GEORGE CLOONEY is once again fighting to save the world from evil, but this time he does not need his Batman costume. The Oscar-winning actor is playing himself in a new battle against an internet website that provides maps and addresses of celebrity sightings.

Clooney is leading the Hollywood charge against Gawker, a New York-based gossip website that proudly declares itself to be “sick and psychotic”.

Concerned that the website may be exploited by obsessive fans, Clooney has launched a campaign to discredit it by swamping its celebrity sightings page with bogus reports. In an e-mail distributed by his publicist to other agents, Clooney wrote: “There is a simple way to render these guys useless.”

He went on: “A couple of hundred conflicting sightings and this website is worthless. No need to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That’s the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride.” The e-mail was signed, “Thanks, George.”

The website responded by deriding Clooney’s attempt to subvert what Gawker insists is innocent fun that provides ordinary fans with a chance to boast of their celebrity sightings.

“Daily Gawker Stalker: Brought to you by the Axis of Evil,” the website announced yesterday. It has amended the introduction to its online map — which shows exactly where celebrities are spotted — to read: “Sightings are sent in by readers and George Clooney.”

The improbable showdown between Hollywood’s leading liberal and the new breed of irrepressible cyber-gossip follows a running skirmish over the launch last month of a “stalker” feature that many celebrities denounced as an incitement to harassment.

Jesse Oxfeld, a Gawker editor, said all the website was doing was adding a map to the celebrity reports that have circulated on the internet for years. The website claims to wait 15 minutes before posting any sighting on the grounds that the delay “provides an ample window for celebrities to move about before facing certain death exacted by their violently obsessive fans”.

Among the New York sightings reported on Friday was Scarlett Johansson, the actress, who was spotted at 3pm at Bubby’s restaurant on Hudson Street with her boyfriend, Josh Hartnett. Johansson “didn’t seem as voluptuous in person as described in the press”, the spotter added.

Nicole Kidman was seen leaving the New York Presbyterian hospital looking “scarily skinny and blonde”. Glenn Close looked “unbelievably fresh, elegant, trim and attractive” as she stepped out of a limousine on West 56th Street, another spy reported.

Security experts disputed Gawker’s claim that the 15-minute delay was enough to safeguard celebrity privacy. “If somebody is sitting down in a restaurant, they are going to be there a lot longer than that,” said Tino Struckmann, a celebrity security consultant.

Stan Rosenfield, Clooney’s agent, said that the stalker feature was “conceptually bad”. Rosenfield recalled the case of Rebecca Schaeffer, a 21-year-old television star who was murdered by an obsessed fan at her Los Angeles home in 1989.

Others pointed to the death of John Lennon, shot by a fan outside his New York home.

“This is a dangerous thing,” said Rosenfield. “Someone could get hurt over it.”

Jessica Coen, another Gawker editor, acknowledged that “there are very many creepy people out there but, truth is, if there is someone really intending to do a celebrity harm, there are much better ways to go about doing that than looking at the Gawker Stalker”.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president