Gaga’s dog walker tells of pop star’s role in his recovery
LOS ANGELES >> Ryan Fischer, Lady Gaga’s dog walker on the night that two of her three French bulldogs were stolen, knows his healing journey might be hard for others to understand. On Friday, he tried to explain it more — and offered clarity about the singer’s role in his recovery.
“She’s helped me so much. She’s been a friend for me,” he told Gayle King in an interview for the recently renamed “CBS Mornings.” “After I was attacked, my family was flown out and she had trauma therapists flown to me and I stayed at her house for months while friends comforted me and security was around me.”
Fischer, who nearly lost his life after being shot in February in Hollywood, raised eyebrows last month when it became known that he had started a GoFundMe effort aimed at raising $40,000 to fund a cross-country journey that he said was strengthening his emotional and mental health.
“With no vehicle, apartment, and having run out of savings and surviving on donations from generous loved ones, I am humbly asking for your help,” Fischer said in his fundraising campaign, which he posted two months into a planned six-month trip.
It quickly prompted the question: Why isn’t Lady Gaga — with a net worth estimated at well into the nine figures — helping her friend and employee more?
Fischer’s assistant, Elisha Ault, also stirred that pot, implying in early September that support from Haus of Gaga, the singer’s creative team, wasn’t all that she expected. When the shooting happened, Gaga was in Italy filming the movie “House of Gucci,” due out this fall.
But on Friday, with his fundraising goal exceeded by more than $5,000, Fischer reiterated that it was all good between him and his onetime boss, and said he was “in a good space mentally as I’ve done the work to embrace this part of myself.”
He had addressed the dramatic wording of his GoFundMe post in a Rolling Stone interview.
“Everyone thought that I was setting a blame on someone, when it was all love,” he told the magazine. “It’s what happens in trauma — all your loved ones, all your family, everyone: You feel alone. You don’t feel supported because this is your journey. I tried so hard. I tried to navigate that. I really did think about the wording. It’s ... a weird way to go about life.
It’s not normal and I understood that. And I really did try to navigate it as best I could.”