Woman Arrested For Trespassing At Taylor Swift’s Rhode Island Home
Westerly RI July 10th, 2023
Though Taylor Swift is on the road with her Eras tour, that didn’t stop one apparent fan from stopping by the singer-songwriter’s Rhode Island home, despite warnings to stay away. Police say that a 54-year-old woman was arrested this week after Swift’s private security told her to leave the home’s front gate area and she balked, the latest in a series of trespassers that have swarmed the mansion since Swift purchased it a decade ago.
Westerly Police Chief Paul Gingerella tells CNN that the arrest was made on July 3, after the woman—named by TMZ as Kimberly Meyer—was reported as a trespasser on the property, just outside its front gates. She was still there when police arrived, and was cuffed, arrested, and charged with one misdemeanor count of trespassing. She’s since been released and is expected to appear in court for her arraignment on July 14.
In 2013, Rhode Island Monthly reported that Swift bought the home in the tony enclave of Watch Hill for $17.75 million, spurring complaints from beachgoers over her allegedly overzealous security detail and engaging in an uncomfortable dispute with a local t-shirt maker that designed a Swift-themed shirt to commemorate her arrival in the region.
As Swift settled into the five-acre, 11,000-square-foot property, a new challenge arose: trespassers started to visit the property, the Washington Post reports, including notes left for Swift at the gates and a Chicago man who attempted to swim to the home. In a first-person account published by Elle in 2019, Swift said that “websites and tabloids have taken it upon themselves to post every home address I’ve ever had online.” (That’s certainly true for this home, the address for which popped up on Google in an instant.) “You get enough stalkers trying to break into your house,” she said, “and you kind of start prepping for bad things.”
Stalkers and trespassers have also dogged Swift elsewhere, as has been wildly reported. In June, 36-year-old Indiana man Mitchell Taebel was arrested on “charges of stalking by threatening serious injury or death, intimidation, invasion of privacy and harassment” after an alleged series of escalating threats and attempts to reach Swift at her home in Nashville, Tennessee. He’s expected to appear in court on July 27, the New York Post reports.
It’s unclear if Swift was home at the time of this latest incident, as TMZ claims she was in Rhode Island for the July 4 holiday, and a social media post from Swift suggests she was celebrating with friends, including the Haim sisters and Selena Gomez.
