Dateline

YOU KNOW HIM AS the “Muscles from Brussels”—an action movie hero who has more strength in his little toe than most mere mortals have in their entire bodies. Jean-Claude Van Damme is one tough guy. But he wants you to know there’s more to the man than swift kicks, a buff body, and true macho grit. Despite allegations that he was among other things, a wife beater, and drug abuser, Van Damme insists inside his hard as a rock chest, beats a tender heart.
“I’m a lover,” he says. “I love people. I love life. I love animals. I love friendship and it’s good for people to know that.” Could it be? Do we have Jean-Claude Van Damme all wrong?
“This guy has muscle and he can kick butt, but you know what? His heart is bigger than his legs. I mean, than his action.” That action stuff has made him, if not a household name here, a huge star overseas. His films have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. But this 37-year-old, larger than life movie hero is surprisingly diminutive off-screen.

For the record Van Damme says he’s five feet ten-and-a half. But in his case, size didn’t matter as much as his martial arts skills. And while most people who talk about his body of work are not talking about his acting. The man who gave himself the nickname “Wham, bam, thank you Van Damme,” says he has the stuff to be a great actor. He says he wants to challenge himself more. But if you look at his repertoire, it’s basically action hero.
“Right,” says Van Damme. Even the names sound alike — ”Double Team,” “Double Impact,” “Sudden Death.”
“Because I’m just starting,” he says. "It’s a new way. It’s a new Van Damme right now.” A new Van Damme, he says, both on and off the screen and that’s what he wants to talk about. And for good reason. After a year of ugly headlines about his wicked ways and wilting box office, he’s been “van damaged.” And he’s the first to admit it.
“I love Hollywood,” he says, “but I fell into the trapping of stardom. Which is...you’ve got to be there to understand what it was.” Van Damme hasn’t done a major interview since his last movie, “Double team” with Dennis Rodman in 1996—a time he calls the worst of his life. The movie grossed only $11 million in the U.S.
“I was not there on the set,” he says. “I was a ghost. I was in my trailer. I was bad. I was dying.” Van Damme now admits he was high on drugs the entire time he was filming and is not surprised the fans and the critics were underwhelmed. One said that he was upstaged by Dennis Rodman.
“Yeah, but that’s what the critics are saying and that’s not what I think,” he says. If there is one thing he’s not short on, it’s self-confidence. Otherwise he’d never have become who he is. Jean-Claude Van Damme, the action hunk, started out as Jean-Claude Van Varenberg, the geek. He was your basic, skinny 98-pound, coke bottle glasses weakling. The “Muscles from Brussels” was a nerd?
“Nerd to your vocabulary, yes,” he says. “I was adorable for my mother.” It was his father who, worried about his sickly son, encouraged him to take karate lessons at a very young age.
“So, I start karate with guys like sixteen, seventeen. I was eleven.” he recalls. “I was scared to ****...” The fear helped turn this karate kid into a martial arts champion. But that wasn’t enough. Van Damme left Belgium and his first wife to transform himself once again. This time into a movie star. He was not an overnight sensation.

He spent six years doing odd jobs, among them a carpet layer, pizza delivery man and limousine driver. Then he finally got his break in a low budget martial arts film. The movie, “Bloodsport” put him on the map in 1987 and he has made more than a dozen movies since then. They’ve made him rich. He’s reportedly the $6 million a picture man. But in true action hero style, he says what he wants most now is respect and his reputation back.
“It’s about injustice,” he says, “about people accusing you of something you didn’t do. Some stuff were there, but some stuff I never did.” For starters, Van Damme’s highly publicized fights off camera like the one with a stuntman friend in a New York City topless club. “Muscles from Brussels went down in one punch?”
“Okay, “Muscles from Brussels” went down one punch,” says Van Damme. “So he hit me and I stopped his punch. I was protecting myself.” But when it came out in the headlines, everybody made a much bigger deal about it.
“Of course, what are they going to say? ‘Van Damme was hit one time and then he walk out of the disco?’ Nobody wants to hear that,” he says. “They want to hear: Van Damme, “the Muscles from Brussels” was hit, humiliated in a fetal position crying for life.”

And then there are the lawsuits. Van Damme paid a half a million dollars in damages to an extra who successfully claimed Van Damme injured his eye in a fight scene on the set of “Cyborg.” And there was another case. He settled out of court with the woman who claimed you demanded oral sex from her.
"Right. You see the problem is every time you talk to a woman and you become a star because they want a piece of you,” he says. But why did he settle if he didn’t do anything?
"Because you don’t want bad publicity if it’s right or wrong,” he says. And speaking of bad publicity, there’s Van Damme’s reputation as a womanizer. Truth is, he says, he’s really an old fashioned family man despite his track record. He’s been married four times. He has had three children with two of the wives. He left his fourth wife to go back to his third wife who he cheated on with wife number four. It was 1996. He had just scored his big breakthrough $100 million worldwide hit “Timecop.” But his home life was unraveling. Van Damme left his third wife, former bodybuilder Gladys Portugues and their two children for Hawaiian tropic model, Darcy La Pierre. He says it began with a hotel room rendezvous.
“She was married at that time and me too,” he says. “Then she called my room and we did have an affair in Hong Kong.” She called you and said, come up to my room?
“Yes,” says Van Damme. And he went? Where was his wife Gladys?
“Home with the children,” he says. Van Damme says his life was a whirlwind, fueled by his passion for La Pierre, cocaine, and his shame for abandoning his family.
“I felt so bad and so guilty,” says Van Damme. “I did go into deeper and deeper and deeper and I started to feel this disgust about myself.” He says things got so bad he ran away and went on a cocaine binge that almost killed him.
“I was in Bali somewhere,” says Van Damme. “Not in a big hotel, but in a bungalow somewhere, blowing eight grams of coke in my nose to try to kill myself. I was going there. I was having a gun next to me to try to blow my brains out. And many times I put it there and I wasn’t able to pull the trigger. And I came back to life.” Van Damme checked into a rehab clinic. He lasted barely a week, but he says he did quit cocaine cold turkey on his own. He claims he has been clean for eighteen months. And he revealed to us for the first time that he is taking medication for a condition he believes aggravated his problems—manic depression. He says he has been taking the medication for the last six months. Does he feel a difference?
“Not me,” he says, “but everybody around me, yes.” Van Damme says he is calmer. And after an on-again, off-again three year marriage that produced a son, Van Damme has split with Darcy La Pierre and was ordered to pay more than a million dollars a year in alimony and child support after yet another barrage of ugly tabloid headlines branding him a wife beater.

Did he ever punch her?
“Didn’t punch her,” says Van Damme.
Did he kick her?
“I didn’t kick her.”
Did he throw her on the ground?
“No, I did not,” he says. And what about those other headlines?
“To tell people I’m HIV, to tell people I’m homosexual when you’re not,” he says, “that can ruin a career to tell an actor’s HIV.” La Pierre did not want to comment, but through her attorney said the last thing she wishes for Van Damme is bad press, because of the child they have together. As for Van Damme, he says he’s happy the turmoil is behind him. He’s working around the clock to buff his body and polish his image. He’s back in shape. The kick still works. But he says, most importantly, he’s rebuilt his personal life. Van Damme has reunited with his third wife, Gladys Portugues.
“I’m back with my ex-ex-wife, ex wife which is Gladys,” he says. “And I’m very happy. She’s my best friend and my soulmate.” Portugues didn’t want to talk on-camera, but told `Dateline’ she took Van Damme back because she believes at heart he’s a good man who made a mistake. They live in an unassuming home far from the mansions of Hollywood and the temptations that Van Damme says still scare him.
“When you’re an addict, you’re an addict,” he says. “Shopping addict, sex addict, drink addict, coke addict, work addict, training addict. But right now, I’m doing fine. I’m a normal person.”

The next test? Van Damme’s latest movie, “Knockoff” opens in September and although he admits some might think just another knockoff action movie, he insists the audience will see glimmerings of the new Van Damme. And he’s already filming another movie “Inferno.” While ‘Dateline’ was there, a sick child from the Make-A-Wish Foundation came to visit the set. A publicity stunt? Part of that image makeover? Van Damme says let cynics think what they will. He says it’s the real him.
“I think I can become a very decent man,” he says. “You have to become a decent guy to do decent stuff in life. All I’m saying to you...what I’m trying to tell you is...I grew up. I start at the age of one to the age of 37. I’m learning everyday to become a better man.”