Within the Nineties, Jean-Claude Van Damme was sued for injuring an actor on the set of Cyborg. Right here’s the story behind the lawsuit and the way it performed out.
Jean-Claude Van Damme was sued within the Nineties over an harm that occurred on the set of Cyborg. All through his profession within the movie enterprise, the Muscular tissues from Brussels has had a fame for delivering intense and well-choreographed struggle sequences in his movies. However supposedly as an unlucky consequence of this life like strategy, a stuntman sustained a critical harm whereas filming a struggle with Van Damme.
Launched in 1989, Cyborg was an early action car for Van Damme, whose profession was simply starting to take off. In reality, the movie was solely his second lead function, with the primary being 1988’s Bloodsport. Although the half was reportedly written for Chuck Norris, Van Damme ended up enjoying the primary protagonist.
Set in a cyberpunk world, Cyborg simply earned its R-rating with a plethora of violent battles and brutal kills, a lot of which carried out by Van Damme’s character. Over the course of the story, Van Damme’s Gibson Rickenbacker had to make use of his martial arts abilities and cyborg enhancements to struggle his method via quite a lot of knife and sword-wielding criminals and pirates.
In 1993, Van Damme was taken to courtroom over an incident that occurred throughout certainly one of Cyborg’s struggle scenes [via Associated Press]. Jackson “Rock” Pinckney, a stuntman who performed one of many pirates Van Damme’s character needed to struggle, accused the actor of gouging out his eye. Jackson, who was a soldier within the U.S.
Military on the time, was hit within the eye with a rubber knife. Apparently, he was purported to rush on the Bloodsport star with a knife of his personal. The scene referred to as for Van Damme to kick the knife out of his hand, after which make it look as if he had slashed open his enemy’s throat. As a substitute, Van Damme’s rubber knife struck Pinckney’s left eye. The blindness he suffered in his eye induced him to be discharged from the army. It was stated that the harm was everlasting.

The lawsuit, which alleged that the harm was everlasting, requested for Van Damme to pay the stuntman greater than $10,000 in damages. Pinckney’s argument towards Van Damme was that the star stabbed his eye “willfully”.
This was based mostly on the notion that Van Damme was insistent on making his fights look so genuine that he usually went too far. The protection provided by Van Damme and his lawyer was that it was solely an accident, and that there was merely no proof that the harm was something greater than that. Van Damme’s aspect maintained that his actions weren’t “willful” or “reckless”.
Ultimately, the courtroom dominated towards Van Damme and awarded Pinckney with a $487,000 sum. What in the end harm Van Damme’s case was the phrases of different stuntmen who labored alongside the star in Cyborg. To the courtroom, their testimonies that Van Damme didn’t shrink back from bodily contact throughout struggle scenes corroborated Pinckney’s claims. However whereas the end result definitely didn’t favor Jean-Claude Van Damme, it didn’t cease the actor from furthering his model of preventing within the movies that adopted.

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