The mother of the stuntman who was killed last July in a high-fall accident on the Georgia set of The Walking Dead is speaking out.
According to Deadline, Susan Bernecker, the mother of stuntman John Bernecker, says that over the last ten years she heard him and his friends talk about the unsafe working conditions in the film and TV industry.
“I’m friends with 50 or 60 stunt people,” she told Deadline in an exclusive interview. “They’re like my adopted children, and I heard this all the time.” And when the Harvey Weinstein sex scandal broke, she says she was reminded of the stunt world’s code of silence that she’d heard about so often.
“If you take out the word ‘sex’ and put in ‘safety,’ it’s the same thing,” she said. “This is parallel in my mind. There are the same pressures and the same risks. People are afraid to speak out because they’re afraid they’ll never work again or that they’ll be looked down upon.” And stunt women get the worst of both worlds. “Stunt women have told me about being put in sexual harassment positions to get a job. I had two girls tell me about that in the last year.”
Her life’s mission now, she says, is to prevent that from ever happening to anyone else. And to that end, she’s forming a foundation in her son’s name that “seeks to create solutions for the safety of movie and television performers.”
Earlier this month, OSHA fined the production company a little more than $10,000 for “failing to protect employees from fall hazards” – the maximum fine allowed for a “serious” violation of federal safety rules. That said, Susan Bernecker believes that a fine that small is not going to force anyone to follow the rules.
“I think it’s ridiculous,” she said. “I mean, they spend that much on food for the crew for two days. If this were half a million dollars, it would get their attention. But $12,000 isn’t going to get anyone’s attention.”
She explains that an OSHA rep called her and sounded “almost apologetic.”
Under the advisement of her attorney, Bernecker said she could not talk about The Walking Dead. She did say, “It took them an hour to get him to the hospital, and that’s a big problem for me – besides what happened. There are a lot of answers I don’t have. I’m a mamma bear, and I want to know. His father left when he was 3, and we were alone. He was my only child. My friends called him the golden boy.”
Most importantly she wants others to know that her son is more than just a stuntman.
“I didn’t know it, but he paid people’s rent,” she said. “He was spreading fairy dust all over the place. He seized every day. He was never negative and never depressed. And if you were, he’d change it.” She created a website to give others the sense of his life.
Since his death, she said, “I cry every day. I’m not a crybaby person, but I just cry every day. I asked my friend, ‘How many days can you cry?’ I didn’t eat or sleep for a couple of months. I eat now, but I still don’t sleep because it’s unresolved. But I know that this is what John would want me to do. There’s nothing worse than having your child die. You lose your future, especially if you have only one child. I’m not going to be a grandmother now. You lose your future. It’s not a natural progression of life. I go through this every day.”
“This should not have happened,” she said. “This was not the kind of stunt you should be killed on. He did this same stunt (a fall from a balcony) two months earlier in South Carolina. So I’m going to try to change things. My niece is a stunt woman, and I feel a duty to find out what happened, and to do what John would have done, to make it safer for everybody. Because the industry isn’t doing it. Somebody’s got to get the ball rolling, so I guess I was picked.”
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