On New Year's Eve, the neo-soul songstress and Dallas native posted an Instagram video during a supposed traffic stop by Dallas police officers who "just wanted to say hi."
The next day, Rebecca Lopez at WFAA-TV tweeted that a stalker had been found inside Badu's home.
"Dallas Police detained a man who was found trespassing in singer Erykah Badu’s home," Lopez tweeted Monday evening. "Sources say the singer called him a stalker. He was issued a criminal trespass warning."
Both stories spread quickly. The Observer reached out to Badu's manager, Cold Chris, yesterday, and he said the stalker rumors were misconstrued.
"There was no break-in. There is no situation," Chris said. "The story has been way overblown.""There is a kid on Twitter following me who had the hots for me, naturally, and came over, made a bad decision." – Erykah Badu
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Badu spent yesterday afternoon tweeting links to "true stories" that insinuated the same. Then, around 6 p.m., she published a video statement to Twitter that went into more detail. She describes the alleged stalker as an overzealous but harmless Twitter follower.
"Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. There is no stalker. There was no break-in. There is a kid on Twitter following me who had the hots for me, naturally, and came over, made a bad decision," she says in the video. "Seven of his homies helped him up. I sent him on his way, gave him a stocking cap because it was cold. He went back to the bus station, as far as I knew."
The story was exaggerated after concerned neighbors called the police, Badu says.
"The neighbors called the cops cause some strange kid was walking around asking where Erykah Badu lived," she says. "Of course that's a reason to raise a red flag, and everyone got upset. The city is in an uproar because a kid made a bad decision."
Badu hasn't taken as much time to debunk the other story about the fanboy cops, "Donterio" and "Clay," but it seems likely she was just horsing around with the officers who responded to her neighbors' call about the Twitter fan.
In a second New Year's Eve video captioned "When the good ones show up," Badu says, “We’re just having fun, New Year’s Eve. I wasn’t harassed or anything."
