Nick Gordon’s Brother Jack Walker Jr. Defends Him Amid Criticism Following Death From Overdose

Jack Walker Jr. is coming to his late brother Nick Gordon‘s defense following the 30-year-old’s unexpected passing on New Year’s Day of a suspected overdose. Opening up about his brother’s death in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Walker Jr. spoke out against “twisted” reports about Gordon, calling him a “great person” who “was loved by many people.”

“Nick was doing so good,” Walker Jr. told the outlet of his brother’s struggles with addiction. “Nick was not how people are portraying him to be at all. Nick is not like that. People got everything all twisted. Everything’s so twisted, with the media and how they perceive my brother.”

“Nick was a great person, and he was loved by many people,” he added. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but Nick was a great person. Nick loved everybody and people fail to realize that. All they do is read tabloids and make a judgment out of somebody off of that and that’s not the case of my brother. I’ve known the man for all of 27 years, so I think I have a better judgment on the type of person he is than the majority of the people who are writing and saying [negative] stuff about him.”

Along with being entangled with a domestic violence case with Laura Leal, which was dropped after Leal retracted her statements, Gordon was also found “legally responsible” for his former fiancé Bobbi Kristina Brown’s 2015 death. Although he denied all claims of his involvement in her death, including allegations that he gave her a “toxic cocktail” of drugs, Gordon was ordered to pay more than $36 million in a wrongful death lawsuit. According to his brother, Brown’s death deeply affected Gordon.

“Of course it did. My brother loved her,” he said. “Everything. All this. Everything that he’s been going through has taken a toll on my brother.”

“Everything. Everything that the media’s been throwing at him, everything that life’s been throwing at him, yeah, it took a toll on him,” he continued. “He lost somebody he really loved. It’s hard to be the same person when you lose somebody.”

Gordon, 30, was found unresponsive in a Florida hotel room on New Year’s Day, four years after Brown’s death and seven years after the death of her mother, Whitney Houston. At this time, a cause of death has not been determined, though an autopsy was completed Thursday morning. Results of the autopsy are pending further investigation and testing.