Creed Singer Scott Stapp Reveals Personal Crisis In Video
By Ed Biggs in Music / Festivals on 27 November 2014
The 41 year old singer has claimed fraud and IRS actions are to blame for his situation, and has reassured fans that he's not abusing drugs.
Scott Stapp, the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Creed, has posted a video to his Facebook page on Wednesday claiming that he’s “penniless” and living in a Holiday Inn.
Creed's singer Scott Stapp
The 41 year old singer stated that he was under “some kind of pretty vicious attack” and has countered to renewed claims of drug abuse by seeking to get blood and urine samples as proof of his sobriety. In the video, Stapp states that things started to go downhill two months ago when he conducted an audit of his and his band’s finances, culminating in the IRS freezing his bank accounts and leaving him close to broke. Things came to a head when he was forced to live in his truck and didn’t have enough money to eat for two days.
"During the course of that audit a lot of things were uncovered. A lot of money was stolen from me or royalties not paid. There’s people who have taken advantage and stolen money from me, and they’re trying to discredit me, slander me, and I’ve even been threatened that if I went public like I’m doing right now, that any impropriety I’ve done in the past, that these individuals can get their hands to humiliate and embarrass me and try to ruin my credibility.”
More: Scott Stapp’s first solo album The Great Divide reviewed (archive)
However, Stapp’s wife of eight years Jaclyn filed for divorce and custody of their two children last week and, according to the Miami Herald, included allegations of Stapp’s increasingly erratic behaviour fuelled by renewed drug use.
But in the video he describes these rumours as “scandalous” and “libellous”. At the end of the video, he reached out to fans for legal services to help him turn his situation around.
Though Creed is not strictly a Christian rock band as they’re frequently labelled, a lot of their music overtly discusses issues of eternity and the Christian faith. They were one of the most commercially successful post-grunge groups at the turn of the millennium, selling over 53 million records around the world during the late ‘90s and early ‘00s despite a great deal of critical scorn. They also won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Song in 2001 with the hit single ‘With Arms Wide Open’.
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