Kendall Jenner says she was “terrified” when an alleged stalker followed her into the driveway of her Hollywood Hills property and began banging on her car window as she called friends to report what was happening.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” the 20-year-old daughter of Kris and Caitlin Jenner told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury.
The model — who has appeared on her family’s reality TV show “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” — testified Thursday that she recognized Shavaughn McKenzie — who was seated on the opposite side of the courtroom — as the man who has “been following me for a couple of years.”
McKenzie, 25, is charged with one misdemeanor count each of stalking and trespassing.
Jenner told the seven-woman, five-man jury that she was returning to her Hollywood Hills home about 9:30 p.m. Aug. 14 when she saw someone sitting in the street with their head in their knees and that she waited for her 13-foot- tall gate to close.
“I wouldn’t expect someone to be sitting on the side of the street. I definitely thought it was weird … It didn’t make sense,” Jenner said.
She told jurors that she was about to open her car door when she saw the figure of a man in her rear view mirror. She said she rolled the window down about six inches and asked who he was and then asked him once he said his first name, “Can you leave please?” She said she asked him “nicely” twice to leave and probably screamed it at him another six or seven times.
When asked to identify the man she saw in her driveway, she pointed to McKenzie across the courtroom.
“I was terrified,” she testified, noting that it “clicked” then that he was the man who had approached her vehicle as she drove near her condominium in Westwood on two separate occasions before she moved to the Hollywood Hills.
“I was crying, I was screaming, I was freaking out,” Jenner testified. “I didn’t know what his intentions were. I was freaking out. I was frightened for sure.”
She said the man began banging on her car window as she was on a cellphone call with a family friend to report what was happening.
“It was not a tap. It was hard enough to frighten me, but not hard enough to break anything,” she testified.
“I never got out of my car. I was terrified. I was literally traumatized,” she said, telling jurors that she began backing out of her driveway.
“I started honking at him … I just wanted to make sure I saw wherever he went. He got out of the gate and I drove down the hill.”
McKenzie was arrested that night by Los Angeles police and has remained in jail since then.
Jenner testified that police arrived after her friends met her vehicle nearby, and that she returned later to the house to pick up clothing to stay at a family friend’s house “because I was traumatized.”
Jenner said she didn’t have any security personnel at her house at the time because “security doesn’t make me feel very normal” and that she likes to “feel as normal as possible.”
When asked by prosecutor Alex Perez whether it was fair to say she was famous, she responded, “I guess.”
Jenner told jurors that McKenzie had previously approached her vehicle twice near her Westwood condominium complex — once in 2015 after he “ran up on me in the street when I was driving my car” and then in a “very aggressive” manner as she drove on Wilshire Boulevard on another occasion.
“It frightened me for sure. Thank God I was in my car,” she said. “Even thinking about it now still freaks me out.”
The head of security at the Westwood condominium complex where Jenner lived for about two years identified McKenzie as the man he frequently saw outside the building, describing him “almost as a fixture” when Jenner was in town and saying that he saw McKenzie try to approach her vehicle.
Testimony is set to continue Monday.
—City News Service