The man who filmed the now-viral video of “Walking Dead” star Chad L. Coleman going ballistic during a New York City subway rant last week tells The Daily Caller that despite what the actor has said publicly, nobody on the train called him the “n-word.”
Coleman, who also starred in HBO’s Baltimore-based crime drama “The Wire,” said that his rant was sparked by the drama unfolding in that city.
“At the end of the day, where’s the humanitarian in you,” Coleman screams at one point in the video. “If you care, fucking care.”
The gossip site TMZ reported that Coleman “told us he heard a guy and a girl on the train talking, trying to figure out where they knew him. He says the guy told the girl, ‘No, we don’t know that n*****,’ and that set him off.”
But Chris Lees, who filmed the fiery diatribe, disputes that claim. Lees explained to TheDC through email:
I was on the train with him from 86th to 14th and no one said a word to him. He got super close to this guy sitting down (who happened to be black). That guy got up and in his face and said “whats wrong with you!” That’s when Chad Coleman went nuts and the video starts. You can immediately see the guy who confronted him (the guy in the security jacket) turn away like he didn’t want to confront him anymore and just pretended like nothing happened for the rest of the ride. At one point you can hear Chad say “there aint nothing wrong with me, and I wasn’t trying to fight you.” Then he goes on and slurs something about oxygen.
Lees says he believes that Coleman “made up the thing about the n-word.”
“You can clearly see what happens in the video,” Lee said. “If someone called him that, why wouldn’t he be yelling at them, instead of everyone on the train?
“Also why would he apologize to that guy for getting in his face saying he didn’t want to fight?” Lees asked.
At around the 1:40 mark of the video, Coleman is heard saying, “there ain’t nothing wrong with me, brother. And I wasn’t trying to fight you.”
The actor does not appear to confront anyone about being called the “n-word” and does not mention being called that during his rant.
Chad Coleman as Dennis “Cutty” Wise in “The Wire” (Public Domain)
But Coleman repeated the claim during an interview on Monday with MSNBC’s Tamron Hall.
“Prior to [the video] I was basically approached by two people, one of which said ‘oh, we know him,’ and the other said ‘oh, we don’t know that ‘N,'” Coleman said.
“That is not an excuse, this is just the circumstance as far as the initial engagement with this individual,” he added.
“It’s not what happened from my perspective,” Lees says, adding that while it’s possible that someone called Coleman a racist pejorative, “it doesn’t seem logical.”
“He was standing right next to me. At one point he grabbed the over head bars and started swinging back and forth dramatically, he seemed real antsy. That’s when he either bumped into, or got way too close to the guy sitting down. The guy sitting down gets up asks him what his problem is, then Chad loses it.”
Lees also said that Coleman was clearly mumbling during the rant and that he believes Coleman was “very intoxicated, or on something.”
Chad Coleman as Tyreese in “The Walking Dead” (Youtube)
Coleman has claimed that he was sober and that besides being triggered by what was occurring in Baltimore, he was upset that his grandmother had recently passed away.
Lees is heard in the video talking with Coleman after the outburst.
“Once he sat down for a bit, he calmed down and started chatting with a guy across the way from him,” Lees described. “He sounded upset, that’s when I said ‘you’re not alone, I love ‘The Wire,” which is totally true.”
Critically-acclaimed, “The Wire” aired between 2002 and 2008.
Lees said he couldn’t continue the conversation with Coleman because he had to get off the train. “I’d already missed my stop by three stops,” he said.
Lees told TheDC that he spoke with a TMZ producer about the story but that he didn’t hear back.
Coleman’s publicist, Anderson Public Relations Group, did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment.
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