In 1981, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate then-President Ronald Reagan in a shooting that wounded the president along with his press secretary, James Brady, as well as a Secret Service agent and D.C. police officer.
Hinckley is set to be unconditionally released by the courts in June and already has a sold-out performance scheduled for July to showcase his abilities in his new career as a folk singer/songwriter, music industry website The Fader reported.
The debut performance sold out
In what has been dubbed the “John Hinckley Redemption Tour,” the would-be assassin turned folk singer’s debut live performance is scheduled to take place at a 450-seat venue in Brooklyn, New York, called Market Hotel.
Hinckley announced that opening tour date in a Twitter post on April 8 and, less than five days later, revealed in another tweet that tickets had already been sold out for the show.
The Fader noted that the landing page on the Market Hotel’s website for Hinckley’s July 8 show confirmed that no more tickets were available for the sold-out performance.
Soon to be released from all court-ordered supervision
NBC News reported in September 2021 that the federal judge overseeing Hinckley’s decades-long case, District Judge Paul Friedman, set a tentative date of June 2022 for Hinckley’s unconditional release from all court-ordered supervision, provided he continued to abide by certain conditions still in place.
Those conditions included continuing to receive psychiatric treatment and therapy, prohibition on firearms possession, and refrain from attempting to contact family members of Reagan or the other victims as well as actress Jodi Foster, with whom Hinckley had been obsessed and was stalking at the time of the assassination attempt.
Hinckley had been found not guilty by reason of insanity by a jury following the attempted assassination of Reagan and spent decades confined to a psychiatric hospital.
In the 2000s, he had been granted supervised visits with his parents and was released from custody in 2016 to live with his mother, though he has since received permission to live on his own after she passed away.
Hinckley’s new career as a folk artist
The New York Post reported in June 2021 that Hinckley had won a court battle a year earlier to gain the right to publish and profit from the music, writings, and other art that he had created.
He shortly thereafter began publishing YouTube videos of his homebound performances of folk songs he had written or covers of certain tunes by other artists and, perhaps surprisingly, began to gain a following of fans.
It would appear that he is now pursuing music-making as a new career, one that may well prove quite lucrative for him, if his sold-out debut performance is an indication and not just a one-off instance of oddly morbid curiosity.
