This post contains discussion of substance abuse.
Charlie Sheen is back in the news with not one, but two tell-alls: a two-part Netflix doc aka Charlie Sheen that premieres September 10, and a memoir The Book of Sheen that comes out the day before.
If you’re at all familiar with the actor’s past, you know that the promise of revelations regarding his life is certainly an interesting one — and leading up to the release of both entities, there’s already a few that are trickling out.
In both the book and docuseries, Charlie reveals that he’s previously had sexual encounters with men — which is something he’s never previously discussed. “I flipped the menu over,” he says in both. In the documentary (via People), he also says that his decision to talk about these experiences publicly feels “liberating.”
“It’s fucking liberating… [to] just talk about stuff,” he says. “It’s like a train didn’t come through the side of the restaurant. A fucking piano didn’t fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me.”
“I’m not going to run from my past, or let it own me,” Charlie also said in an interview with People — and in a separate interview with Good Morning America, the actor (who is currently eight years sober) detailed how his sexual encounters with men began while he was freebasing cocaine. “That’s what started it,” he says. “That’s where it was born, or sparked.”
“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 fucking fun, and life goes on.”
Charlie also said that part of why he’d kept quiet about these experiences was that he paid people off not to talk about his personal life.
“At the time I was just like, ‘All right, let’s just pay to keep it quiet,’ and just hope it just stays over there,” he explained. “Make it go away, you know, just make it go away… Because they would have, they had videoed things or whatever and had stuff over me. So, I was kind of held hostage.”
We’ll see what else we learn next week!
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.