Robert Champagne says KOMO’s special inaccurately portrayed him. To start, he hasn’t been homeless for more than three years.
- David Kroman in Crosscut
When he was shown the video for the first time, Robert Champagne was unsure if the person on the screen was really him. But then he recognized the teal-green shirt he was wearing when the film crew from KOMO TV trained their camera on him. He pulled the same shirt from his closet and laid it on his bed. “It is me,” he said.
Champagne appears several times in the latter half of the hour long television special, called Seattle Is Dying, which was filmed over the past year and aired earlier this month on the Seattle station. He is never interviewed, but he is shown multiple times, either sitting on the sidewalk or bracing himself against newspaper boxes downtown, a Target bag at his feet containing the bottle of laundry detergent he’d just bought.