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Mickey Rourke is admiting to some past faults as he speaks out against the GoFundMe campaign launched on his behalf to help prevent him from being evicted.
Rourke, 73, took to Instagram on Monday, Jan. 5 to decry a GoFundMe campaign that was seemingly launched in his name by a member of his management team the previous day. It was created after he was served with a notice to pay $59,100 in back rent he allegedly owes or vacate his Los Angeles property in December.
“Listen, I’ve done a really terrible job in managing my career. I wasn’t very diplomatic,” Rourke said in the video, after asserting that he “wouldn’t ask for no f—— charity” if he needed money.
“I had to go to over 20 years of therapy to get over the damage that was done to me years ago, and I worked very hard to get through that,” Rourke added. “I’m not that person anymore, but you know, I can’t be the one to say that. You’ve got to talk to the last several people I’ve worked with.”
On Instagram, Rourke cited his collaborators and directors like Robert Rodriguez, Francis Ford Coppola and Darren Aronofsky as people who would speak to a change in his professional demeanor in recent years. (The former boxer-turned-actor famously costarred in Rodriguez’s Sin City movies; one of his earlier film roles came in Coppola’s 1983 movie Rumble Fish, and he also starred as the title character in Aronofsky’s 2008 movie The Wrestler, for which he received an Oscar nomination.)
“I’m not that wild man that I was 20 something years ago, but you pay the price for your past,” Rourke added.
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Rourke insisted throughout the five-minute-long Instagram video that he had nothing to do with the GoFundMe page set up in his name, which has now raised $102,058 but ceased accepting donations as of Tuesday, Jan. 6. The GoFundMe is attributed to a woman named Liya-Joelle Jones, who described herself in a description for the fundraiser as an assistant to Rourke’s manager Kimberly Hines; its description also reads that it was “created with Mickey’s full permission to help cover immediate housing-related expenses and prevent” his eviction.
“I’ve got a roof over my head and I’ve got food to eat. . . everything’s okay, just get your money back,” Rouke said at the end of the video. “I don’t need anybody’s money. I wouldn’t do it this way. I got too much pride, man. This ain’t my style.”
Rourke appeared in three movies last year, including Devil’s Play, Jade and The Roaring Game. He has a number of projects in development.
Responding to Rourke’s video, Hines confirmed to THR in a story published on Tuesday that the fundraiser was created for the actor by his team and that all proceeds would go to him. She also admitted that while they informed the actor of it, he may not have fully understood what was happening at the time.
“We said, ‘Mickey, there’s some people that want to help you out.’ He’s like, ‘Okay, great.’ I don’t think he understood, and now it’s taken on this media frenzy, and he flipped out,” Hines told THR.
