A Los Angeles courtroom has drawn a five-year perimeter around the home of pop star Sabrina Carpenter, granting a permanent restraining order against a 31-year-old man who repeatedly attempted to force entry into her residence. The petitioner, William Applegate, told the judge he and Carpenter were part of a classified military programme and that their immediate union was vital to “national and global security”. During one incident, he struck a security guard before being arrested at the singer’s front door. The order, which also protects Carpenter’s sister and partner, illustrates the increasingly robust legal armour available to celebrities in the United States as stalking cases escalate from digital intrusion to physical confrontation.

Half a world away in Russia, another young woman who found fame through television is now confined by a different kind of legal boundary. Diana Shurygina, who became a household name in 2017 after appearing on the talk show *Пусть говорят* (Let Them Talk) to discuss a sexual assault allegation, has been placed under house arrest on charges of producing and distributing pornography. A Moscow court has prohibited her from using the internet, making telephone calls, or sending and receiving post; she may only contact her lawyer and close relatives, and use a phone to summon emergency services. Prosecutors allege that after her relationship with a former boyfriend ended, Shurygina worked with a Ukrainian agency creating explicit content. If convicted, she faces up to six years in prison — a sentence that mirrors the term handed down to Argentina’s most powerful woman.

In Buenos Aires, the legal net is tightening not around a person but around the proceeds of power. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s former president, has been serving a six-year sentence for fraudulent administration in the so-called Vialidad case, yet the state has failed to recover a single peso of the stolen funds. Her defence team has deployed what local analysts describe as an unrelenting barrage of appeals and procedural chicanas to stall the confiscation of assets. Now the Federal Oral Tribunal No. 2 is accelerating the process, awaiting a final report from Banco Galicia on US$5 million held in accounts and safety deposit boxes belonging to Kirchner’s daughter, Florencia. Those funds, originally seized in a separate money-laundering investigation, have become the focal point of a broader effort to enforce the financial penalties of the corruption sentence.

Viewed from London, the three cases reveal how legal systems on three continents are grappling with the challenge of imposing constraints on individuals whose notoriety often outpaces the machinery of justice. In the United States, the restraining order offers a swift, civil shield against a single obsessive threat. In Russia, house arrest functions as a punitive cage for a former media darling now cast as a moral transgressor. In Argentina, the struggle is not to confine a body but to claw back the material rewards of graft — a task that, one year after a firm conviction, remains mired in the very political and legal inertia the sentence was meant to overcome. Each case, in its own way, tests whether the law can truly fence in those who have grown accustomed to living beyond its reach.