The Actress Who Relived Her Own Stalker Ordeal On Camera

Actors typically only play themselves on the big screen for laughs, and largely to tell the world, “Hey, look—I really don’t take myself too seriously.” Think Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, or the entire cast of This Is The End.

Theresa Saldana, however, did it for another reason entirely: She bravely chose to recreate the horrific real-life ordeal in which she was stabbed 10 times by a psychotic fan.

Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story premiered on NBC in November 1984, just two years after its titular star nearly lost her life in a vicious knifing outside her West Hollywood home. “Working on the film released a lot of tension for me,” Saldana explained to The New York Times about the project most would consider untouchable. “How many people are offered the opportunity to go back in time and relive a traumatic experience, but without any of the physical or emotional pain that they felt the first time?”

A Man With a Murderous Plan
Turning Trauma into Action
Founding Victims for Victims

A Man With a Murderous Plan

At the time of the attack, Saldana was a star on the rise. She appeared in her first movie, Robert Zemeckis’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, in April 1978, and Nunzio, directed by Paul Williams, a month later. In 1979, she worked with Brian De Palma on Home Movies, and in 1980, she played Marsha in John Flynn’s Defiance and Joey LaMotta’s second wife Lenora in Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorsese.

It was the role in Defiance that got her noticed by Arthur Richard Jackson, a 46-year-old from the Scottish city of Aberdeen who saw the film at his local movie theatre and became obsessed; he stalked Saldana for 18 months with the goal of murder. The actress’s nightmare really began when Jackson hired a private investigator, who managed to get her mother’s unlisted phone number. The Scotsman, posing as an assistant for Martin Scorsese, called on the pretense that a film role in Europe was up for grabs and obtained Saldana’s home address.

At 10 a.m. on March 15, 1982, Jackson approached Saldana, who was on her way to a music class, and after verifying her identity, repeatedly stabbed her in the chest, legs, and arms with a hunting knife. In echoes of the infamous murder of Kitty Genovese (the details of which were later shown to be exaggerated), the incident was witnessed by numerous bystanders who didn’t intervene, even as Saldana screamed “He’s killing me, he’s killing me.” Jackson wasn’t stopped until Jeff Fenn, a driver for Sparkletts Water Delivery, heard Saldana’s cries from a nearby apartment building and rushed to her aid.

By this point, Saldana had suffered a punctured lung and several other severe wounds—Jackson had been so forceful that his knife’s blade had bent out of shape. She survived emergency surgery, but still needed to spend almost four months at Cedars-Sinai Hospital before she fully recovered.

Sadly, the actress’s ordeal didn’t end there: Saldana had to relive the attack on multiple occasions in court. “I will never forget the searing, ghastly pain, the grotesque and devastating experience of this person nearly butchering me to death, or the bone-chilling sight of my own blood splattered everywhere,” she told the judge at a hearing in 1984.

Jackson was sentenced to 12 years in jail, but he continued to torment Saldana from his cell, penning threatening letters to the actress; in one, he stated his regret at his choice of weapon, writing, “a gun would have given me a better chance of reunion with you in heaven.” The Scotsman was later extradited to the UK on murder and robbery charges dating back to the 1960s and was eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital. In 1989, Robert John Bardo would follow Jackson’s blueprint in obtaining information that allowed him to stalk and kill sitcom star Rebecca Schaeffer. Jackson died in 2004.

Saldana’s already strained marriage to her first husband, Fred Feliciano, also suffered in the aftermath, with the pair later going on to divorce. And inevitably, her once-promising acting career stalled while she underwent her lengthy recuperation.

Turning Trauma into Action

Saldana soon reentered the spotlight, though. She signed up to play Charles Bronson’s wife in the aptly-named The Evil That Men Do (1984) and then, despite initially laughing at the concept, starred in future Emmy-winning director Karen Arthur’s Victims for Victims. “As time went on and more people expressed interest, it became apparent that with or without my cooperation, this was going to be a film,” Saldana told The New York Times. “I wanted to make sure it would be done properly.”

The TV movie further blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality when paramedic Joel Nessa and emergency room doctor Eugene Keller, two men who had been pivotal in saving Saldana’s life, also took the opportunity to play themselves on camera. “The operation was actually harder work the second time around, because the first time we only had to do it once,” Keller said while recalling the bizarre metaness of it all.

Even the team behind the film had reservations about Saldana’s casting. Steve White, NBC’s vice president of motion pictures for television, admitted he was initially concerned about exploiting her situation in the name of entertainment. However, producer Harry Sherman insisted the film had noble intentions: “Theresa is giving hope to other victims, showing them what can be accomplished.”

Victims for Victims—whose reenactment of the stabbing around 14 minutes in makes for distressing viewing—did prove to be something of a career reviver. Its leading lady went on to guest on some of the biggest procedurals of the '80s (Cagney and Lacey, Matlock, Simon & Simon): incredibly, she once again drew upon her experiences playing a stalked pianist in an episode of Hunter, too.

In the early ‘90s, Saldana picked up a Golden Globe nod for her turn as detective Tony Scali’s wife in ABC dramedy The Commish, starred opposite kickboxer Olivier Gruner in martial arts flick Angel Town, and hosted the Lifetime show Confessions of Crime. And she racked up more than a dozen credits over the following decade, last appearing on screen in a 2003 episode of The Bernie Mac Show.

Founding Victims for Victims

Alongside her fearless most famous performance, Saldana also built a legacy through her philanthropic work, too: She founded Victims for Victims, an organization designed to support those who had endured similar crimes; delved deeper into her experiences with the 1986 book Beyond Survival; and successfully lobbied hard for both the first anti-stalking legislation in 1990 and Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994.

However, Saldana was determined to not let the traumatic incident define her. “If someone brings it up, I remember,” she told the Associated Press a decade after the attack. “But I don’t think about it all the time. It’s certainly not a formidable part of my life anymore. I’m happy and excited. I’m doing really well.”

Indeed, the star also looked like getting a happy ending in her personal life, too, when she walked down the aisle with actor Phil Peters in 1989, becoming a first-time mother later that same year with the birth of daughter Tianna. Tragically, she passed away at the age of 61 in 2016 after contracting a severe bout of pneumonia in 2016.

“I have such good memories of working with her on Raging Bull, and I always admired the way that she handled the horrifying attack by a stalker—the good that she made of it,” Scorsese said in one of many glowing tributes paid in the wake of her untimely passing. “She was a wonderful actress and a fine human being.”

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