Miranda Cosgrove Recalls Her Own Baby Reindeer Stalker Incident — and Being Confronted by One of His Victims

In 2016, the Nickelodeon alum's stalker lit himself on fire and then fatally shot himself in her front yard

Miranda Cosgrove arrives at the Nickelodeon's 2023 Kids' Choice Awards at Microsoft Theater on March 04, 2023
Miranda Cosgrove. Photo:

Steve Granitz/FilmMagic

As Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer is captivating the world, Miranda Cosgrove is reflecting on her own traumatic experience with a stalker.

In 2016, a man who had been stalking the iCarly alum, 30, lit himself on fire and then fatally shot himself in her front yard. Thankfully, she wasn't home at the time, but she returned to find her Los Angeles home had turned into a crime scene.

This wasn't the first time she'd had a scary run-in, however. The man had previously shot at a woman that resembled Cosgrove when she drove past her home. Years later, the actress ran into the shooting victim at an event for a nonprofit animal rescue.

“This girl came up to me, and she was like, ‘I didn’t know if I should tell you this here or how to say this, but I’m actually the girl that was at your house that got shot at,’” the Mother of the Bride star told Bustle.

Miranda Cosgrove
Miranda Cosgrove. Taylor Hill/Getty

“She seemed like she processes things in a similar way that I do,” Cosgrove continued, sharing how the two were able to use the terrifying ordeal to bond. “She said she’d just gone through a breakup the night before and was going to her friend’s house because she was so distraught. When they brought her into the Hollywood Police Station to ask what he looked like and how it all happened, the detectives were like, ‘Start from the very beginning. What happened?’ And she was like, ‘Well, he broke up with me last night,’ and she started telling them all about her breakup.”

While she can look back at things with a sense of humor, Cosgrove admitted that she was still dealing with residual trauma left from the incident.

“That’s another reason why I go back and forth to my parents’ house so much,” she said, explaining that she still lives in the same home. “I just don’t feel super safe in that house. For two years after it happened, I wouldn’t really stay there. Then I got into a relationship and because that person was there with me, I was less scared. But I don’t really like being there on my own that much.”

Now that she's 30, Cosgrove said that she's been working towards a "huge goal" of finding a "place that I feel really safe, to kind of start a new chapter.”

When she watched Gadd's Baby Reindeer on Netflix, the actress revealed that she didn't think about her own experiences "very much" but commended him for being able to act out his trauma.

"I feel like if that were me, having to go back through your most terrible experiences and then try to act them [out], that’d be so hard," she confessed.

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Baby Reindeer is available to stream on Netflix.

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