A St. Paul woman is accused of relentlessly harassing her neighbor, at times going so far as to yell racial slurs at the woman’s visitors and attaching a sex toy to her fence, authorities say.
Roberta Ann Madison, 63, was charged via warrant with two counts of gross-misdemeanor level stalking, as well as three counts of violating a restraining order her neighbor took out against her, according to a criminal complaint filed in Ramsey County District Court.
She also faces charges of indecent exposure and disorderly conduct for her alleged harassment of her neighbor, which reportedly took place over a six-month period between August of 2017 and February of this year.
Madison said Friday afternoon that the charges are baseless.
“They can file all the fake charges they want. They still have to prove something happened and that’s going to be impossible because nothing did,” Madison said. “This has all been played out to make me look bad.”
The dispute started about a year after the neighbor purchased a home near Madison’s residence on the 800 block of Howell Street in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood, authorities say.
Last August, Madison started calling 911 to report that “suspicious” people of a “different race” were coming and going out of her neighbor’s home and suggested that her neighbor might be running a “sex operation,” the complaint said.
She also yelled racial slurs at the visitors and threatened to have them deported, according to legal documents.
The visitors were reportedly houseguests of the neighbor at the time.
The following month, Madison threw debris in the woman’s yard when she had a bonfire and repeatedly set off her own car alarm to compel the woman and her guests to retreat indoors on other occasions, the complaint said.
Some time later, Madison affixed a sex toy to the neighbor’s fence, according to the complaint.
The harassment, described by authorities as “relentless,” led the woman to get a restraining order against Madison last November, the complaint said.
The court denied Madison’s own attempt to secure a restraining order against the neighbor, dismissing her petition due to “lack of proof,” according to legal documents.
The harassment continued undeterred, making life for Madison’s neighbor “unbearable,” authorities say.
On two instances after the restraining order was in place, for example, Madison allegedly exposed herself and made obscene gestures toward surveillance cameras her neighbor had installed and routinely piled snow at the end of her driveway, the complaint said.
Two other neighbors in the area and one of the woman’s friends corroborated the accounts of harassment to investigators, legal documents say.
The neighbors reported that Madison had also harassed the previous homeowner.
Madison, who has lived in her home for nearly 30 years, said Friday that she has secured a retraining order against the woman and accused her neighbor of unlawful invasion of privacy.
She said the woman’s security cameras point in to her backyard, which is a private space. She added that she suffers from incontinence and hip problems, preventing her from sometimes making it upstairs to her second-floor bathroom. In those instances, she uses her backyard instead, Madison said.
She characterized all of the woman’s allegations against her as lies, and said she only once called the police when she saw someone inside her neighbor’s home late at night that wasn’t her.
Madison’s record includes one conviction for disorderly conduct in 2010.