14 DAY TRIAL // The latest round of auditions for America's Got Talent, the Austin stage, included a war veteran named Timothy Poe who had discovered singing after he was wounded in combat and suffered a brain injury. As it turns out, he might be a fraud.
Video of his segment on AGT is below.
As you can see, Poe says he was a soldier for 14 years and was wounded in Afghanistan, which caused injuries to his spine and brain, leaving him with a stutter.
At one point in the film, a photo of a man who looks like Poe is shown but TMZ has confirmation that he is not the guy pictured there.
“Staff Sgt. Norman Bone tells TMZ he first heard about the photo from his ex-wife who was watching AGT – Norman thought it was part of a tribute to the troops and didn't think twice about it,” the celebrity e-zine writes.
Shortly afterwards, he learned that the photo hadn't been included in a tribute, but was actually passed around as Poe's.
“First thing that came to my mind was 'Why would this lying son of a [expletive] do this?' I'm absolutely furious. Been seeing red all day,” Bone tells TMZ.
The same report notes that the photo was originally posted on the US Department of Defense official website with a caption that explains that it was Bone who was shown in it, and not Poe.
Following the scandal, FreemantleMedia, the production company that handles America's Got Talent, has issued a statement to lay all the blame with Poe: he supplied them with the photo and they never stopped to consider he might have been lying.
“We sincerely apologize to U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Norman Bone for using a photo of him in our story on Tim Poe. It was supplied to us by Tim and used on the show in good faith. It has now been removed and will not be used again,” says the statement.
To make matters even worse, it seems that Poe also lied about his injury and the cause of his stutter, Radar Online notes.
“Sgt. Poe's official military records do not indicate that he was injured by a grenade in combat while serving in Afghanistan in 2009, as he reports,” the Minnesota National Guard says in a statement cited by the e-zine.
Now, America's Got Talent is struggling to save face, just when producers thought they had a tear-jerking gold moment on their hands with Poe's act and story.