Mark Wahlberg was 16 years outdated when he was concerned in yet one more racially charged crime in his hometown of Boston, and this one resulted within the teenager spending time behind bars. In April 1988, Wahlberg attacked two Vietnamese males, hitting certainly one of them with a five-foot-long stick and punching the second within the eye; in each circumstances, he was accused of yelling racial slurs on the males. A number of accounts of the crime (through The Smoking Gun) recommend that the would-be rapper-turned-actor bragged about his actions to cops after he was positioned beneath arrest.
Wahlberg was charged as an grownup, and he served 45 days of a two-year jail sentence. In 2014, he requested a pardon from the state of Massachusetts for the assault on the Vietnamese males, expressing regret for his previous actions and acknowledging he was working with a nasty crowd at that time in his life. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Johnny Trinh, one of many two victims within the 1988 assault, mentioned that Wahlberg’s pardon request must be granted. “I wish to see him get a pardon,” he mentioned, later including, “He paid for his crime when he went to jail … He has grown up now. I’m positive he has his circle of relatives and is a accountable man.”
Talking to TheWrap in 2016, Wahlberg confirmed that he was capable of personally apologize to Trinh and his household. Nonetheless, he expressed remorse over the pardon utility, telling the outlet, “I used to be form of pushed into doing it … I definitely didn’t have to or need to relive that stuff over once more.”