Scott Stapp Is Broke and Living in a Hotel

​​Well, the vast project aimed at completely crushing the spirit of Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed and rock ‘n’ roll punching bag, has worked: He’s homeless, without enough money to feed himself. 

That’s according to a video—apparently shot using a borrowed phone—he just posted to Facebook. It sounds really awful (and not just because he incessantly smacks his lips):

The most disturbing part is the revelation of his homelessness. “Right now, I’m living in a Holiday Inn by the grace of God,” he says. “There’s been a couple weeks where I had to sleep in my truck. I had no money, not even for gas and food.” In those two days without food, apparently things got pretty dark, and he says he “ended up in the emergency room.”

In the ​video, Stapp—who now sorta looks like Glenn Danzig (in a good way)—provides the broad strokes of a vast conspiracy against him by the IRS, an identity thief, people at his record label, and someone who seems to be blackmailing him. 

He says the IRS has frozen his bank accounts “two or three times to leave me completely penniless,” although the third freeze, he claims, is due to a “clerical error,” and that the IRS will return his funds in nine to ten months.

But that’s just the beginning; there’s also the supposed campaign to smear and humiliate him. “They’re trying to discredit me, slander me, and I’ve even been threatened that if I went public, like I’m doing right now, that any impropriety or anything that I’ve ever done in my past that these individuals can get their hands on to humiliate and embarrass me, and try to ruin my credibility, that they would do that.” 

His record label, ​Wind-Up Records is apparently responsible for “royalties not paid,” but they’re also thieves, according to Stapp. In part of the video addressed to his son Jagger, he says “people that we know, and at the record company, and outside of that, have stolen lots of money.”

But then there’s the identity thief, whom he accuses of simply obtaining his passwords and draining his accounts. His bank is also culpable, he says, since bank representatives took no action after this theft—he claims they simply said, “Yeah, all the money’s been taken out of your account and there’s nothing we can do.”

Stapp’s downward spiral has been going on for a long time. I still remember reading Stephen Thompson’s ​brutally concise AVClub review of Human Clay. (Excerpt: “Stapp’s tortured, bleating windbaggery, coupled with ham-fisted riffage and take-me-higher/what-about-the-children lyrics, makes for rough, monotonous going.”) But he wasn’t just a critically disparaged singer, he was obviously a severely damaged dude—there was that time he allegedly ​went to that Florida Denny’s to try and hook up with a girl he had met at an airport who turned out to be pranking him, there was that time he got into a fight with 311 in a hotel bar on ​Thanksgiving, there was the ​blowjob video with Kid Rock. The list goes on. 

But three years ago, he ​tried to kill himself by​ clumsily jumping off a balcony, and got saved by TI. That seems like the kind of hitting-bottom story that would begin a slow climb to redemption, but apparently after Stapp’s ​tell-all memoir and ​most recent solo album were greeted with shrugs from the general public his life took another turn for the worse. Obviously something bad is happening to the one-time rock star, even if it has nothing to do with the conspiracy he’s denouncing via cameraphone.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twi​tter.