This article is going to very briefly discuss the topic of suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis or may try to harm themselves, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
We’re back with another edition of Urban Legend: Fact or Fiction. In this chapter, we are going to look at the viral rumor that the late actor/comedian Robin Williams had a contract rider that required each of his projects to hire 10 homeless people.
In 2014, the world lost Williams when he tragically took his own life. After his passing, a slew of former co-workers came forward to talk about what an excellent human being he was. However, the day after his passing, a website started making the following claim.
The Story
“I never actually booked Robin Williams for an event, but I came close enough that his office sent over his rider. For those outside of the entertainment industry, a rider lists out an artist’s specific personal and technical needs for hosting them for an event- anything from bottled water and their green room to sound and lighting requirements,” writes Brian Lord. “When I got Robin Williams’ rider, I was very surprised by what I found. He actually had a requirement that for every single event or film he did, the company hiring him also had to hire a certain number of homeless people and put them to work.”
Lord’s account was posted on August 12th, 2014, the day after Williams passed. Lord provides no evidence for this claim, like a copy of the rider, aside from his word.
Variants
Somewhere along the way, this story shifted to him hiring at least 10 homeless people per project. Which means over the span of his career, he would have helped approximately 1520 homeless people.
Is it Real?
The problem here is that the document demanding this has never materialized. The Smoking Gun was able to dredge up a rider for Williams’ 2002. It does ask for 16 crew members, “(Tour 12/Local 4),” but doesn’t specify that they need to be homeless.
Normally, this is where we would call something busted, but his daughter, Zelda Williams, is also backing up Lord’s claim. “My dad, on all of his projects and especially when he was on tour, would hire homeless people. He would actively give them jobs,” she told the crowd at an industry event in New York in 2024. She adds:
“Please, if you ever have an opening, at least consider it. It makes an enormous difference for people generationally. It doesn’t just take incredible organizations like [Comic Relief]. It takes individuals. So if you ever don’t think that you as a single person or as a person who has a business can make a difference, please know you can, even if you’re hiring just one person.”
Where It Gets Tricky
At this point, we will call the rider element of this legend debunked. After 12-years and countless viral posts about it, one has never materialized. (It’s the internet; someone with solid proof quickly provides it, if anything, just to be right). Now that’s not to say we don’t think Zelda and (to a degree) Lord are also telling the truth.
Williams was a huge supporter of Comic Relief, a charity dedicated to helping with poverty and, in turn, homelessness. Williams’ friend and fellow comedian Billy Crystal even revealed that their first Comic Relief show raised $4 – 5 million.
“That’s was what we knew we were doing. Something that was not only funny but helpful,” he said. “And that’s the greatest thing that you can do with your talent. When the money came in, it went out to the most needy places across the country, the shelters across the country. And the three of us [Whoopi Goldberg, Robin and myself] would deliver the checks to these individual shelters all across the country.”
Williams also spoke at a Senate hearing about the Homelessness Prevention and Revitalization Act of 1990. “This program has incredible possibilities to deal with keeping people in their homes,” he said. ”The problem cannot be denied anymore … You can’t keep picking people up, you have to stop them from falling. That’s what I hope.”
Yes, He Helped The Homeless
No one is here to say that Robin Williams did not do what he could to help the homeless. There is just no evidence he ever contractually required productions or live events to hire them. If Lord’s claim were true, wouldn’t there have been an outpouring of directors who had worked with Williams to verify this? The fact that this legend has existed for over a decade and zero documents have surfaced despite multiple investigations makes this hard to believe, at best.
In the same turn, why wouldn’t former co-workers step forward to say it isn’t true when it’s so easily disproven? Well, culturally, we don’t like to speak ill of the dead. Correcting this rumor could be viewed as taking one of the many, many feathers out of Williams’ cap. However, we disagree with that assessment.
A Possibility
Think about it this way: if Williams had forced the homeless to be hired via contract, they would have more than likely been treated as “diversity hires.” Which is to say, treated like an obligation more than an employee. Notice how Zelda only said he “would hire homeless people.” By putting them through the hiring process, Williams was intentionally, or not, making it so that marginalized people, like the homeless, were seen more as co-workers than as a forced hire. We think that says more about his legacy and pull in the industry than a contract demand ever could. It would mean that these productions were hiring vulnerable and often stigmatized people purely at his behest and not because they legally had to.
Only time will tell if any filmmakers who worked with Williams step forward and prove this one way or the other. And all we are saying is that a legacy can be both epic and accurate. For now, all we feel confident saying is that this particular urban legend is at least partially false. However, that doesn’t detract from all the good Williams did. If anything, it adds to how much he honestly cared and fought for his coworkers.
If you or someone you know is experiencing a crisis or may try to harm themselves, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
