Theresa Saldana

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article, while providing some complete reference citations, includes a list of references or external links, and its verifiability remains partly unclear because it has insufficient in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (October 2007)

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (October 2007)

Theresa Saldana (born August 20, 1954) is an American actress, known for her work in motion pictures and television. She is perhaps best known for her role as Joe Pesci's wife 'Lenore La Motta' in the 1980 feature film Raging Bull and in the 1990s television series The Commish, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role, in 1994.

Theresa Saldana

Born	August 20, 1954 Brooklyn, New York

Saldana was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Divina and Tony Saldana.^[1] On March 15, 1982, Saldana was the stalking victim of Arthur Richard Jackson, a 46 year old drifter from Aberdeen, Scotland. Jackson stabbed her viciously in the torso 10 times, with a 5 1/2 inch knife, near the front of her home in broad daylight, almost killing her. The attack was so fierce that he bent the blade in his rage.

Saldana would have died had it not been for a bottled water deliveryman, Jeff Fenn, who came down from the second floor of an apartment building and subdued her attacker. Inspired by the event and encouraged by many, Jeffrey Fenn, shortly after, entered Los Angeles County Sheriff Dept. training, graduated from the academy, and became a deputy sheriff.

Saldana eventually recovered after 4 hours of surgery, and a 4-month hospital stay, and eventually founded the Victims for Victims organization. The 1990 anti-stalking law and the 1994 Drivers Privacy Protection Act came into being partly as a result of the attack. The horrific experience inspired Saldana to star in the TV-film "Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story" (1984), recreating that traumatic day.

Jackson attained Saldana's address by hiring a private investigator to obtain the unlisted phone number of Saldana's mother. Jackson then called Saldana's mother and posed as Martin Scorsese's assistant, saying he needed Saldana's residential address in order to contact her for replacing an actress in a movie role in Europe. Jackson's approach to Saldana would later inspire stalker Robert John Bardo to also hire a private investigator to contact Rebecca Schaeffer.

Jackson served a 14-year prison term for the assault, and was then extradited to England to be tried for a 1966 robbery/murder. The mentally ill Jackson, who once perceived himself as "the benevolent angel of death", died at 68, of heart failure in a British mental hospital in 2004.

Theresa Saldana continues to act, and has appeared in dozens of roles on TV and films, in the last two decades. She also authored the book "Beyond Survival," a memoir of her experiences after being violently attacked.