Charlie Sheen has admitted he was ‘probably a sex addict’ at one point in his life ahead of the release of his bombshell memoir and Netflix documentary series.
60-year-old Sheen quit alcohol in 2017 and has been completely sober ever since.
"My body was starting to reject it," he recently told Good Morning America co-anchor Michael Strahan. "Literally, like, turning inside out. I was a mess.”
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But before coming abstemious, the Two and a Half Men star was allegedly exploited by same-sex relationships.
Speaking ahead of Netflix’s aka Charlie Sheen, and his new autobiography, The Book of Sheen, the father-of-five admitted that he did sleep with men and that some of them reportedly tried to blackmail him after discovering medication related to his HIV diagnosis.
“It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion," Sheen told Strahan. "And so at the time, I was just like, 'Alright, let's just pay to keep it quiet. And just hope it just stays over there, make it go away, you know? Make it go away.'”
Sheen claimed this same-sex exploitation caused him to feel as if he was being ‘held hostage’ because he didn’t want his ‘secrets’ to be made public until he was ready.
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“I just need to be free of that ... and then see how the world feels if people know that stuff," the Hollywood icon revealed.
"Because I've written a story all these years about, 'Oh jeez, if I ever reveal that, then this has to be how I'd be dealt with, how I'd be treated, how they'd feel.'”
Sheen, who came clean about his HIV in a 2015 interview with The Today show, said that, as well as being a ‘sex addict’, he was using crack at the same time.
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"That's what started it. That’s where it was born, or sparked,” he said. “And in whatever chunks of time that I was off the pipe, trying to navigate that, trying to come to terms with it — "Where did that come from? … Why did that happen?" — and then just finally being like, 'So what?' "So what? Some of it was weird.
"A lot of it was f***ing fun. And life goes on.”
At the height of his sex addiction, Sheen was paying $53,000 to a so-called ‘Hollywood madam’ for the services of her prostitutes, as per the Associated Press.
The Golden Globe-winning star testified to the amount during the 1996 federal tax evasion trial of Heidi Fleiss.
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He later released an out-of-court statement that read: "I apologize to my family, my future wife and my close friends for any embarrassment these incidents may have caused.”
Sheen’s new two-part Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, is set for release on September 10. His memoir, The Book of Sheen, comes out a day earlier (September 9) via Simon & Schuster.
Speaking ahead of the book’s release, he said that he no longer identifies with the person he was before coming sober.
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"I don't know who that is, and that's not a cop out,” Sheen said. “I don't know what part of me that came from.
"It's weird. It's like there's a possession going on. I'm like, you know, kind of pleading with that version of me to just, 'Dude, God, stop. Pull it back.’"
He added that he ‘regrets’ how he acted at the height of his fame.
“There's probably a lot of people out there that still only know me from those viral clips, a guy screaming 'tiger blood' and 'winning' and all this other nonsense, right ... That was a moment in a really long career where things just went off the freaking rails.”
Topics: Celebrity, LGBTQ, US News, Sex and Relationships
Ella Scott