Hollywood has a Mark Wahlberg problem, so why is it being ignored?
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: What was supposed to be a celebratory moment turned bitter when television and film actor Mark Wahlberg presented the final SAG Award to the cast of 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'. Many recalled his 1988 assaults on two Vietnamese men, as he handed off the award for outstanding performance to the predominantly Asian cast.
Back in 1988, Wahlberg, who was 16, hit a Vietnamese man in the head with a stick while attempting to steal alcohol. He punched another Vietnamese man in the face later that day. While one of the men had to be sent to the hospital, Wahlberg served about 45 days in jail. The actor later went on to apologize and raise millions of dollars for charity.
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At the time of the attack, the 'Uncharted' actor was under the influence of the hallucinogen PCP, according to the Daily Mail. The Vietnamese-American man he punched in the face, Johnny Trinh, later said of the attack, "He knocked me down and I got up and ran. I was scared that he was going to hit me again. I just wanted to get away. I had never seen him before and did not know why he wanted to hit me. The guy was crazy, he must have been out of his mind on drugs."
The attack on Trinh was not the only crime Wahlberg committed. The star, in fact, has a history of racially motivated attacks that keep resurfacing. One of the times the 'Ted' star's misdeeds resurfaced was when he shared a picture of George Floyd, supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. “The murder of George Floyd is heartbreaking. We must all work together to fix this problem,” he wrote, according to Independent. “I’m praying for all of us. God bless.” Many accused him of hypocrisy considering his history of using racial slurs and committing hate crimes as a teenager.
Mark Wahlberg’s crimes
When Wahlberg lived in Boston in the 1980s and was twice charged with race-related hate crimes. Wahlberg, 15 years old in 1986, was charged along with three friends for chasing three Black children and attacking them. Wahlberg and his friends pelted the children with rocks and yelled, "Kill the N-words". An ambulance driver eventually intervened.
The very next day, Wahlberg harassed another group of mostly Black children who were around the age of nine or 10. He gathered other White men at the beach and racially abused the children, throwing rocks at them.
Two years later, the incident involving two Vietnamese men, as discussed earlier in the article, took place. Wahlberg knocked Thanh Lam unconscious with a five-foot wooden stick, calling him a 'Vietnam f***ing s***'. He attacked Trinh later the same day. While he was given a two-year sentence for attacking Lam and Trinh, he served only 45 days in prison.
Kristyn Atwood, one of the fourth-grade students attacked by Wahlberg at the beach in 1986, later told the Associated Press that she did not believe he should be pardoned. “I don’t really care who he is. It doesn’t make him any exception," she said. "If you’re a racist, you’re always going to be a racist. And for him to want to erase it, I just think it’s wrong.”
'I am deeply sorry'
Back in 2014, Walhberg tried to seek pardon for the second attack and get it removed from his criminal records. “I am deeply sorry for the actions that I took on the night of April 8, 1988, as well as for any lasting damage that I may have caused the victims,” Wahlberg wrote in his pardon application. “Since that time, I have dedicated myself to becoming a better person and citizen so that I can be a role model to my children and others.”
In 2016, Wahlberg dropped the request. In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, he said, "I took it upon myself to own up to my mistakes and go against the grain and not be a part of the gang any more – to say that I was going to go and do my own thing."
He added, "[It] made it 10 times more difficult to walk from my home to the train station, to go to school, to go to work. But I also prided myself on doing the right thing and turning my life around … I would hope that people would be able to get a second chance in life.” Since 2001, Wahlberg reportedly sought the betterment of the lives of inner city children through the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation.
How Hollywood turned a blind eye
Despite his vicious crimes, Wahlberg successfully transitioned from a teen pop idol to an acclaimed actor. He received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for 'The Departed', and was praised for his performance in 'The Fighter'. He managed to get away and rise to fame despite his crimes, and not many in Hollywood seemed to care. Walhberg even went on to become close friends with Leonardo DiCaprio and David Beckham. Some years back, Wahlberg shared a clip of his friendship with DiCaprio, where a 19-year-old DiCaprio says, “Are we friends? Yeah, we’re friends. Right, Mark?" “Friends till the end,” Wahlberg, then 22, replies.
According to his IMDb profile, "Wahlberg dropped out of high school at age fourteen (but later got his GED) to pursue a life of petty crime and drugs. He'd spend his days scamming and stealing, working on the odd drug deal before treating himself to the substances." His eventual crimes were so brutal that many have, over the years, questioned the attention and fame he has been given. A recent example is the social media outrage after he presented the SAG award. His racist attacks did not stop a major turning point from coming in his career, when he got the role of troubled porn star Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Boogie Nights' (1997).
Since then, he has only flourished, acting in a range of roles in critically acclaimed dramas such as 'Three Kings' (1999) and 'The Perfect Storm' (2000). He was also seen in popcorn flicks like 'Planet of the Apes' (2001) and 'Contraband' (2012), and indies like 'I Heart Huckabees' (2004). Wahlberg has been married to Rhea Durham since 2009.
At a time when celebrities like Kevin Spacey, Will Smith, Kanye West, and James Franco are facing the consequences of the cancel culture due to various reasons, it is shocking how Wahlberg manages not to bear its brunt and continues to rise.