Jason David Frank is best known to Power Rangers fans as the Green Ranger, and he recently got into a heated exchange with Jean-Claude Van Damme at a Comic Con event in Mexico City.
According to Frank, he was asked if he would be willing to share his green room with Van Damme and his 20 person entourage and he agreed. Frank and Van Damme have a long running feud that dates back to the 90s after they exchanged words at the premiere for the Power Rangers movie, but he thought that Van Damme wanted to bury the hatchet.
After JDF finished signing autographs he went back to the green room, but Van Damme’s security prevented him from going in. He was then approached by someone from Jean-Claude’s entourage who insisted they take a photo together, and JDF says it was all a set up.
Jean-Claude Van Damme then brought up the fact that JDF challenged him to a fight in 2010, and JDF told FloCombat that Van Damme asked if he still wanted to beat his ass then challenged him to a fight on the spot.
“All of his crew comes out and everybody has their cameras out and he has this professional camera, I’m not sure if he’s shooting a reality show or what, but all the cameras are on and he comes out of the room and straight up to me and he goes ‘hey you like writing articles about people, you want to beat my ass? You gonna apologize for that?’ and I said nope. He goes ‘you think you can still beat my ass?’ and I said yeah. He said ‘OK let’s do it right now’. I mean I thought it was all a joke but his security was all filming this and I heard them talking in the back and it was clear that he was trying to punk me. Either make me look bad or throw a punch first.”
“I clinched him up and pushed him back, not in a violent way, in a respectful way that if you want to do this, let’s do this,” Frank said. “The whole time everybody is filming me and no security people are coming but everybody in his entourage is filming. So I clinched up with him and put him against the wall and he’s talking and he froze up and I raised my knee and said ‘do you want to this?’ and he doesn’t do anything so I let go. I backed away and he starts saying ‘well be careful what you say, you never know what I’m gonna do’. So that’s when it escalated and his security guy came in and broke it up.”
“Security came and broke it up and that’s when he starts saying ‘f*ck you’ and I told him come on. Why don’t you come in the cage or the ring? Why are you doing this at Comic Con?” Frank said. “And then his security is trying to get my phone to take away the footage. My point is if he has all the footage and it’s gonna make him look really bad. It doesn’t belong at Comic Con. It belongs in a ring or a cage. I’m not bitter but he’s acting childish.”
Video footage of the altercation has surfaced online, and even though it doesn’t show Frank clinching Van Damme it’s clear from the footage that this was not a friendly exchange and the video can be viewed below.
