Mr. Hirsh says Mr. Jermyn has already received several small payments, even though the company hasn’t“made much profit”so far.“We haven’t collected anything for ourselves,”says Mr. Hirsh.
Mr. Jermyn’s slide into homelessness is a painful subject for his sister Beverly. And so is the clothing deal. She believes“The Crazy Robertson’ founders are exploiting her brother’s condition to build their brand. I think these guys saw an opportunity and they took it,”she says.“I am not happy with the arrangement.”
Ms. Jermyn, who lives close to the alley where Mr. Jermyn sleeps, says her brother has a form of schizophrenia. He refuses to take medication, she says, despite suffering from fits of shouting and cursing. In the years since his condition began deteriorating in the late 1970s,“he slipped through my fingers like sand,”says Ms. Jermyn, 64, who manages facilities for Oracle Corp.
In the late 1980s she testified in court in a proceeding to force her brother to seek help, but psychological evaluators found him“lucid and gracious,”according to Ms. Jermyn. She has made countless attempts to provide him with shelter and therapy, and she still visits him twice a week with food. She also pays for his cellphone and collects his Social Security checks on his behalf.
The repackaging of Mr. Jermyn as a fashion front man comes at a time of increased fascination with homelessness. The producers of“Bumfights”— a collection of videotaped street battles between vagrants — claim to have sold more than 300,000 DVDs since 2002, and a British TV series called“Filthy Rich and Homeless”made headlines this year for its depiction of real-life millionaires posing as London beggars.