Former "Law & Order" star Kathryn Erbe testified Wednesday that she lived in fear after an obsessed fan "infiltrated my life" - and even viciously mocked her young daughter.
"I couldn't believe it was happening," she said in Brooklyn Federal Court at the stalking trial of Charles Nagel.
The petite actress, casually dressed in a black blouse and charcoal gray cargo pants, looked at her tormentor and identified him as the man who forcibly tried to hug her at a scene shoot in upper Manhattan in July 2008.
It was their first contact - but not the last.
"I got a very bad feeling from him," she recalled. "Just the way he looked at me."
Nagel grew increasingly persistent over the next eight months as his demented rants mailed to Erbe's ex-husband and Internet messages sent to her family went unanswered.
Erbe lost her composure when prosecutor Allon Lifshitz displayed a doctored photo of her 14-year-old daughter on a Facebook page linked to Nagel.
"That is a seventh-grade graduation picture of my daughter with a dialogue bubble that says, 'I'm ugly,' and a cockroach drawn on her face," Erbe cried.
"This is my daughter, who is completely innocent and relatively defenseless, and I'm not going to let this happen," she said.
Nagel's wife sat on a bench in the courthouse hallway, and the couple's two oddly named daughters - Batgirl and Harley Quinn - sat on the floor.
Defense lawyer Robert Datner conceded that his client had "some kind of interest" in Erbe, but noted she had not sought a restraining order.
The trial took a twisted turn when Datner called 12-year-old Harley Quinn Nagel to testify that she had doctored the picture of Erbe's daughter, not her dad.
Then Nagel, a pudgy creep who collects comic books and sells memorabilia, took the stand and claimed he was the victim of a colossal misunderstanding.
For a full year, he thought he had been communicating with Erbe on her MySpace page only to find out it was an imposter, not the actress, who had offered to boost his songwriting career.
"You have to be over-the-top to get a reply from a star," Nagel said. "I try to be sweet and sometimes it doesn't pay off."
jmarzulli@nydailynews.com
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