Eva LaRue is detailing a harrowing chapter in her life.
Nearly two decades after the CSI: Miami alum began receiving disturbing notes that ultimately led to 12 years of terror from a fan-turned-stalker, she reflected on the devastating experience and its aftermath.
"It was a full-body takeover," LaRue explained in a Nov. 11 interview with CBS Mornings. "It really is an absolute rewiring of how you move through life. There's no way to ever go back to innocence. Somebody had said to me, 'Well, can you move on now?' No. Your brain never goes back to not being hypervigilant."
The messages—which were sent between 2007 and 2015, before assailant James David Rogers transitioned to voicemails in 2019, per prosecutors—were signed by "Freddy Krueger," a.k.a. the fictional killer from the Nightmare on Elm Street film franchise.
And LaRue and her now 23-year-old daughter Kaya McKenna Callahan—whom she shares with ex-husband John Callahan—had to uproot their lives multiple times.
"We had to move twice," the 58-year-old explained. "He ultimately found her high school and called the high school pretending to be her dad and told her to stand out in front of the school. He was going to pick her up."
LaRue—who is sharing her story in her upcoming docuseries My Nightmare Stalker: The Eva LaRue Story Nov. 13—detailed the physical toll the stalking took on her.
"My eyelashes fell out," she recalled. "I was broken out in hives all over. There was no place to hide because you don't know where he could be. You really are 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."
LaRue further detailed her experience in the Paramount+ docuseries, adding in the trailer of the letters, "Those words and those threats were absolute psychological terrorism."
"My worst fear was that everything that he said in those letters could be a reality," the All My Children alum continued. "The letters were coming fast and furious."
Meanwhile, Callahan shared her own experience navigating the situation in the upcoming project. "He could be anywhere," she said. "He could be anywhere. That's what he was to me, a shadow that I could never pinpoint."
Among the threats Rodgers made in his letters, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2022, was that he would rape both LaRue and Callahan before killing them. In one, he vowed, "I am going to…stalk you until the day you die."
After 12 years of harassing and stalking LaRue and Callahan, Rodgers was sentenced to more than three years in federal prison in 2022.
The 61-year-old—who has since been released—pleaded guilty to "two counts of mailing threatening communications, one count of threats by interstate communications, and two counts of stalking," per the announcement.
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