Woman who was stalked by the same man as Ivanka Trump discusses her horrific ordeal
A YOUNG woman claims to have spent the last five years living in fear of the same man who stalked and harassed Ivanka Trump.
But, unlike the daughter of the business mogul and new US president, Lenora Claire didn’t have access to security in the same way Ivanka did.
As a result, Lenora says that she endured years of creepy messages and threats.
After taking a restraining order out on Justin Massler in 2011, Ivanka Trump’s security was forced to arrest him in 2012 - just metres away from Trump Tower in New York.
Mr Massler — who had legally changed his name to “Cloud Starchaser” — was charged with aggravated harassment of Ivanka and put in prison.
But, in the months following his arrest and subsequent release, Lenora claims that she quickly became his new obsession.
According to Lenora, her run-in with Mr Massler started when she was profiled as part of LA Weekly’s “Best Of LA” write-up - which focused on the young art curator’s gallery opening, called pop tART.
Lenora told Crime Watch Daily: “I just opened up an art gallery; I’d gotten a lot of press.
“I was one of the LA Weekly ‘People of the Year’.
“I was at the gallery one day and this guy shows up — I kid you not — in a spacesuit, which I thought was kind of funny and strange.”
At first, Lenora shrugged off his presence as just another arty type who wanted to visit her gallery.
“When you’re a curator, you have a high tolerance for artistic shenanigans so I was just like, whatever.
“He seemed off, but harmless”, she told VICE.
After Introducing himself as “Cloud Starchaser”, Lenora and the man spoke discussed the gallery ad well as her involvement.
Lenora says that her opinion of Mr Massler changed just moments after they started to chat.
“He tells me that I remind him of Jessica Rabbit and that he thinks I’m a supreme being”, she recalled.
“Then he tells me that he intends to stalk me. He tells me that right to my face.”
Lenora claims that she soon found out that the man had skipped bail and had travelled across the country from New York to Los Angeles.
Lenora said on Crime Watch Daily: “He was arrested in New York for stalking Ivanka,
“While on bail he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, saw an article about me, and was sort of I guess fixated.
“That’s how he found me to begin with.”
According to Vice, Mr Massler was a “Harvard-bound star athlete until he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, the manifestation of which changed the course of his life”.
It has been claimed that he had convinced himself that he was Superman, and had "beliefs that women like Ivanka Trump and Lenora Claire needed to be kidnapped and raped in order to harness their powers.”
After their peculiar initial meeting, Lenora asked Mr Massler to leave immediately.
“It was, I don’t know, maybe like a week or 10 days after, these letters just started showing up,” Lenora said.
“On the envelope it says ‘From Cloud Starchaser in jail’.”
After the letter, Lenora allegedly started receiving emails, tweets and texts from Mr Massler — all containing ramblings and incoherent sentences.
Lenora alleges: “I have literally thousands of emails, tweets and he has entire blogs dedicated to stalking and raping me.
“I’ve just had enough. I thought it would stop. I thought he would be medicated and it would be OK. That’s obviously not the case.”
When Lenora went to give evidence to Los Angeles police, she was lucky that the man had also stalked Ivanka Trump - so they recognised his name.
But despite this, they were unable to offer her much help.
“They told me that I should change my hair so I’ll be less of a target,” she told Vice.
“They also told me to remove myself from social media ... I walked out of there so angry.”
In the US, a victim of stalking can legally serve a restraining order against their alleged stalker.
But to do that, the alleged stalker needs to have a physical address so they can be officially “served” the paperwork.
RELATED STORIES
In Lenora’s case, she claims that because Mr Massler didn’t have a fixed address she was told he could not be given the papers - making the restraining order only “pending” instead of “permanent”.
Lenora decided to protect herself by checking IP addresses to confirm where Mr Massler was sending his emails from in the US.
“If he was in California, I was in high alert because I felt like he could find me.
“If he was in a different state, I could breathe a little easier that day,” she said.
“This became my normalised routine.”
Five years on from her meeting with Mr Massler, Lenora has joined forces with California Congressman Adam Schiff, in the hope that her ordeal can help improve stalking laws in the US - by giving police the ability to serve a restraining order by email.
Lenora said that she also hopes her story changes the way people see victims of stalking.
Following her appearance on Crime Watch Daily, she reportedly received criticism that her image and presence on social media was to blame for her being targeted.
“I went public with what is actually a really painful and stressful thing for me because I wanted to take away the shame element of it,” she said.
“No one wants to be the face of stalking,” she told Vice.
“[But] we have seven million Americans being stalked and we haven’t done s**t for them.
“I want to change that.”