14 DAY TRIAL // Zac Efron got beat up the other day in Skid Row in Los Angeles where, according to reports, he wasn’t looking to score drugs but just happened to have his car run out of gas. More details into the altercation have emerged online, with one man claiming to be the actor’s bodyguard saying he pretty much owes him his life.
Efron took a punch to his pretty face to save him from getting beat up, the man tells celebrity publication TMZ. He won’t go on the record with a name, but he vouches he’s working for the former Disney star as a personal guard, which pretty much makes his entire story sound bogus.
One would imagine one’s bodyguard would be like Kevin Costner in the Whitney Houston classic film, i.e. trained to fight whatever opponent and, if the situation requires it, ready to take a bullet for his client.
Of course, that’s in the movies because, according to the so-called bodyguard, it was Efron who courageously risked his own life to prevent a bunch of other guys from beating him up. The man claims the altercation started when he and Efron ran out of gas and, as they were waiting in the car, threw a bottle out the window.
The bottle landed and crashed on the sidewalk, making a group of transients assume they’d been the target for it. The man says he got out of the car to reason with them, they jumped him, and he was soon overwhelmed. He figures he might have even been killed had it not been for Efron, who also jumped out and came to his rescue.
“He tells us... the transients actually went after him with ‘a spear’ – like a shank – and stabbed him in the face, stomach and chest. He says Zac then got out of the car and swung a vodka bottle at the transients to fend off the attack. He says Zac actually thwarted the attack and saved his life,” TMZ writes.
In the process, Efron took a punch to the face, which probably hurt him a lot because he is still recovering from a broken jaw, after a domestic accident in November.
Perhaps the weirdest part of the “bodyguard’s” story is that he says Efron swung the bottle at the attackers, scaring them off: the same bottle he was supposed to have thrown out the window before the melee, which shattered on the ground and started the whole thing.
Efron is yet to comment on the incident. No arrests were made at the time because police deemed the episode “mutual combat.” TMZ says that the man claiming to be the actor’s bodyguard actually has a history of drug abuse and violence, which would support the theory that the two of them were looking to score a hit in Skid Row, an area of LA notorious for drug trafficking.