Aishwarya Rai

A man accused this week of stalking San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was reportedly barred from an earlier Aishwarya Rai concert in Oakland, Calif., and claims that he is the true life partner of the Bollywood star.

“i think i’m married to Aish,” Han Shin told india-West Feb. 27 by phone from his home in Union City, Calif. “She’ll be good luck for me.”

A restraining order was filed Feb. 21 against Shin, 42, who was found in Newsom’s San Francisco apartment building at 1 a.m. on the evening of Valentine’s Day. Newsom wasn’t home at the time, but police later found items in his car that were cause for alarm – including a map of the city, with Newsom’s address highlighted; a cutout composite photograph of Shin and the mayor; magazine articles; three purple latex gloves and a cassette tape titled “President Newsom.”

Reached by phone, Shin – a longtime Bollywood fan whom india-West reporters and photographers have encountered numerous times backstage at most of the major star shows – said that the media reports, which made the TV news and the front page of the Chronicle, are all false.

“i’m going to let them lie,” he said. “it’s all a carnival of lies. i didn’t stalk him. i was there in his building, yes … but i was just delivering a book.”

Shin said he had tried to deliver the book, written by his father, Dong Shin, to Newsom’s office earlier that day but was rebuffed by the mayor’s staff.

Prior to that incident, Shin had appeared at Newsom’s town hall meeting Feb. 10 in the city’s troubled Bayview neighborhood and had indulged in some strange behavior.

According to a declaration from San Francisco Police officer Franco Fleming, who was working on the mayor’s security detail, Shin sat in the front row and took photos of the lower half of Newsom’s body; and at one point, when Newsom’s jacket fell on the floor, wiped it off in a caressing manner and held it on his lap.

Shin also tried to get the mayor’s attention in a “flirtatious manner” numerous times, and grabbed him, said the declaration, which the City Attorney’s office made available to india-West.

“After Mr. Shin ignored our request to leave, my partner forced his way between the mayor and Mr. Shin, eventually separating the two,” reads Fleming’s declaration.

On Feb. 13 at an event marking the third anniversary of same-sex marriages approved by Newsom at City Hall, Shin showed up in purple latex gloves, and grabbed the mayor’s arm. Refused entrance to the mayor’s office, “Mr. Shin would not leave and demanded to see ‘Mr. Newsom,’” Fleming’s declaration continued.

“i wore purple gloves because purple is the color of the crown chakra,” explained Shin to india-West. “Marriage is the highest form of commitment two people can share, and i’m for gay marriage.” Shin is single, he said.

Asked to characterize his relationship with the mayor, Shin said, “i think he should run for president in 2008 and i want to be his campaign manager.”

Shin added that he wanted to lobby the mayor to invite the Miss Universe pageant to San Francisco. Shin is a great fan of beauty pageants, as evidenced by his Web site, BeautyForTheWorld.org. The site has dozens of photos of international beauty queens, including several of Bollywood stars Lara Dutta and Aishwarya Rai.

At a ViP function before the “Breathless” concert in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004, he showed this reporter a book he had created which consisted of hundreds of photos of indian beauty queens such as Sushmita Sen.

Shin also claims that he is on friendly terms with Sen and Bollywood actor John Abraham. “John gave me his personal phone number in Mumbai,” said Shin. “Sushmita and Ash talked to me.”

“But Aishwarya’s manager threw me out of the [Oakland] Coliseum,” he said, because he was trying to get too close to Rai. “i said, ‘You have earned bad karma in the U.S.,’ which is why none of Ash’s films have been hits here.”

Simone Sheffield, Rai’s international manager, said Feb. 27 that she would neither confirm nor deny that the event occurred.

According to biographical information posted alongside the Amazon listing, Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the U.S. with his parents in 1973.

His biography says he graduated as the class valedictorian from James Logan High School in Union City, and attended U.C. Berkeley, majoring in business.

A hearing on the restraining order will be held in San Francisco Mar. 7.