The Cars lead singer Ric Ocasek's son, Chris, has accused him of being a narcissist who abandoned and neglected his own children. The now 56-year-old grew up without knowing his dad, who passed away in September last year. It was only when The Cars began to make it big that he reached out to his son. Chris opened up about his strained relationship with his father in an interview with Page Six.
"There may have been a touch of guilt, but I also think he wanted to say he was becoming famous and I think that gets into one of the more universal things in that he was just simply a narcissist," Chris said. "He didn’t have the sort of conscience to keep him grounded so he just kept going and always went for the next thing even if that meant abandoning or neglecting children. That was fine with him. I don’t think he thought much about it."
Chris admitted he and Ric barely spoke and only saw one another once a year. Despite their limited contact, Chris decided to move from New York to Los Angeles to get as far away from his father as possible.
"I was living a few blocks from him for a year or two and saw him once maybe and I just decided I had to get as far away as possible as I could," he said.
Ric passed away on Sept. 15, 2019, from hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease but Chris said that his father died the day he was born.
"He was never present, he was never there," he explained. "Even when he was, he was never there and that’s the abandonment that I’m referring to."
Chris has not held back when it comes to Ric. On the one-year anniversary of his death, he took to Instagram to slate his father.
"You don’t exist. We didn’t either," he captioned a photo of himself with Ric and his brother Adam, adding hashtags expressing his anger such as #throwawaykids, #myfatherdiedtwice and ##cruelpretender, among others.
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.