was back again, this time at her doorstep in Greenwich Village.
“I felt sick,” she said of learning the news by phone, from another assistant, as she stood on the porch of a vacation home in the Bahamas. “I felt physically nauseous.”
Jordan camped in his car on her Greenwich Village street for a week – ringing her doorbell repeatedly, and dropping off a couple more bizarre letters – before getting arrested last October.
He is charged with stalking and aggravated harassment, both misdemeanors. In meticulously going over nearly every communication, bit by bit, she built the prosecution case that there was an ongoing course of conduct necessary to prove aggravated harassment. Legally speaking, it was a star turn for the actress.
But Thurman wore little makeup and dressed almost austerely, in black slacks, sweater and flat-heeled shoes.
Instead, it was Jordan – an unemployed pool cleaner who was a graduate education major at Mills College in California before madness apparently descended – who was most ready for his close-up.
He popped a breath mint and dabbed on cologne before entering Manhattan Supreme Court for his day with the object of his warped fascination.
“He’s very relaxed,” defense lawyer George Vomvolakis said. “He sees now how much he frightened her. But at the time, he had no idea.”
As Thurman testified, Jordan – on his lawyer’s advice – barely looked at her, so as not to make her uncomfortable.
Jordan, 35, is scheduled to take the stand in his own defense today.