New York Dolls’ David Johansen Revealed To Have Stage 4 Cancer; Daughter Organizes Crowdfunding Efforts

deadline.com:

David Johansen, the former frontman of seminal punk band New York Dolls and subject of a 2023 Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, has been revealed to have Stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor, his daughter wrote in an online crowdfunding campaign the family has launched as the musician’s health care has placed an “increasingly severe financial burden” following medical complications.

Partnering with the nonprofit Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, Leah Hennessey, Johansen’s daughter, began the post by revealing the diagnosis, saying that her father has been in “intensive treatment” for a majority of the past decade. “Five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic we discovered that David’s cancer had progressed and he had a brain tumor.

There have been complications ever since. He’s never made his diagnosis public, as he and my mother Mara are generally very private people, but we feel compelled to share this now, due to the increasingly severe financial burden our family is facing,” she wrote.

Hennessey added that Johansen suffered a fall the day after Thanksgiving, resulting in a back broken in two places, which landed him in the hospital for a week.