The accused in the criminal case under Article 115 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Intentional Infliction of Minor Personal Injury” was recently in Moscow 43-year-old Ukrainian singer Vitaly Grachev, better known by his stage name Vitas. A statement against him was written by 38-year-old head of the Department of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection Sultan Dzhandigov, who quarreled with him at a karaoke club on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street and, due to the use of a spray of gas from his opponent, he received chemical burns to the cornea of his eyes.
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– On the night of October 22, I was at the Duets karaoke club with my wife and two girls, – the telegraph channel SHOT quoted the testimony of Vitas. – The man with whom the conflict took place also rested there. He paid for the establishment to run after it closed, so we all sat down even after 6am.
At one point, this man asked the girls in my company to sing a song he had ordered. When he was refused, he said: “I paid the institute, sing the song I want”. I started a dialogue with him to resolve the situation. He recognized me and remembered that about ten years ago we sang with him in this karaoke. We took pictures and went to our tables. Shortly thereafter, the same man began to speak negatively and contemptuously about my hairstyle. I tried to make him understand that we had already resolved the conflict. But the quarrel began to grow.
He began calling on the street to settle the matter like a man. Evaluating our size, I refused. The conflict moved to a stage where I felt he could hit me and use pepper spray. I wasn’t going to hurt him, I was afraid he would hit me. After that, my wife and friends left.
“Go crazy”
This is not the first criminal scandal involving the singer famous for his shrill falsetto.
In 2001, when Vitas, who arrived from his native Odessa, along with his future wife Svetlana Grankovskaya and his sister Natalya, rented an apartment in Moscow on Shirokaya Street, his downstairs neighbor Yuri Belous and other residents took up residence. complained to the Severnoye Medvedkovo Police Department who sang loudly and kept them and their babies awake at night with noisy orgies. He threw bags of feces and used gaskets on balconies, and his door constantly smelled of soot and syringes were lying around. But this case was later silenced and the artist didn’t take responsibility for the hooligan antics.
– This quarrel wiped out my brain no less than this man and all the children of this entrance, – confessed the producer of the singer Sergei Pudovkin. – When Vitas just arrived in Moscow and I started working with him, we rented him an apartment in the center, in Smolenka, opposite the house where I live. There were no problems, thank God. But when we rented an apartment on Shirokaya Street, the complaints started coming from the neighbors.
No, no, Vitas is by no means prone to hooliganism, drunkenness and debauchery. All these stories, like he’s living with two girls and organizing orgies with them, are total nonsense! I’m not talking about the smell of schmalli and syringes. Maybe all of this happened. But how many neighbors are there! Maybe they are all hammering there from morning to night.
Another thing is that Vitas has an absolutely abnormal regimen. I always told him that in our country this would not bring him good, and that with such a regime he needed to live in the forest. Let him sing at night and do it until 6-7 am – this is true. I go on tour with him and I know what he does. He sleeps during the day, before the concert. At 4 he gets up and goes to the construction site. And at night he composes songs or rehearses.
Considering this, I understand my neighbor well. And I categorically take his position. But the trouble is that the neighbor himself has a bad head. He called me several times. And he carried total nonsense. For example, he claimed that Vitas threw the girls on the floor during orgies. It happened that Vitas and I were on tour, thousands of kilometers from Moscow, and a neighbor showed me that Vitas was now beating on the ground and preventing him from sleeping. Would you listen to the messages he slandered me on the answering machine: “Bitch! fagot! Condom! Get your cat out of here! I’m dying! I’m going crazy! “In general, the situation stopped. It became clear that we had to leave.
ferris wheel
But in 2013, when the singer, finding herself in a blatantly inadequate state, in the All-Russian Exhibition Center area, shoved her Infiniti on a cyclist Olga Kholodova, threatened her with a dummy gun and called the cops who were holding him. “roosters” and kicked him, to evade responsibility for him failed. True, he was tried only under Article 318 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Use of violence against a representative of power” and the punishment was limited to a fine of 100 thousand rubles.
– Vitas was the victim of a bicycle racker, – his lawyer Sergey Zhorin defended the singer. -He was on vacation with his family, riding a Ferris wheel and overheated in the sun. He didn’t drive anywhere. I sat inside and turned on the air conditioner to cool it down. A parking attendant approached him and asked him to move the car to a nearby spot. Vitas started to back off and touched this cyclist. I went out to see what happened. A boy immediately jumped on him. He claimed to be the cyclist’s boyfriend. Hit him and knock him down. Another or two people appeared somewhere. They also started digging in Vitas. And when the police came, he was so angry that he behaved badly towards the police.
During the investigation, these boys were identified and interviewed. They said they passed that way. But then it turned out that it was some kind of grouping and everyone knew each other there … Other victims identified the young woman. And after being exposed by vigilant citizens, she was wrong. Therefore, Vitas was not tried for the episode with her. And he made peace with the police. He apologized to them and paid the fine. Personally, Vitas impressed me as an absolutely adequate guy. Considering the level of popularity he had in Russia and China, it was as comfortable as possible for me to communicate with him. I have someone to compare.
Vitas appears to have not drawn any conclusions from what happened and has regularly continued to come to the attention of law enforcement. In 2018, he harassed his neighbors by shooting a gun in the courtyard of his country house on the Rublevo-Uspenskoye highway and received an administrative arrest for seven days for petty hooliganism. And now, for a gas canister attack on a Labor Ministry official, he faces up to four months of arrest or up to a year of remedial work.
I lost control
“It seems to me that Vitas got into serious trouble because he lost control of his producer Serezha Pudovkin,” Olesya Sazykina, the former producer of the Muz-TV channel, expressed his opinion to Express Gazeta. – I met Sergey in the late 90’s in the Rossiya concert hall. He also worked as a director for Bari Alibasov in the Na-na group. And he was one of the few to show interest in the opposite sex. He even married a big “on-ours” fan – “Russia” administrator Anzhelka Strelchuk.
Even then, he had a goal of becoming a producer himself. But Alibasov did not allow him to develop. He constantly belittled him. And Sergey did his best to show Bari Karimovich that he was capable of doing more.
I remember a demonstration case at the “Slavianski Bazaar” festival in Vitebsk. “On-Ours” was late somewhere. Sofia Rotaru was supposed to perform in front of them. Pudovkin began to insist that he let them go on. In response, the great artist said something unpleasant about “Na-na”. In those days, she, like Alla Pugacheva, no one dared object. But she didn’t get pissed off and put her in her place. As a result, Sophia Mikhailovna got angry and whipped him with a bouquet of roses which she passed under her arm so that she scratched his entire muzzle with thorns.
Despite this, Seryozha got what she wanted and changed her place to “ours”. He has always fought so hard for him as artists. He stopped at nothing to defend their interests.
Eventually, Vitas showed up somewhere Pudovkin and with him managed to realize himself as a producer. At first, his ward was quieter than water, lower than grass. When Vitas was taken to concerts in “Russia” or to shoot with us on “Muz-TV”, Seryozha did not even allow him to open his mouth and spoke to everyone for him on the pretext that his gills prevented him from speak. She literally checked every step of him and almost went to the bathroom with him. But it is no coincidence that they say that there are devils in an immobile pool. Perhaps, over the years, Pudokin’s control has so disgusted the boy that he has no longer been able to keep himself within limits. Thus began a series of these ugly scandals with Vitas.
Photo source: Legion-Media, Boris Kudryavov, Larisa Kudryavtseva
