Body Cam Captures Heated Moment ‘Cobra Kai' Actress Confronts Martin Kove Over Bite
star is under fire after allegedly biting fellow actress during a fan convention in Washington, and things nearly escalated into a full-blown fight.
According to a police report, the shocking incident unfolded on Sunday, June 22, at Summer Con in Puyallup, Washington, where cast members from the Netflix hit "Cobra Kai" were meeting fans.
Martin Kove, best known for his iconic villain role in "The Karate Kid" franchise, later claimed the biting was 'horseplay.'
Hannah-Kim claimed the incident began when she tapped Kove on the shoulder to greet him at their shared cast booth.
'Martin Kove suddenly grabbed her arm and bit her upper arm so hard it nearly drew blood, and she yelled out in pain,' the report obtained by PEOPLE alleged. 'Once Martin Kove finished biting her arm, he grabbed her arm again and began kissing it where he had bit her.'
In footage obtained by TMZ, Hannah-Kim told officers that Kove bit her so hard he nearly broke the skin, and when she confronted him, he allegedly became 'furious and outraged.'
'That is assault!' Hannah-Kim is heard saying. 'You have left a mark on my body, which in your 80-year-old brain, you think is 'play,' Sir, were you raised in a ditch?'
She is later heard speaking to police, telling the officers, "I told him calmly not to bite me. He insisted he bit me for fun.'
Her husband, actor Sebastian Roché, witnessed the altercation and backed her account.
The situation became so intense, Alicia told Martin Kove in front of an officer that she would've knocked him out if he were 20 years younger, a cutting jab that highlighted just how furious she was.
Police noted a 'very noticeable bite mark on her arm that was already turning blue and bruising.'
Startled and in pain, Hannah-Kim and Roché confronted Kove, who allegedly 'exploded on them' and insisted 'he did not do anything wrong.' She proceeded to find an on-site law enforcement officer, who confirmed the visible injury and took a report.
When questioned by police, Martin Kove allegedly 'admitted to biting' Hannah-Kim, explaining that 'he thought he was being funny,' and referenced playful on-set antics from "Cobra Kai." 'He did not think it was a big deal,' the officer noted in the report.
However, Hannah-Kim made it clear that she 'was legitimately caused pain' and was deeply upset.
Both she and the officer informed Kove that his behavior was illegal and 'would not be tolerated in the future.' Kove allegedly replied that 'he did not mean for it to be perceived as illegal' and reiterated that 'he was just messing around.'
While Hannah-Kim ultimately declined to press assault charges, she requested an official informational report be filed 'in case this continues.' Photos were taken to document the injury, and both she and her husband signed affidavits and received a case number.
Martin Kove and his son declined to submit a voluntary statement and were escorted out of Summer Con at the discretion of the "Cobra Kai" producer on site.
The actor broke his silence days later, saying in a public apology, 'I deeply regret and apologize for my actions regarding the incident with Alicia,' and described her as a 'wonderful person.'
The news of Martin Kove biting his "Cobra Kai" co-star Alicia Hannah-Kim has sent shockwaves across social media, where fans were quick to express disbelief and outrage.
'There is nothing playful about biting someone intentionally!' one X user wrote, echoing a common sentiment.
Another stunned fan simply asked, 'Martin Kove did WHAT?'
The comparisons to his famously aggressive "Karate Kid" character, John Kreese, came fast and furious. 'So Martin Kove really was John Kreese,' one person quipped. 'Mf biting people at cons. Sh-t is wild man,' another added.
Others slammed the actor's alleged behavior as inappropriate and unsettling. 'What kinda thug does this, especially with her husband there?' one commenter wrote, while another didn't hold back, 'ARREST HIM! INCARCERATE HIM!!'
Some fans also referenced Kove's reported ties to Scientology, with one remarking, 'Scientologists are f-cking weirdos. Sorry to break it to you that Martin Kove is one of them if you didn't know.'
Hannah-Kim joined "Cobra Kai" in Season 5 as Kim Da-Eun, while Kove has portrayed John Kreese since the original "Karate Kid" in 1984. The hit Netflix series recently concluded its sixth and final season.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Inside the revolting story of the infamous ‘poop cruise': ‘Complete media bloodbath'
Elevator pitches don't get much more captivating, and possibly revolting, than 'poop cruise' – a modern day Gilligan's Island tale that's almost too good to be true. For those who may have missed the headlines in 2013: a two-day transit from Galveston, Texas, to Cozumel, Mexico turned disastrous when an engine room fire struck the Carnival Triumph and stranded its 4,100-odd passengers and crew in the Gulf of Mexico. The fire devastated the Triumph's electrical nerve center and crippled the auxiliary systems aboard the ship, from the wifi to the toilets – which literally backed up into cabins and spilled into the hallways. After three days adrift, the Triumph was towed to Mobile, Alabama – but not before the limits of socially conditioned behavior approached a breaking point. Related: Poop Cruise review – a fascinating look at a toilet disaster that still haunts passengers 12 years later To widespread relief, however, the saga ended with passengers kissing the ground and laughing off the calamity as they disembarked – and the stricken Carnival cruise went from a potential Titanic epilogue unfolding in real time to the ultimate shaggy dog story. 'When you hear 'Poop Cruise', you think '… OK'', says Bafta-nominated director James Ross. 'But actually there's a lot more layers and twists and turns to the story.' His latest film, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, follows recent documentaries in Netflix's Trainwreck series on the fall of Toronto mayor Rob Ford and the Astroworld festival tragedy. Poop Cruise doesn't just dive head-first into the graphic details; it deftly walks the line between the serious and the side-splitting while reconstructing the epic yarn in 360 degrees. Right away, we're introduced to a cross-section of Triumph cruise survivors: the bachelorette party looking to blow off steam, the nervous fiance traveling with his future father-in-law for the first time, the divorced dad who just wanted to have a nice vacation with his 13-year-old daughter. Their passive experience aboard the cruise – the bachelorette party ominously skipped the safety briefing upon boarding the ship and headed straight for the bar – is juxtaposed with perspectives from the cruise director, bartender and other non-Americans on the crew pulling 70-hour work weeks to keep the good times rolling. (Think Upstairs, Downstairs on the high seas, with bed-hopping above and below deck.) 'It's hedonism,' says Ross. 'There's this huge extreme of people on one end who are there just to really enjoy themselves and the crew who are there to facilitate that. But it was also important to show that this terrible scenario didn't just happen to the passengers; the crew were in it as well.' Poop Cruise cleverly puts viewers back onboard the Triumph, setting its expert witnesses inside kitschy dining halls, bars and other backdrops that suggest locations on the actual ship. At one point during the interview with the nervous bachelor, Devin Marble, the lights flicker out – a fortuitous and poetic echo of real life, as it happens. 'We were shooting in an arcade shop in a mall in Houston, and there was a power cut midway through,' says Ross. Poop Cruise also features one of the better applications of scene re-enactments in a documentary, especially when it comes to reconstructing anecdotes. (One memorable scene takes shape as one member of the bachelorette party recalls her disco-like endeavor to use a blacked-out cabin bathroom with a flashing beacon between her teeth.) Ross says he wanted the re-enactments to 'not feel too real' but also signal to viewers that 'you're in this kind of hyper real place, because the real footage is the star of the show'. Ross had his pick from hundreds of hours of passenger-generated footage, each adding to this mosaic of civilizational collapse in miniature. Passengers go from cannonballing into the pool and hoofing around the disco to creating tent cities on deck and contemplating how long they can hold off on going No 2 before they have to break down and defecate in a crew-issued hazmat bag. Finding the footage of those critical story beats, says Ross, was just a matter of tracking down insiders such as Marble (whose vlogs became a critical window into the crisis) and sorting through the trove of video and photo evidence that was submitted for the disaster investigation. Ultimately, the fire was blamed on a fuel leak – a preventable failure that Carnival knowingly sailed right past. Poop Cruise could have easily gone sideways again trying to shoehorn such a wide-ranging story into a tight 45 minutes. But it benefits from natural time constraints (five days) and legitimately earned twists that raise the stakes from scene to scene. A major inflection point sneaks up when the Triumph, which has drifted out of range for a Mexican rescue, crosses paths with a sister Carnival cruise liner – the Legend (which diverted its course to help). Triumph passengers go from thinking they're saved to realizing there's no way all 3,143 of them can be transferred over to the other ship safely. (The Triumph crew does manage to grab critical supplies from the Legend, and one passenger who required medical attention makes it across.) Worse, the passengers aboard the Legend shrug off the Triumph's plight, gawking at the destitute ship as if it were a breaching humpback before resuming the good time that Triumph passengers had themselves signed up for. But when Triumph passengers realize they can 'steal' the Legend's working wifi, they throng to the deck with phones in hand and reach out to their loved ones. Shockingly, it was through those mayday calls that the world learned that Triumph was in crisis. Up to that point, Carnival corporate's PR strategy was to relate as few details about the fire as possible – a scheme that kept the media uninterested at first. ('You give them what you believe they need,' says company spin doctor Buck Banks, 'and no more than that.') But once those Triumph distress calls started cropping up on Twitter and elsewhere online, Carnival was forced to reckon with a 'complete media bloodbath', says Banks. CNN was one notable outlet that struggled to justify covering the Triumph fire story over Barack Obama's State of the Union, Pope Benedict's abdication, saber rattling in Pyongyang and other pressing news. But once the fuller picture of the situation aboard the ship came into focus, the network – which had just been placed under the management of former NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker – went all-in on the story, and competitors swiftly followed their lead. Once the ship was under tow and within striking distance of shore, there was a mad scramble to intercept it in the air and go live with the first images of the deterioration. For many aboard the ship, that media onslaught was their first indication that their very own 'three-hour tour' from hell was in fact drawing to a close. Of course there will be some who might not have the stomach for Poop Cruise. Besides holding the potential for inducing claustrophobia, it traffics – by necessity – in the scatological. (One of the cooks aboard the ship likened the desperate scene he found inside a god-forsaken lavatory to a 'poop lasagna'.) But the thing most likely to turn off viewers is that Carnival didn't really face any serious repercussions from the poop cruise. (In general, cruise passengers give up their right to sue when they purchase a ticket.) After a $115m clean-up effort, the Triumph was relaunched under a new name: the Sunrise. Buyer beware. The average person would never think to book a cruise again after surviving such an ordeal. But Poop Cruise is more than a deep rewind on 12-year-old clickbait. It's a rollicking allegory for the precariousness of our modern world and the resiliency of the human spirit. 'People were saying this was the best cruise they'd ever been on, I think because the crew worked so hard,' says Ross, who seized on the opportunity to make a different sort of documentary. 'This was an opportunity not to tell a kind of dark sad story about a crime or whatever, but to do something where in the end nobody died. Yes, it was a terrible experience, and people learned from it. But it was also one of those 'holy fuck' stories.' Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is available now on Netflix
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Wellness Influencer ‘Liver King' Arrested After Posting A Series Of Videos Aimed At Joe Rogan
Wellness influencer Brian Johnson, 47, known to his millions of followers as the 'Liver King,' was arrested Tuesday and accused of making threats against popular podcaster and former MMA fighter Joe Rogan in a series of videos posted on his Instagram page. 'Joe Rogan, I'm calling you out, my name's Liver King. Man to man, I'm picking a fight with you,' Johnson said, holding two rifles in a video posted Monday. 'I have no training in jiujitsu; you're a black belt, you should dismantle me. But I'm picking a fight with you. Your rules, I'll come to you whenever you're ready.' Much of Johnson's Liver King content revolves around advising fitness enthusiasts to build a body like his through questionable practices like eating raw animal testicles or, as the name alludes to, raw liver. In 2022, leaked emails revealed that he had been spending approximately $11,000 a month injecting himself with steroids and human growth hormone. Johnson was highlighted in the Netflix documentary series 'Untold: The Liver King,' which came out this year. He made other concerning videos leading up to his arrest, many of which show him rambling. Austin police told HuffPost they were notified of Johnson's alleged threats Tuesday morning, and observed him traveling to Austin while continuing to challenge Rogan online. It's unclear why Johnson posted a series of videos challenging Rogan. He told the podcaster in a follow-up video, 'I actually have something to fight for' and 'We'll see you soon. Real tension I have with you. Real fucking beef.' Rogan has hosted well-known celebrities and figures on his podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience,' but has never had Johnson on his show. Austin police said Rogan told them that the two had never interacted, and that he considered the posts threatening. The podcaster had criticized Johnson's steroid use and his general demeanor in an episode released two years ago with fitness influencer Derek, known for the brand 'More Plates, More Dates.' 'The guy calls himself the Liver King, and he's this guy who walks around everywhere with no shirt on. I've seen him in Vegas with no shirt on, big bushy beard, super jacked, and he was telling people that the way he gets that way is by sunning his balls,' Rogan said. Austin police arrested Johnson on Tuesday at the Four Seasons Hotel and took him into custody without incident on a misdemeanor charge of terroristic threat. It's unclear if the wellness influencer has an attorney representing him. Video posted on Johnson's account shows him wearing a burgundy sweatsuit promoting a fight between him and Rogan as he paces around a hotel room rambling with his wife, Bozena 'Barbara' Johnson aka the 'Liver Queen.' He was later seen being patted down by officers while in handcuffs. 'Absolute Betrayal': Joe Rogan Regular Turns On Trump, Calls For Impeachment 'What The F**k...': Watch Joe Rogan And Trump's FBI Director React To Musk's Post Joe Rogan Mocks Katy Perry And All-Women Blue Origin Space Flight In Misogyny-Inflected Rant
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Liam Payne's Sister Feels 'Immeasurable Pride' Seeing Late Singer in 'Building the Band'
Liam Payne's sister Ruth Gibbins reacted to seeing her brother on the Netflix singing competition series Building the Band "You're a star Liam, you always were and always will be," she wrote on her Instagram Stories of her late brother The One Direction album died in October. He was 31Liam Payne's sister is reflecting on the late pop star's Netflix show. Following the debut of the Building the Band trailer on Wednesday, June 11, Payne's sister Ruth Gibbins posted on her Instagram Stories about seeing her brother appear on the show after his death in October 2024. "I didn't know whether to share this, but it felt weird when I've raved about Liam's work and achievements for the last 15 years,' she wrote, sharing the trailer on June 24. Added Gibbins: "Im heartbroken he never got to see how great he is in this show. He knew he had done a good job, we all told him this when we were at filming, but watching it back, wow!" Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. "You're a star Liam, you always were and always will be," Gibbins concluded. "There are a range of emotions I felt watching this, but one of the main ones is immeasurable pride, always. Miss you more every day." Payne signed on for the reality show in August 2024, months before he died at age 31. The Building the Band producers were shocked and saddened to hear of his death, a source told PEOPLE at the time. The One Direction alum's family "reviewed the series and is supportive of his inclusion," said Netflix in a press release. Payne appears as a judge on the singing competition series alongside Destiny's Child's Kelly Rowland and The Pussycat Dolls' Nicole Scherzinger, who will also serve as a mentor. Backstreet Boys icon AJ McClean hosts the singing competition series. The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now! Building the Band "will attempt to answer this question by forming the next great music group, sight unseen," a synopsis reads. "A group of talented singers will enter the competition for the opportunity of a lifetime: to find their perfect bandmates solely based on musical compatibility, connection, and, most importantly, merit." However, when meeting up in person, will outside forces like personality, work ethic and style change things? Fans can expect "plenty of drama, next-level artistry, and unforgettable performances." The first four episodes of Building the Band premiere on Netflix on Wednesday, July 9 with episodes 5-7 and 8-10 dropping on July 16 and 23, respectively. Read the original article on People
