Willow Smith filed for a restraining order against a 38-year-old registered sex offender who has been stalking her online.
The 20-year-old daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith claims Walter James Whaley first began hitting her up on social media and leaving comments about how he wants to marry her and have kids. He then traveled from Oklahoma to Los Angeles and attempted to break into her home during the Christmas season.
Whaley climbed over a fence to Smith’s home and, per TMZ, was captured on surveillance footage lurking around the property and looking for a way into the house. Smith’s security called police but when they arrived at the scene, the trespasser wasn’t arrested. Cops reportedly found a Greyhound bus ticket in Whaley’s pocket showing he had traveled from Oklahoma the day before.
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Smith is rightfully concerned that Whaley may return to her home so she filed legal docs seeking a restraining order against him. She included photos of Whaley on her property, and noted that he “will do whatever possible to make physical contact with me.”
The judge agreed with Smith and she was granted a temporary restraining order. Whaley must stay 100 yards away from her and cease communicating with Smith.
Meanwhile, Smith previously opened up about coping with “extreme anxiety” during a December episode of Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk, alongside her mother and her grandmother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris.
“I couldn’t talk, I had to just cocoon and just be with myself for a moment,” said Smith. “And that was so important because it would have been more intense if I was, like, looking to you,” she continued, looking at her mom. “To be like, ‘No, help me!’ And then when I was ready … open the cocoon.”
She also touched on the range of emotions that come with having an anxious nature.
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“There’s shame. There’s guilt. There’s sadness. There’s confusion,” the singer said. “And then you don’t even want to talk about it because you’re like, ‘I feel crazy. I feel crazy for feeling this way and I don’t want them to think I’m crazy, so I’m just not going to say anything.’”
Back in 2018, she revealed a shocking secret about her tough childhood years and admitted to turning to self-harm to cope.
“I feel like I lost my sanity at one point,” Smith revealed at the time. “It was after that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing and I had just stopped doing singing lessons and I kind of was in this gray area of: Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?”
“I never talk about it because it was such a short, weird point in my life,” she continued. “But you have to pull yourself out of it.”
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