Charlie Sheen has acknowledged that he was ‘probably a sex addict’ during a period in his life as his revealing memoir and Netflix documentary series are about to be released.
Sheen, now 60, stopped drinking alcohol in 2017 and has maintained sobriety since then.
“My body was starting to reject it,” he said in a recent interview with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. “Literally, like, turning inside out. I was a mess.”
Before adopting a sober lifestyle, the Two and a Half Men actor reportedly had same-sex relationships that led to exploitation.
In anticipation of the Netflix series aka Charlie Sheen and his upcoming autobiography, The Book of Sheen, the father of five confessed to having slept with men. Some of these men allegedly attempted to blackmail him after discovering medication related to his HIV status.
“It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion,” Sheen mentioned to 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 expressed that this same-sex exploitation made him feel as if he were being ‘held hostage’ due to his reluctance to have his ‘secrets’ publicly disclosed before he was prepared.
“I just need to be free of that … and then see how the world feels if people know that stuff,” he revealed.
“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.’”
Having disclosed his HIV status in a 2015 interview on The Today show, Sheen also admitted that along with being a ‘sex addict’, he was using crack cocaine at that time.
“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.”
During the peak of his sex addiction, Sheen was reportedly spending $53,000 on a ‘Hollywood madam’ for her prostitutes’ services, according to the Associated Press.
The Golden Globe-winning actor provided testimony regarding this amount during Heidi Fleiss’s 1996 federal tax evasion trial.
He later issued an out-of-court statement saying, “I apologize to my family, my future wife and my close friends for any embarrassment these incidents may have caused.”
Sheen’s upcoming two-part Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, is scheduled for release on September 10. His memoir, The Book of Sheen, will be available a day earlier (September 9) through Simon & Schuster.
Before the book’s publication, he expressed that he no longer identifies with the person he was before achieving sobriety.
“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 also stated that he ‘regrets’ his actions during his peak fame.
“There are 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.”