FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH singer Ivan Moody celebrated his third year of sobriety on March 8.
Late Wednesday night (March 10), Moody took to his Instagram to share a a nine-minute video message in which he once again talked about his plan to turn his home in Las Vegas into a recovery center. “I originally wanted to do it for people with eating disorders,” he said. “It’s something that I faced myself. A lot of you probably don’t know that, but that is why my weight has fluctuated a lot [over the] years. But we go back and forth about ideas on how we wanna do this.
“There are no places in Nevada at all for people with eating disorders, which is really odd to me,” he continued. “It’s the entertainment capital of the world, so you think it’d be a priority, but it is not. However, I’m not taking anything [away from Nevada], because the sober community out here, the recovery community is bigger and better than anywhere else in the world. That is a fact. Look it up. There are more meetings here in a week than there are most places in two months.”
In September 2018, Moody opened up about his struggles with alcohol addiction during an interview with the WEBN radio station. The singer admitted that he was “back and forth for a while; I’d do three months, then relapse.” He added: “Recovery, you have to be commited; it’s an honest program, and I wasn’t being honest with myself at the time. I’m very, very proud of the progress I’ve made.”
Moody went on to credit several of his friends and musical peers with helping him get through some of his darker moments. “Rob Halford [JUDAS PRIEST] is the person that I called a lot of the time when I was in recovery,” he revealed. “I think he’s been sober now for going on 40 years — maybe, I think, a little longer than that; I could be wrong. But Jamey Jasta [HATEBREED] — another one. Jamey‘s been sober now for [two decades]; Jonathan Davis [KORN]; so on and so forth. So these were all people that I looked to when I was struggling, and I was very, very lucky and blessed to have them on my team.”
Back in May 2018, Moody told the Green Bay radio station Razor 94.7 that he nearly died due to an alcohol-related seizure and woke up surrounded by EMTs and his daughter holding him while crying. He also admitted that he went to rehab five times before the last time finally stuck.
Moody revealed that he was sober but massively hung over during his onstage meltdown in Europe in 2017, with the band sending him home after that and later welcoming him back on a “probationary” basis after both Phil Labonte from ALL THAT REMAINS and Tommy Vext from BAD WOLVES filled in on a couple of tours.
Kael himself celebrated his third year of sobriety in February.
Moody and Kael are not the first members of FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH to publicly discuss their struggle with addiction. Drummer Jeremy Spencer, who left the band in December 2018, got clean and sober nine years ago after a particularly bad episode of drug and alcohol abuse, saying that he didn’t want to let his parents down after achieving the kind of success he dreamed of as a kid.
