Mark Wahlberg: PARDON ME!
MARK Wahlberg wants to be pardoned for assaults he committed in 1988, including hitting a Vietnamese man in the head with a stick and punching another. Not everyone’s sympathetic.
Johnny Trinh, whom Wahlberg struck as a teen, said recently, “He was young and reckless but I forgive him now.” But the star’s former bodyguard Leonard Taylor — who separately claimed Wahlberg attacked him in 2001 — doesn’t think he deserves clemency.
“He hasn’t changed his ways, he just has money now where he can cover it up,” Taylor told us this week. “You can take Mark out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of Mark.”
Taylor claimed in a $2 million civil lawsuit at the time that Wahlberg punched him in the face and bit him on the arm. But Taylor later dropped the suit, and no criminal charges were ever filed.
“Mark liked to say things I think are inappropriate,” recalls Taylor of his time in Wahlberg’s entourage for three years, working as an unpaid bodyguard. “One minute he’s laughing, the next he’s looking at you with the evil eye. He goes from hot to cold real quick. There is no middle ground with him.”
Wahlberg, who spent 45 days in jail for the ’80s scrapes, told us he wants to be pardoned because, “I’ve been spending the last 27 years trying to correct the mistakes that I made and trying to be the best person I could be, the best father I could be, and that’s why. I want to hopefully put those days behind me.” He also denied a report that his true motivation for seeking a pardon is so he can open 300 outposts of family restaurant Wahlburgers. The Hollywood Reporter said Wahlberg wrote that he feared he’d be “denied a concessionaire’s license on the basis of my prior record,” in a Massachusetts Board of Pardons application.
But, Taylor, who’s battled drug addiction, said, “I’m gonna be here every six years doing something to remind people, I’m gonna be in my 70s telling people he attacked me. This is not about money, this is personal. I want to be a painful reminder of what he did.” Wahlberg’s reps didn’t get back to us.