The transcript below is from the video “From Master To Meme: The Sad Truth About Steven Seagal” by Goldenbell Training.

Goldenbell Training:

Steven Seagal is a bit of an enigma for a lot of martial artists because a lot of people see him as a person who is incapable of telling the truth but at the same time, they respect him as someone who has achieved a high level of skill and the martial art of Aikido. The problem is that if Steven Seagal, the movie star, were just Steven Seagal, who runs a martial arts gym in suburbia Midwest USA, he would be seen as a predator who would be in one of Rob’s McDojoLife McDojoNews videos because Steven Seagal is an absolute monster, who has done nothing his entire career but placed himself in positions to engage in predatory behavior.

I posted a video last year called “The Problem with Steven Seagal” and I was surprised to see a lot of people defending Seagal saying that I did poor research or that I’ve been listening to too many rumors. So I decided to actually look into Mr. Seagal and I was shocked because Steven Seagal is worse than I could even imagine. What I saw was that Steven Seagal has four roles that he plays and the common thread among all four of them, well, besides the constant lying, is that each one of them allows Steven Seagal to engage in some very abusive behavior that began the minute Seagal stepped into his first role as the Sensei. So that’s where we’ll start.

Goldenbell Training:

So according to Seagal’s website, Steven Frederic Seagal was born in Lansing, Michigan on April 10, 1952. His humble childhood was underscored by fascination with the martial arts and the blues. Seagal mastered martial arts at an early age becoming a 7th degree black belt and an Aikido master.

The thing is when Seagal first hit the scene, he was telling people that he was from Brooklyn, New York for some reason. I guess that was to make him appear to be the tough guy that he played in his early movies. But this all stopped when Seagal’s mother told the truth that the family moved to Fullerton, California.

When Seagal was 5, he was actually frail due to asthma while living in Michigan but he thrived after the move to Orange County. She said that Seagal was in rock music and not the blues as he claimed. Later, he worked with a Japanese man in garden grove and that’s how his martial arts journey actually began.

Goldenbell Training:

I talked more about this in my previous video “The Problem with Steven Seagal”, so I’m not going to rehash the stuff from that video but here’s where things get interesting during Seagal’s role as the Sensei. Oh and if you wonder why I keep saying Steven’s last name as Seagal, it’s because that’s the actual proper pronunciation of his name. Steven saw the Chagall exhibit at a museum and he liked the sound of the word. So he changed the pronunciation of his last name.

But anyway, so, after studying in Okinawa and Karate in California, Seagal was convinced to go to Japan around the age of 19. Things didn’t work out and he returned to California where he would eventually meet Miyako Fujitani who was teaching Aikido in California at that time. Now, I should mention that Seagal at one point was saying that he studied under Aikido founder, Morihei Ueshiba, who had already passed away before Seagal even made it over to Japan. Seagal fans like to deny that Steven ever made the claim but you can read it for yourself in some of Seagal’s first interviews in Black Belt magazine issues from 1988 and 1990.

Goldenbell Training:

In 1974, Seagal left for Japan with his Aikido instructor Miyako Fujitani. Now, I defended this move in my last video but since then, well, I’ve learned that Robert Strickland who was working as a CIA consultant in Japan said that Steven actually married Miyako to avoid the draft. He believed that marrying a Japanese national and moving to Japan would make him less likely to be sent back to the U.S. I thought this guy was a patriot.

Now Seagal fans love to point out that Steven was the first westerner to open a dojo in Japan but that’s not true. When his father-in-law retired from teaching, Seagal took over the teaching duties but the dojo was owned by his mother-in-law and it was managed by his wife. Miyako went on to say that Seagal only earned his black belt because the judge in charge of his grading fell asleep during his presentation. He was so embarrassed that when he woke up, he awarded Seagal with a black belt. The stories about Seagal fighting the Yakuza and throwing people out of the dojo are also untrue. Miyako said that Seagal only chased away a few drunks.

Goldenbell Training:

Seagal likes to tell people how the dojo attracted the attention of the CIA and other high-ranking military members in Japan and many of them went on to become Seagal’s students. Now, if you listen to the Seagal hype, well, it’s because Seagal was such a highly accomplished practitioner of Aikido but the reality is that these were Americans. They were obviously joining a dojo where another American was open to teaching Americans in English.

If you’ve never been to Japan, well, there are businesses to this very day that will not allow Americans, unless they speak and read Japanese. And I personally experienced this in Sasebo back when I was in the navy. But keep this part in your memory banks about Seagal teaching people like Robert Strickland who actually was a CIA consultant and other high-ranking military personnel because this is going to come up again later. Why? Because Steven Seagal is an absolute monster. But anyway, Seagal’s role as sensei would eventually shift from Japan back to America.

Goldenbell Training:

Steven told his wife that he wanted to go back to the U.S to get rich in Hollywood or to open restaurants. Miyako believed in Seagal’s dream, so she says she spent years saving money and living on the bare minimum in order to fund Seagal’s dreams. Well, Seagal returned to the U.S where he opened his first dojo in Taos, New Mexico and he thanked his wife, Miyako, by marrying his second wife, Adrienne La Russa, while he was still married to Miyako, who was still in Japan raising their children.

And while Seagal is busy cheating on his first wife with his new wife, the dojo in New Mexico was struggling financially. Seagal was known to leave on these trips where he’d return with cash and nothing was known about his mysterious financial backers. But Seagal liked to say that he was away carrying out hits for the mob. Eventually, when La Russa filed for an annulment, she said she was basically paying Seagal to stay away from her. But she didn’t want to say anything else because she was afraid of Seagal’s scary friends. Well, at this point Seagal is starting to transition to his next role, his biggest role, the movie star.

Goldenbell Training:

So while Seagal is struggling to keep his dojo open and he’s married to two women on two different continents, he finally decides to make good on his promise to get rich in Hollywood. Seagal just happens to meet with Kelly LeBrock’s manager who tells him if he wants to break into Hollywood, he needs to be seen with famous people. Seagal, like anyone else who had seen Kelly LeBrock in anything in the 80s, was totally smitten with her. So he pulls a straight-up baller move and takes off to Japan to meet her not long after meeting with her manager. So Seagal is back in Japan where his wife and kids live, while his other wife is back in the U.S, and he’s going to meet Kelly LeBrock so that he can break into Hollywood. He did succeed in meeting her and within two weeks of their meeting, they were lovers, and a year later, they were parents.

So Seagal at one point had two wives on separate continents while he’s wooing his third wife and why is that? Well, because Steven Seagal is an absolute monster. This dude is terrible, worse than I could even imagine. But back to our story, so by this point, the Taos dojo completely failed. Seagal calls one of his shady friends to steal Kelly LeBrock’s Porsche so that he can use the insurance money to fund his dojo. So, I mean, remember what Kelly’s manager told Seagal, “if you want to make it into Hollywood, you need to be seen with famous people”. Being married to Kelly LeBrock wasn’t enough. Seagal had to take a page from Bruce Lee’s playbook and become Sensei to the stars and that’s exactly what he did. In 1987, he opened a dojo in Los Angeles, where he taught Bruce Lee’s former student, James Coburn. He taught Sean Connery and broke his wrist and the person responsible for launching Seagal’s movie career, Michael Ovitz.

Goldenbell Training:

Michael Ovitz arranged for Seagal to meet with executives of Warner Brothers where he would demonstrate Aikido for them. Mark Makita, a local karate instructor, was brought in to serve as Seagal’s uke for that demonstration. Now by the end, the Warner Brothers executives were absolutely amazed. They’d never seen anything like what Seagal was doing and one said he couldn’t believe how easily Seagal could grab someone and then throw them across the room with very little effort. The only thing is that the entire thing was staged. Mark Makita later said that the only way Seagal’s techniques would work is if he allowed himself to be thrown for the demonstration. But after that demonstration, Warner Brothers dropped $50,000 on a screen test for Seagal and the entire thing was a complete disaster.

Seagal had no charisma and his whispering voice was terrible on film. This is when Ovitz stepped in. And like I said, Michael Ovitz launched Seagal’s movie career even says it on his website. Ovitz was the casting agent for Lethal Weapon and when he was called on for Lethal Weapon 2, he agreed not to take a raise on the sequel if Seagal was hired to make a movie. Now there are questions about if Ovitz was actually bribed by the mafia to vouch for Seagal and this is something that’s going to come up throughout Seagal’s time as the movie star up until he started to make those direct video movies at least.

Goldenbell Training:

But in 1990, Seagal is at the peak of his fame. By this time, he’s done Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, and Out for Justice, which made him a bona fide action hero. Around this time, Steven Seagal started his own production company Steamroller Entertainment with Julius Nasso. Now this marks an interesting twist in Seagal’s career. He’d already had a history of implying he had some kind of connection with the mob. Well, this Julius Nasso guy, he started a pharmaceutical company when he was in college in the 70s, where he was selling health supplements. But what I heard is that he was selling drugs to sailors and on top of that, Julius Nasso’s uncle, who had the same name Julius Nasso, owned a concrete company that was in some trouble involving Anthony Salerno the original “Fat Tony”. Basically these guys had connections to the Gambino crime family. Well, it turns out that Nasso loaned Seagal a $0.5 million of the Gambino family’s money to do a four-picture deal. And after forming their production company, Seagal was no longer under contract with Warner Brothers on his movies. They paid his production company where sometimes his money went directly to Julius Nasso.

Now on top of all of that, members of the Gambino crime family or their relatives appeared in some of Seagal’s movies. Steven Seagal is notorious for hitting stuntmen and hurting people on the set. But if you look at some of those movies, there are people in some of the fight scenes who never get hit and it turns out that those guys were all associates of the Gambino crime family.

Goldenbell Training:

So when you hear “Sammy the Bull” Gravano telling stories about how Seagal was crying to the FBI about how he was being extorted by the mafia, this is why the Gambino family went looking for their money after Seagal decided he didn’t want to make any more movies and Nasso sent them straight to `Seagal while he was working on Exit Wounds.

Now on top of dealing with the mob, Seagal started losing all of those friends that he’d made his sensei to the stars. Seagal managed to get close to all kinds of special forces operators FBI and CIA agents and consultants solely for the purpose of taking their stories and telling them as if they happened to him. Seagal tried to tell a story about training with the Green Berets to a group of his students. Everything was going okay until one guy who’d been a former Green Beret spoke up and said, hey bro, I told you that story.

Goldenbell Training:

Another time, Seagal was treasure hunting off the coast of Barbados with Gary Goldman and he was bragging about his time when he’d been a Navy SEAL. Now, Gary Goldman was an ex-mercenary who vouched in the press for Seagal because they were working on a movie together. But after they fell out, well, Goldman recanted on all of that stuff and he said that Seagal likes to get close to operators to steal their stories and make it part of his own personal narrative.

But anyway, after Seagal was done bragging about his time as a SEAL, while they were off treasure hunting, well, he almost drowned in calm water. Seagal completely panicked and Goldman and the other people there had to push him back onto the boat. So he was one of those Navy SEALS that don’t swim. Also, remember Seagal’s friend from Japan, Robert Strickland, Seagal asked if Strickland could put out a hit on Gary Goldman after he told the press that Seagal was lying to them about his past. Seagal also called up his friend Robert Strickland again after a GQ article came out exposing him in his lies. Seagal wanted Strickland to have someone help expose the article writer Alan Rickman as being gay even though Rickman wasn’t gay. As a matter of fact, Seagal did an interview on the Arsenio hall show for the sole purpose of calling out Rickman. Whenever Seagal is called out, well, he likes to flex by going on TV to try to humiliate that other person. It’s kind of like what Steven Seagal tried to do in those videos that he did with Jesse Enkemp. And if you want to hear the details on the smack talk that happened in that video, just let me know in the comments and I’ll have to make another video because this one is going to be really long. There’s a lot of stuff because Steven Seagal is a monster.

Goldenbell Training:

But anyway, Seagal kept trying to get his former CIA consultant friend Robert Strickland to carry out his dirty work whenever he got exposed by somebody. Well, that is until he finally fell out with Robert Strickland. So Seagal was making the rounds of nighttime talk shows, letterman Arsenio hall, and the other guys when he was at the height of his career making movies, Seagal was asked about being a consultant with the CIA.

And he shared a story about something that happened during that time, except it, well, he told a story that he heard from Robert Strickland and Robert Strickland just happened to be watching the interview. Strickland sued Seagal and Seagal, being the kind of b*tch to run tell that, well, he told Strickland to back off because he’s got powerful friends.

Later, a friend contacted Robert Strickland and they told him that he really should back off because Steven Seagal had some powerful people who were heavily invested in his public image. And now we know that it was the Gambino crime family. So all this stuff about Steven Seagal literally being hard to kill in real life, like he portrayed in his movies, well, that was all set up by the mob because they were actually invested in the success of this guy’s movies. And Seagal, he went along with all of it because, well, Steven Seagal is an absolute monster.

Goldenbell Training:

Well, obviously a person showing signs of possibly being a pathological liar, who allegedly gets in bed with a mob to become a movie star, has very little regard for the law. But once Seagal’s movie career was relegated to direct to video films, well, he decided to reinvent himself as a Dog the Bounty Hunter knockoff with his Steven Seagal Lawman reality series and this started Seagal’s next role as the Lawman.

According to Seagal, he’d actually been a cop for 20 years while he was also making movies. But the truth is that outside of playing a cop in his movies, Steven Seagal actually has no training as a police officer. He claims to have done some training at the LAPD’s academy but there are no records with the city of Los Angeles to substantiate that claim. The truth is that while filming one of his movies, Seagal started giving martial arts training to local police officers.

At the time, mafia guys were making fun of him which leads me to believe that it was while filming Under Siege, where Robert Booth Nichols, a Gambino family associate, worked closely with Seagal. Joseph John, a retired Navy captain who helped secure the use of the uss missouri for the film, described Seagal and Nichol as assh*le buddies. Now I no idea what that meant but I guess Nichols didn’t like Seagal spending so much time with local law enforcement officers teaching them martial arts.

Goldenbell Training:

But anyway, Seagal continued to teach the officers with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s department by visiting them a few days out of the year and after about a decade or so, they just sort of grandfathered him into the department as a deputy sheriff. Seagal was not actually doing any type of real police work other than volunteer ride-alongs at the most. He’d absolutely zero training. He had not done 40 years of police work as he claimed, nor had he done 20 years of police work, like he claimed on the intro of his reality TV show. Steven Seagal trained as a policeman the same day that he passed the die motivator to go to buds to do a SEAL training. Well, Steven Seagal, with absolutely zero training as a police officer, drove a tank through a guy’s fence killing his dog in the process in order to assist sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County sheriff’s department bust a guy for chicken fighting, even though the only evidence that the guy was chicken fighting was the fact that he owned a hundred chickens and had been issued a citation for being at a chicken fighting event.

Seagal was allegedly on loan to sheriff Joe from the Jefferson County sheriff’s department but the thing is Seagal was not an officer with Jefferson Parish at that time. He was just a regular civilian driving a tank through this guy’s house with a swat team to humiliate this guy who was later found to be innocent and this was all for his reality TV show. So the question is well why was Seagal no longer an officer with Jefferson Parish after I just told you guys how he got deputized? Well, Seagal was no longer a deputy sheriff because Steven Seagal is an absolute monster.

Goldenbell Training:

See, while Seagal was filming his Dog the Bounty Hunter reality show, he took out an ad for an executive assistant on Craigslist. Miss Kayden Nguyen was hired for the job and when she arrived in Louisiana, Seagal told her that one of her duties would be to perform a massage for him. If she didn’t know how to perform that kind of massage that Seagal was talking about, well he’d teach her by giving her the massage to demonstrate. Well, at this point, things get very dark and I can’t really go into the full details of the legend incident here on YouTube. I’m just going to say that according to Kayden, she was assaulted three times in a five-day period. She said that she was held in Seagal’s home for at least a week. When she finally managed to escape, Steven Seagal chased after her with a gun with a flashlight attached to it. Kayden also alleged that Seagal kept two young Russian girls on staff, who were available for any extra services in addition to massage at all times of the day. Nguyen filed a civil suit against Steven Seagal but her lawsuit was settled out of court. Now I’m not going to judge her decision to file a civil suit versus going to the police, that’s her choice. For Seagal though, this was the end of his career as a police officer. Jefferson Parish was going to launch an internal affairs investigation immediately following the outcome of Kayden’s lawsuit. And since settling out of court was neither an admission of guilt or innocence, the investigation was going to move forward. And I guess Seagal could have potentially been facing criminal charges for sex trafficking while in uniform deputy. Seagal resigned immediately from his position before the investigation and he left the state of Louisiana. As if Seagal isn’t already sounding like an absolute monster, well, it turns out this wasn’t even the first time he allegedly tried something like what happened with Kayden Nguyen.

Goldenbell Training:

In 2004, Steven Seagal attended Ray Charles funeral. During the funeral, Seagal approached Ray Charles granddaughter Blair Robinson about working as his executive assistant. Blair’s father, Ray Charles Jr. attended the interview with her and she was hired. Good job! When Blair flew out to Seagal’s office in Memphis, she was informed on the first day of the job that one of her responsibilities would be to give Seagal a massage every day. If she didn’t know how to perform the kind of massage he wanted, well, he would teach her by giving her a massage to demonstrate. Blair left immediately and hopped on the first flight she could get to Los Angeles and that was that. But unfortunately, other girls were not so fortunate.

When Seagal was filming On Deadly Ground about 10 years earlier, he invited an 18-year-old extra to a wrap party after they wrapped for that day of filming. When she arrived at the party, it turns out that she was the only person there and when she arrived at the party, she was a virgin and when she left, well, she wasn’t. According to her, what happened was non-consensual. So I’ll let you figure it out if you haven’t and, well, I’m just gonna say that what took place happened because well Steven Seagal is an absolute monster and I should mention that these are all allegations. We don’t know if anything’s been proven.

Goldenbell Training:

So after being the Sensei to the stars, who has three wives, the movie star being backed by the mob and the ex-cop facing too many #metoo allegations to count according to the Washington post, the only thing left for Seagal to do is to pursue enlightenment because if there’s anyone who can get people to look the other way when they’re accused of multiple sexual offenses and taking money from shady people, it’s a religious leader.

In 1997, Steven Seagal was recognized as the reincarnation of Chungdrag Dorje, a 17th-century Buddhist lama by the Tibetan leader Penor Rinpoche. While Penor Rinpoche may have recognized Seagal as a tulku, Hollywood recognized that something fishy was happening. From what I can tell, it’s not been proven that Seagal made a generous donation of Penor Rinpoche’s monastery and Penor Rinpoche’s organization denied receiving any substantial size donation from Steven Seagal. But you have to wonder what they define as a substantial size donation. Either way, Seagal took the honor and ran with it and he makes sure to remind people that he was recognized as a tulku every chance he gets.

Goldenbell Training:

In 1999, Seagal wanted to let the world know about his high spiritual accomplishment by going on the compassion in the martial arts lecture tour. On the talks, Seagal was known to come out in full Tibetan monk robes announced to everyone that he was a reincarnated lama, and then give a dharma talk for an hour on compassion as a spiritual discipline. At the end of the talk, Seagal would open up the floor to questions from the audience and some of these auditoriums were known to hold thousands of people.

Well, at one talk which was attended by Buddhist professor and meditation teacher Douglas Gentile, Seagal was asked by one audience member if he always dresses in full Tibetan monk attire. Seagal’s response was to roll his eyes and then he said, next question. He was asked multiple times about how he’s able to reconcile the spiritual beliefs about compassion and non-violence with the violence that he displays in his action films and his response was that he approaches each take with a pure heart and hopes that it’s visible to the audience. Well, at this point, Gentile actually pressed Seagal on this point after Seagal said something about has movies are really about good versus evil and at the end, it’s all about telling a story about good winning out over evil.

Goldenbell Training:

But see the thing is in Buddhism, this type of dualistic thinking reinforces this type of thinking that does not lead to one seeing true nature. So, that’s why Gentile pressed Seagal about his response because it’s not in line with Buddhism. Well, Seagal’s response to gentile’s question was, well, see, “I don’t want to talk over the people’s head in the audience because we understood that this nigga was clearly lying”. And the truth is that Seagal had no idea what he was talking about on stage, just like Seagal says lines in his movies this was just another opportunity for Seagal to flex on stage and pretend to be some enlightened Buddhist monk. The moment someone made him deviate from the script, well, the entire facade he was trying to present fell apart.

So, I mean, what does any of this have to do with Steven Seagal and his martial arts accomplishments, because for some people none of this stuff diminishes him as a martial artist in their eyes and my question is, I mean, why doesn’t it, if someone in my school had all of these allegations, they’d be kicked out of the school and completely stripped of their rank. But I guess the idea of wuda or martial arts morality and it doesn’t exist in Japanese martial arts schools. And I mean, this is strange to me when an art like Aikido is supposed to have this spiritual aspect to it. But I mean, for some Aikido people, maybe it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you keep taking falls and you talk like some blissed-out hippie that really doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Goldenbell Training:

And my question is, I mean, how do you even know what Seagal’s level of skill is? His ex-wife said the judge fell asleep during Seagal’s black belt test and it sounds like it may have been awarded as an attempt to save face. Seagal’s stories about fighting Yakuza in Japan were fake, the Aikido demonstration that launched his movie career was fake, all of the stuntmen who Seagal beats up making his movies is no different from someone getting hurt taking bumps in professional wrestling. The fights are fake, the injuries are real. I’m just gonna say this, of all of the internal martial arts people that I know personally, some of them have fought and won in combat sports. I’ve never heard any of them say, wow, man, look at Steven Seagal’s movements he’s got great internal mechanics. So I’m gonna point out my first video on Aikido, “The Problem with Aikido” and I’m going to say that my understanding of Aikido is that it requires the same internal mechanics that make Tai Ji Quan work and I’ve never heard anyone say that Steven Seagal has it. So, just like everything else that he’s pretended to be, to me, he’s also the great pretender when it comes to martial arts and I know some people are going to feel some kind of way about what I just said and I mean, like, look this is just me sharing my opinion based on the things that I have observed about Steven Seagal. The truth is this if Steven Seagal is completely innocent of all of these allegations, none of this mafia stuff is true, and his Aikido is completely legit, how’s that gonna change your life? How will that make you better as a martial artist? And I mean, if you’re mad at me for doing a Steven Seagal exposed video, again, how’s you getting mad at me gonna make you better? I mean, like, it’s just my opinion that Steven Seagal is an absolute monster and the only thing that I feel that I can stand to learn from Steven Seagal is how not to be a really shitty person. But I mean, sometimes I’ve tried to even stick up for Seagal, like I did in this video where I look in if he lied about fighting Bruce Lee. And he actually mentioned that stuff in the Jesse Enkemp video, so I may have to post an update to this video very soon because I know a lot more of the details than I did when I first made that video a year ago.

And also, hey, if you want to know something that actually will make you better, then you should keep training, remember to breathe, and come holler at me on the next video.