A woman who threatened to kill Catherine Zeta-Jones, cut her up and then feed her to dogs was jailed for three years on Friday after the Oscar-winning actress branded her as ”simply evil”.
Dawnette Knight (35), who pleaded no contest in February to stalking and making threats against the Welsh-born beauty, was put behind bars after an angry and withering statement from Zeta-Jones was read to the court.
”You have profoundly affected me in how I conduct my life, from the first time I was aware of this nightmare,” wrote the actress, who was not in court to face Knight, a fan obsessed with Zeta-Jones’s famous husband, Michael Douglas.
”Your actions will be with me for the rest of my life — how I will be constantly observing, looking over my shoulder,” Zeta-Jones said in the two-page statement, read by prosecutor Debra Archuleta.
The actress, who won the Oscar for best supporting actress in 2003 for her role in the musical movie Chicago, described the chilling threats made against her by Knight, who had a ”crush” on Oscar-winning actor Douglas.
”She was going to ‘blow my brains out like JFK’,” Zeta-Jones said. ”She was going to cut my throat the way that ‘OJ did to Nicole Simpson’. She was going to slice me up ‘like [Charles] Manson did to Sharon Tate’.
”She was going to slice me up and feed me to the dogs. Or ‘maybe a quick blow to the head’,” the actress quoted Knight as telling her in a string of threatening phone calls and letters that she said took a toll on her mental and physical health.
Fatal Attraction star Douglas testified last year that he was ”shocked, scared and stunned” after learning that death threats had been made against his wife.
In her statement, Zeta-Jones addressed Knight directly, saying she will never win celebrity as a result of her actions.
”You will never be famous, you will never be infamous,” the actress said. ”You are just a criminal — that is what you are to me and my family, a person that has caused so much distress that we want to completely forget about you.”
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Mintz sentenced Knight to three years in jail, including time served. She was arrested in June last year. — Sapa-AFP