Man used as proof that 'Seattle Is Dying' tells his story
Robert Champagne says KOMO’s special inaccurately portrayed him. To start, he hasn't been homeless for more than three years.
When he was shown the video for the first time, Robert Champagne was unsure if the person on the screen was really him. But then he recognized the teal-green shirt he was wearing when the film crew from KOMO TV trained their camera on him. He pulled the same shirt from his closet and laid it on his bed. “It is me,” he said.
Champagne appears several times in the latter half of the hourlong television special, called Seattle Is Dying, which was filmed over the past year and aired earlier this month on the Seattle station. He is never interviewed, but he is shown multiple times, either sitting on the sidewalk or bracing himself against newspaper boxes downtown, a Target bag at his feet containing the bottle of laundry detergent he’d just bought.
He, like many other people filmed by the news team but never spoken to on camera, is assumed to be homeless. As the camera focuses on him, KOMO reporter Eric Johnson says, “This man, in the downtown core of our city, was suffering, in distress. Once he fell down he couldn’t get back on his feet again, so he sat there for a long time.”
Champagne struggled to explain why he was sitting on the street that day. It may have been because he sometimes suffers from sciatica — a shooting pain in his back and legs radiating from the sciatic nerve. In fact, his former case manager, Howard Bess, said that at one point a doctor advised Champagne to use a walker.
https://crosscut.com/2019/03/man-used-proof-seattle-dying-tells-his-story