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His Addictions & Suicide Attempt

As we previously reported, Damon Evans absolutely hated being a part of “The Jeffersons” and had several problems going on behind the scenes and internally (you can read about that HERE). So in 1978, he left the show and decided to pursue other acting roles, as well as his first passion of singing in the opera. Yep, he can SANG.

Unfortunately, in the years that followed, Damon soon realized Hollywood had mostly typecast him as the ‘comedic character,’ “Lionel.” However, he wanted to prove his diversity. This resulted in grueling struggle of unemployment, with very few acting gigs in between.

In a prior People Magazine article, Damon explained how his lack of jobs, led to depression, then to years of drug addiction. “Getting high was all that mattered…I didn’t have any pride,” Evans admitted. Ultimately, his struggles pushed him to a suicide attempt that fortunately went wrong:

Via People: A depressed and unemployed Evans came close to ending his own life. High on crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine, he walked from his upper Manhattan apartment to the George Washington Bridge and contemplated leaping into the Hudson River 250 feet below. “I thought, ‘I can’t go on like this anymore,’ ” Evans recalls. Luckily a lack of nerve—and one nagging thought—kept his feet on the ground. “I was thinking, ‘How am I going to kill myself when I don’t even know myself?’ ” he says.

Then came the help he needed, but also a very humbling experience:

The next day Damon Evans started getting to know Damon Evans. He admitted his drug addiction to his therapist and joined Narcotics Anonymous. To support himself, he took a job in the mail room of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, where he gamely replied “Yes” whenever coworkers asked, “Weren’t you Lionel?” Evans also joined a church and began taking singing lessons.

It’s great that Damon sought the help he desperately needed, but in the beginning the sudden reality of him having to go from “Lionel” the superstar, back to the everyday civilian, working in the mail room, had to a tough adjustment.

What He Accomplished After Getting Clean

Today Damon Evans is 69 years young and has made great strides in his life. In 2007 (at age 56) he earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Bronx College in New York. He explained to NPR, why he decided to go to college at an older age:

Damon Evans- “I am useless when I am not active. And to be quite honest, I didn’t have a direction when I went there. I just sort of just said well, let me just see where this goes. I started loving it, I mean, started knowing that I could even write.

And things start evolving and I started tutoring. It’s really been pretty phenomenal. It really was the verbal autobiography that brought this attention to the fact of what I’ve done and I – and for… I talked to the students about what it meant about learning to let go of family, about, you know, following your own course in life, and about confronting the fear of change. And I think, for me, that was the hardest thing – was that I was so afraid to give up my identity as a performer. And you know – but gradually it happened, and of course, there’s this whole new world in life. I was afraid of change.”

Source1, Source2

The post “The Jeffersons” Lionel Reveals Drug Battle, Suicide Attempt & His Regular Job After Fame appeared first on I Love Old School Music.

Evans’ Daughter On His Rejection Of Her

Carlena Harris: My mother and my grandmother raised me 100%. My father he was just…he was alive, but he definitely wasn’t involved and at times he would even say he didn’t know who my father was, so…he wasn’t even always claiming me, but at times he would, you know. But was he a good father? No, never was a good father…and so at [age] 13 we actually concluded this foolishness and took a blood test and [the results] came out 99.9% [that he was my father]. At that point, he couldn’t say I wasn’t his anymore. But after that, he [still] just chose for whatever reason, to continue being separate and I just had to live with the fact that I didn’t have an…earthly father who wanted me, but the thing with that is it certainly caused me to be closer to my heavenly father and got me to a point where I was content. I guess…I could have a human father, but a human father can only do but so much, but when the God of the universe is your daddy, it certainly makes a difference and I’m walking in that now.

On what it was like for her when her dad, Mike Evans, passed away…

CH: He died in December of ’06 and it’s interesting because he actually died of throat cancer. He was a smoker [and he died] without a tongue in his mouth, broke and very miserable. And so uh, it was actually quite a sad and tragic death and he ultimately died in his mother’s house.

Carlena on whether or not she and her father, Mike Evans, ever established any type of relationship prior to him passing away from cancer:

CH: No, not at all. The last time that I talked to him literally I was 21 years old and at that time is when…his last couple words in that conversation to me was that he didn’t know if he was even my father and I said ‘uh I have blood tests that say you are my father’ and he said “Well I don’t know, maybe you should consider my brother.” I said ‘WHAT?!! Who’s your brother? Nobody even knows who your brother is.’ This is clearly some stuff that took place with him and my Momma that I know nothing about…um, I’m clearly innocent and at that time I’m just like ‘I just don’t understand, I just don’t.’

So I mean it was a long story, he ended up calling me back because that was like pretty tragic and I was just like ‘Who’s my father?’ I’m calling my Momma, I’m calling my Grandmomma like ‘What’s going on?’ And they both told me “You know who your dad is, he knows who he is too, whatever.” I even put [out] an ad that was in the National Enquirer, Wendy Williams did something [on my story] and it was just, it was a mess. [But after] that point I decided ‘You know what? I’m not going to the media’…and eventually I decided I just had to suck it up, ‘this man doesn’t want me,’ you know? It was pathetic but I had to come to the conclusion that I can’t make a person acknowledge, accept, or want me. It just so happened that a couple years after that, he died and the rest is history.

How She Forgave Him

Carlena said things eventually started to change for her, after she said ‘God told her’ to go to L.A., where her sister, Tammy (who’s also Mike Evan’s daughter), was living in their Grandmother’s home. That was the same home that their Dad, died in. Carlena ended up having to sleep in the same room her dad died in and says she ‘felt his spirit’ talk to her, asking her to save his his home, which was about to be foreclosed.

She said that’s when she realized that in death, her father not only needed her, but also finally accepted her, which she says then allowed her to fully forgive him.

The post “Lionel’s” Daughter Exposed Surprising Painful Experiences With Her Dad appeared first on I Love Old School Music.