Lady Gaga’s dog walker shared some more details about his harrowing attack at the hands of dognappers last year during Grand Jury testimony in October.
The 41-year-old was brutally attacked last February while taking the singer’s three prized French bulldogs out for a stroll in L.A., not long after Lady Gaga had departed for Italy to begin filming House of Gucci.
Reports surfaced that the celeb dog walker had been approached aggressively and then shot at close range while the offenders took off with two of the dogs. One dog managed to escape their clutches and returned to stay by Ryan’s side until help arrived.
Ryan Fischer spoke in more detail about his attack last year at the hands of dognappers
More than a year after the assault and being close to death after taking four bullets to his upper body area, the previously-sealed testimony has been released to the public and gives a closer look at those moments back in February when Ryan was attacked.
Ryan testified that he used a champagne bottle he had just bought at the store to try to fend off the assailants, saying that “‘the dog screamed at me, and I reached for him, and then the guy, the man with the gun, shot me as I was reaching,” according to Rolling Stone.
He continued to describe what happened at the time, saying, “I immediately tried to call for help but realized I was bleeding out of my lung and that I was losing more and more air quickly.”
Ryan revealed that he was “confused” when the white car pulled up beside him, and three men jumped out and began shouting at him to hand over the dogs.
“They pointed down to the dogs, that they wanted the dogs, and I said, ‘No,’ and I started to scream for help and tried to fight back,” he added.
Some of Lady Gaga’s fans felt that the singer focused too much on her dogs’ well-being than on Ryan after the attack
As more details emerge from Ryan’s testimony, a quick look back at the post Lady Gaga made last year at the time of the attack shows that some of her fans were not so thrilled with her Instagram post regarding finding her dogs.
After sharing a photo of two of her pooches with a caption that detailed her heartbreak over their loss (the dogs were later recovered safely), fans were largely empathetic to the singer’s sorrow over the incident but others were less than sympathetic.
“It seems to me that there was a lot more concern about the damned dogs than the man who was walking them,” wrote one enraged follower.
They continued the rant by adding, “Dogs are ok, but this man almost lost his life. However, Gaga was offering rewards for return of the dogs. I would have been offering a reward for the safety and health of the dog walker. Her concern for her dogs appeared to be way more than the fact that the man she hired was SHOT. What’s wrong with this picture????”
The harsh critique was made more poignant when Ryan shared later last year that he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress and was asking for financial help as he was living out of his van.
The robbery ended in the eventual arrest of five people, one of which included the alleged “good Samaritan” who had claimed that she miraculously found the two dogs tied to a pole in an alley.
Police warned Lady Gaga at the time to be careful with providing the woman with the hefty $500,000 reward she had offered up, wanting to ensure that the good Samaritan wasn’t involved in the planning of the assault in any way.
Authorities later discovered that the woman had indeed been part of the scheme, and she was arrested along with four men.
They pleaded not guilty and are currently awaiting trial to determine their fate.