The ABBA Superfan Who Got the Girl—and Wouldn’t Let Her Go
In April 1974, an eight-year-old boy in the Netherlands watched four young Swedes win the Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo" and fell for the blonde singer in silver platform boots. Twenty-three years later, that boy, Gert van der Graaf, was dating Agnetha Fältskog.
When she ended it, he refused to accept it, and it took a Swedish courtroom, two deportations, and a series of arrests to keep him away from her. Even that didn't end it: in 2011, more than a decade after the breakup, a court convicted him again, this time for writing and phoning her in violation of a restraining order.
A Superstar in Hiding
To understand how it all went wrong, start with how far Agnetha had retreated. ABBA's run wound down in 1982, her marriage to bandmate Björn Ulvaeus had ended two years before that, and after losing her mother in 1994 she pulled back to her estate on Ekerö, an island in Lake Mälaren west of Stockholm, a short drive from Drottningholm Palace and an easy day trip from the capital.
The Brighton win had started a Swedish pop-hit streak that never really stopped. Agnetha was the part of it that did.
She spent the nineties on yoga, astrology, horseback riding, and saying no to almost everything. Sweden's most famous singer had become, by most accounts, its most famous recluse.
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The Eight-Year-Old Who Never Moved On
Gert van der Graaf was eight when ABBA won, and in his own telling the feeling never faded. As a teenager he cycled about 35 miles to a Dutch TV studio where Agnetha was performing, and when she told the studio audience she loved them, he decided the words were meant for him alone.
He taught himself Swedish from a phrasebook and mailed letters addressed to little more than "Agnetha Fältskog, Sweden."
"I went to Sweden 32 times," he told Solna District Court. "The 25th time I got in contact with her."
Eventually he bought a weekend cottage on Ekerö, a few hundred meters from her estate, and found work nearby as a forklift driver. Sweden's most famous singer now had a neighbor whose crush was more than two decades old.
When the Fan Became the Boyfriend
By the end of 1997 they were a couple: the 47-year-old superstar and a Dutch forklift driver sixteen years her junior. She knew from the start, she later testified, that he was "an odd person."
"It was a very intense courtship from his side," she told the court. "Finally I felt I couldn't resist anymore."
She broke up with him three times, by her own account. The last one, in September 1999, came with a restraining order, and it still didn't take.
Eighty-Six Letters and a Face at the Window
Even before the final breakup, the letters never stopped: some 300 of them between 1997 and 1999, and phone calls up to three times a day.
After the final breakup, the verdict alone counted 86 more letters, some of them, in her judgment, threatening. He called her home phone and her mobile at all hours, followed her when she drove, waited on the road to her house, and went through her mailbox.
On Christmas Eve 1999 he appeared suddenly outside her window. "He almost scared me to death," she testified.
Months earlier, seeking the restraining order, she had shown a judge a letter she wrote him: "Gert, I want to be left alone. There's no hope for us together. I don't want any more letters. Nothing else!"
It changed nothing. She told police she needed medication to sleep and feared for her life and her children's.
He described their romance as Romeo and Juliet; she told police it was "more like Jekyll and Hyde."
Even his mother had run out of patience. "Gert should have accepted it was over," she said.
"I'm sorry she's afraid of me," Gert told the Mail on Sunday. "I'm not dangerous, but if I'm put in jail I'll still love her."
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Sweden Puts a Stalker on a Plane
In April 2000 she filed a police complaint, and he was arrested two days later. When police searched his cottage, they found a room papered floor to ceiling with pictures of her.
That October the case reached Solna District Court. Agnetha asked not to share a room with him, and the court agreed: he listened to her testimony from an adjacent chamber.
"I have been deprived of my liberty for over a year," she said. "He has watched me everywhere, sometimes he has scared the life out of me."
Gert admitted the letters and the calls but denied committing a crime.
"I'm not a violent person and I have never wanted to cause her any harm," he told the court. "I just wanted to try to get her back."
The one thing he couldn't understand was her fear: "I feel sad. I love that woman."
On October 26, 2000, the court convicted him of harassment, ofredande in Swedish, plus fraud and forgery over a check he had doctored to fool his bank out of 10,000 kronor. The penalty was a suspended sentence, a fine, and a two-year ban from Sweden.
The court cited "a large number of violations" and a "risk of continued criminality." It was right about the risk.
At the time, Sweden had no crime called stalking, so courts had to convict on stacks of older, smaller offenses. A dedicated offense, olaga förföljelse, only came into force on October 1, 2011, carrying up to four years in prison, two decades after California became the first place to outlaw stalking.
He Kept Coming Back
The ban expired, and he came back. In June 2003 he was arrested again on Ekerö after neighbors spotted him near her home, and deported once more.
"I love her still," he told Expressen. "I will never forget."
In 2005, within months of that ban expiring too, neighbors found him in her garden. Agnetha told Expressen the comebacks had done real psychological damage.
In 2006, by SVT's account, he was arrested one more time, outside her home. In 2011 came another conviction, this one for violating the restraining order with new letters and phone calls to her.
"I shall never again try to contact her," he told the court that year. He had only been in Sweden "on vacation," he explained.
The Documentary She Didn't Want Made
In May 2023, Prime Video released Take a Chance, a Swedish documentary about the case, its title borrowed with heavy irony from "Take a Chance on Me." Director Maria Thulin built the film around Gert's own narration, mixed with interviews of his friends, psychologists, and stalking experts including Rhonda Saunders, the prosecutor in Madonna's stalker case.
Agnetha wanted no part of it. Her representatives had written to the producers asking them not to make the film at all, and she declined to comment on it.
Journalist Fredrik Strage had already told the story in his book Fans, built on interviews with Gert himself. Years after the trial, a Swedish forensic psychiatrist who examined him, Fredrik Heden, diagnosed him with erotomania: the delusion that someone, usually someone famous, is secretly in love with you.
In the film, his obsession looks untouched by the years: the Volvo still carries books, records, and clothes devoted to Agnetha and ABBA, and he still writes her letters. He just doesn't send them anymore.
Where Agnetha Is Now
She never left Ekerö, but she did, slowly, come back: a covers album in 2004, a solo album of new songs in 2013, and then the thing nobody expected, ABBA together again for 2021's Voyage, their first album in forty years, with the ABBAtar concerts that opened in London in 2022.
In March 2024, King Carl XVI Gustaf made all four ABBA members Commanders First Class of the Royal Order of Vasa, the first time in almost fifty years that Sweden's royal orders went to anyone at all.
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Gert van der Graaf got what millions of ABBA fans only dream about, and it still wasn't enough. A friend told the Daily Mail in 2023 that he still drives the fifteen-hour route from the Netherlands to Sweden, still "planning" a way back into her life.
Agnetha has never told her side of the story publicly. Her testimony in Solna remains the fullest account she has given: "I want my freedom back and live a normal life again."