Iam Somerhalder is opening up about crawling out of MASSIVE debt!
As someone who starred in a show as successful as The Vampire Diaries, you’d think they’d be set for life, right?? Well, yes… unless you make some questionable business decisions! This week, Ian opened up to E! News at the Beverage Forum in Manhattan Beach, California, about his involvement in a business he “didn’t build properly” which left him reeling in an eight-figure hole of debt:
“I retired from acting seven years ago. I left an insanely lucrative career in television after financial upheaval from building a business that I didn’t build properly. And due to fraud, it put my wife and I into an eight-figure hole.”
EIGHT figures… Holy s**t! This is 10s of MILLIONS of dollars, we’re talking! While the 47-year-old didn’t reveal the exact number, he said things went haywire “due to greed and fraud within that company and fraudulent activities from our biggest customer.”
Yeesh!
Ian previously revealed in 2021 the company was related to clean energy sourcing, which he invested “heavily” in and promised “huge personal guarantees to banks.”
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In his interview with E! On Wednesday, he didn’t get into specifics, but hinted the temporary crash of the oil and gas industry was what sent everything “crashing down” and broke his bank, as he made promises to lenders he then couldn’t keep.
That’s scary… However, the actor had one saving grace: his wife Nikki Reed! He revealed his eight-figure debt was “a hard hole to climb out of”:
“But Nikki and I did it. You know, she really negotiated us out of this deal but we sold houses, paintings, cars, watches, everything.”
You gotta do what you gotta do! Thank goodness he has such a decisive partner!
Now in retrospect, Ian feels he “should have been retiring off of one of the biggest TV shows in the world” instead of “starting companies that were not gonna pay me possibly ever.”
The actor previously gushed over his wife’s help in an Instagram post in 2021:
“This woman here decided that she didn’t want to see her husband ruin his body/mind/spirit and pulled up her bootstraps and got down in the trenches assembling a team to get to the negotiating table to find a way out. She devoted her life to getting me out of that mess and it almost killed her along the way.”
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Insane!!! We hope he NEVER takes her for granted!
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[Images via MEGA/WENN]
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