Paula Abdul is now freely admitting she was scared shitless the day she came face-to-face in the Idol audition room with a longtime obsessive fan who'd later commit suicide outside her home.

On Monday, she told Barbara Walters she "begged producers" not to let Paula Goodspeed, who had been sending her scary letters for close to 18 years, into the audition room. It was a request producers responded to in typical fashion. ("Do you enjoy your job here, Paula? It would be a shame if something were to happen to it, don't you think? And what might become of your Forever My Girl trinket-belt sales if you were to go back to being a nobody? What's that? You agree? Yes, we thought you might. Now bring in the nice stalker girl! We have some Idol disaster-week magic to make here and the day's not getting any shorter, people!")

Asked to weigh in on the controversy, former Idol EP Nigel Lythgoe (you might remember him from this montage of lightly racist sassisms delivered on the set of So You Think You Can Dance) demonstrated the deep wells of sympathy that characterize all competitive reality show producers:

"You do not take somebody in that room that you believe is a danger to herself or a danger to Paula," Nigel Lythgoe told PEOPLE... "That would not enter our heads.

"The very fact that this happened, I'm really sad for her family," said Lythgoe. "It happened about four weeks ago. For it to come back four weeks later, I'm really sad we're still talking about it."

"[Goodspeed] had been through an audition process with the producers, an audition process with the executive producers, and we were wheeling her in as a huge fan of Paula Abdul," Lythgoe said. "This is what we knew: She was a great fan, she was a lovely girl. And a great fan of Paula."

Lythgoe added: "We've seen over 700,000 contestants. And one has made a terrible, terrible mistake. If you're an odds man, they are great odds."

Don't clutter up his head with questions regarding disturbed individuals who'd demonstrated time and again why they might be a threat to his employees and themselves. That was a whole four weeks ago! We'll just have to take Lythgoe's word that Goodspeed was "wheeled in" as a huge fan of Paula's—not particularly the most sensitive choice of phrasing, mind you, when you consider she left the same way.