Mark Wahlberg's past came back to haunt him after a social media firestorm raged over him presenting an award to the Asian cast of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" on stage at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild awards Sunday.
Images showed Wahlberg presenting Ke Huy Quan with the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award for the film, sowing the seeds of the outrage that looked back to the actor's criminal past.
The 51-year-old star was convicted of assaulting Vietnamese-American shopkeeper Johnny Trinh, along with another Vietnamese-American man in 1988 when he was 16.
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Wahlberg punched Trinh in the eye and knocked out the other with a wooden stick.
Investigators at the time said Wahlberg used the g-word racial slur against East Asians and verbally mocked their eye shape, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail.
Thirty-five years later, the internet wasn't so quick to forget.
Bonnie Stiernberg, managing editor of Inside Hook, tweeted of Wahlberg's presence, "I gotta say, having Mark Wahlberg, who literally went to jail as a teen for committing a hate crime against a Vietnamese man, present an award to the cast of Everything Everywhere All At Once was certainly a choice."
Some pointed out that Will Smith was not given the opportunity to present awards while Wahlberg was.
Matt Samet, an attorney from California, tweeted, "REALLY interesting that Will Smith wasn't invited to present Best Actress while Mark Wahlberg is presenting the ensemble award to a film with a predominantly Asian cast when he punched and barely blinded a Vietnamese man…."
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"Will Smith ostracized while Mark Wahlberg get to present an award to an Asian cast," journalist and commentator Torraine Walker chimed in.
Ryan Aguirre, a publicist, sarcastically tweeted of the incident, "Good for Mark Wahlberg, standing on a stage with all those Asian people without assaulting any of them."
Others defended Wahlberg, however, noting how he has changed since the incident took place and has since apologized for the crime.
"People can't change from when they're teenagers?" one asked.
Another, citing a separate Daily Mail report from 2014, wrote, "Wahlberg was 16 and high, the victim has forgiven him, and Wahlberg offered to fly the victim to Los Angeles so that he could apologize in person. Also, the victim was not seriously injured and was already blind. Really?"
Wahlberg said in a 2016 interview with TheWrap that he was "relieved" to hear that the man's eye wound came from the early 1970s instead of the incident, adding, "I was able to meet with him and his wife and his daughter and apologize for those horrific acts. Some good did come out of it."
Wahlberg has also said he "made a lot of terrible mistakes" and had "paid for those mistakes dearly."
