Miranda Cosgrove is opening up about her traumatic experience with a stalker. In a profile for Bustle, the actress recounted the time in 2016 when a man paced in her backyard for hours before shooting at a car he believed was hers; he then set himself on fire and shot himself in her front yard. Luckily, Cosgrove was not at home.
Cosgrove revealed that she still lives in the house where all this went down. “That’s another reason why I go back and forth to my parents’ house so much,” she told Bustle. “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.” Cosgrove, who is 31, said one of her goals when she turned 30 was to find a place where she feels “really safe, to kind of start a new chapter.” She said she’s still working on that.
The iCarly actress added that, by chance, she met the woman her stalker had attempted to shoot. Cosgrove was attending an event for Kitten Rescue L.A. when someone she didn’t know approached her. “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,’” Cosgrove said.
This is not the first time Cosgrove has spoken about her experience with a stalker. She first detailed it in 2019 on actor Brett Goldstein’s podcast, Films to Be Buried With. Last year, a clip of Cosgrove from a 2020 appearance on Whitney Cummings’s podcast went viral on TikTok for the “nonchalant” way she told the horrifying story. Both times, Cosgrove explained that she had been on a movie date that went poorly and she drove to her parents’ house instead of returning to her own. She jokingly told Goldstein, “Pitch Perfect 3 saved my life.”
