“I am here to admit that I am, in fact, HIV-positive.”On Tuesday morning, acclaimed Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen sat down for a candid interview with the Today show’s Matt Lauer and said he’d been living with HIV for four years. He said he felt compelled to come forward after enduring a “barrage of attacks and sub-truths” in the tabloids, and paying up to $10 million in “shakedowns” and “extortion” over his condition. In one instance, he claimed a prostitute took a photograph of his antiretroviral medications and blackmailed him.Lauer also asked Sheen, “Have you, since the time of your diagnosis, told every one of your sexual partners before you had a sexual encounter you were HIV-positive?”
“Yes, I have,” Sheen replied, adding, “No exceptions.”
Well, Sheen’s ex-girlfriend, the former porn star Bree Olson, begs to differ. If you recall, Olson was one of Sheen’s two live-in girlfriends—along with Natalie Kenly, whom Sheen had met in a treatment program. Sheen labeled the women the “goddesses,” and they were by the Two and a Half Men star’s side during his highly publicized meltdown and anti-Semitic rant against that show’s creator, Chuck Lorre.
In an interview with The Daily Beast after their split, Olson claimed she was “miserable and waiting for it to end,” and that she was the one who one day packed up her things and left Sheen’s chaotic mansion.
During his interview with Lauer, Sheen said he was diagnosed HIV-positive back in 2011, “on the heels” of his public downward spiral—and while he was dating Olson. She says the two remained together for around seven months.
Well, Olson appeared on The Howard Stern Show Tuesday morning following Sheen’s Today Show reveal. According to Stern, she appeared “shaking and upset” as she entered the studio.
Asked when she learned Sheen had HIV, Olson replied, “Right along with everyone else. Three days ago, I started getting calls—it was right when everything happened in Paris. Fox and everyone else started getting at me in emails, and even I wanted to blow it off [thinking], ‘Oh, this is just another Charlie thing,’” she said.“He never said anything to me,” Olson added. “I was his girlfriend. I lived with him. We were together. We had sex almost every day for a year—with lambskin condoms.”Lambskin condoms, by the way, do not prevent the transmission of HIV—they only prevent pregnancy. Olson told Stern that while she preferred standard condoms, lambskin was Sheen’s condom of choice.
Olson, who had driven from her hometown in Indiana to New York for the sit-down interview with Stern, brought in her HIV test, which she then presented to the radio host.
Stern observed her HIV test and read, “no HIV antibodies were detected.”
“I am negative for HIV,” said a relieved Olson.
Before shacking up with Sheen, Olson was a prolific porn star, but says she “left the industry” for Sheen and never returned. Recently, she appeared in the horror film Human Centipede 3.When asked whether or not she feels betrayed, Olson paused. “I have not spoken to him in quite some time,” she said. “I had spoke nothing but positive things about Charlie. I have never said a negative thing, I’ve never torn him apart in any way, but I am so upset. I couldn’t be more angry. I’m shaking, I’ve been crying… to think that someone could do that to me. I loved him. He was my boyfriend.”“He just admitted right in that [Today] interview that [the diagnosis] is during the ‘tiger blood’ time. That’s when I was with him!” she continued. “I was living with him. We were sleeping together every night. [He] never said a thing, ever. ‘I’m clean,’ he told me. ‘I’m clean, I’m clean,’ because I didn’t want to use lambskin, I wanted to use regular condoms… I trusted him.”
In his interview with Lauer, Sheen described the side effects he faced living with HIV, including a series of debilitating “cluster headaches and migraines,” as well as night sweats.
“I remember that [sweating],” Olson said. “He would wake up all the time in the middle of the night complaining of these symptoms, and he would blame it on steroids—these steroids he took.”
Indeed, during his Today chat, Sheen chalked up his “tiger blood” time to “’roid rage.”
“A doctor came to the house all the time and they’d go into a room by themselves,” added Olson. “He always told me, ‘This is for my steroids.’”
While Sheen claimed that many women had shaken him down in the past, Olson was adamant that she’s been an incredibly loyal ex. “I never went and sold any of my stories,” she said, even claiming to have turned down a $200,000 offer for a sit-down interview following their split.
“It’s illegal,” she said of Sheen’s non-disclosure.
Indeed, Sheen’s home state of California makes it a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison for a person with HIV to have unprotected sex with the intent to infect someone to whom they haven’t disclosed their status. Also, California has a misdemeanor charge carrying up to six months in prison for willfully exposing others to HIV.
When asked what sort of action she’ll take, Olson said wasn’t sure. “I haven’t even thought about anything, but all I know right now is now, because of him, every time someone hears my name they think of HIV right next to it,” she said, later adding, “He doesn’t even value my life.”
