‘Sons Of Anarchy’ Actor Johnny Lewis Was Mentally Ill First, Drug Addict Second, Says Show Consultant
The bizarre incident this week which saw the death of Sons of Anarchy actor Johnny Lewis after he allegedly beat his 81-year-old landlady to death, has inspired the morbid curiosity of the media as many facts in the case are still murky at best. Though police believe that Lewis may have been under the influence of drugs at the time of his death, a legal expert and former Sons consultant believes that the troubled actor was primarily bipolar.
Wendy Feldman, a prison consultant who was working with the Sons of Anarchy star, told E! Online that she “met Johnny to work with him on a potential alternative sentence that would keep him out of jail but into some sort ofprogram” and that the two “maintained the relationship for a period of 2 months, but there was such an obvious need for a medical therapeutic approach.”
Feldman said that Lewis displayed “psychopathy or bipolar disorder…something that needed a psychiatrist rather than a therapist. Johnny denied to me he was taking drugs,” continuing, “I didn’t see that profile. I really saw someone who had mental illness.”
Lewis was also reportedly a Scientologist, and some media outlets have questioned whether or not his allegiance to the controversial religion played a role in his death, according to RadarOnline. Feldman opined that Lewis’ descent into darkness had more to do with his estrangement from his parents and his tense custody battle over his daughter.
“He was brokenhearted about that,” Feldman continued. “When he talked about his daughter, he talked about love.”
Feldman contends that whatever the police toxicology report on Lewis’ body yields, his mental illness shouldn’t be ignored:
“If anyone can get a lesson out of this tragedy,” she said, “He had the diagnosis of very serious mental illness that was not being treated, and that’s why it becomes obvious that you’re gonna have a tragic end result of some great magnitude.”
Do you think that Johnny Lewis suffered from a mental illness that drove him to his crimes, or was he a simple drug addiction case?
