Before revealing to Matt Lauer on the TODAY Show in November his H.I.V. diagnosis, Charlie Sheen had kept his illness a secret.
But now the New York Times reports that Sheen managed to do so by paying off various blogs from making his diagnosis public, including a blog called Diary of a Hollywood Street King, which published stories saying “not only that Mr. Sheen had H.I.V. but that he was paying a 25-year-old woman to keep his secret.”
The blog’s lawyer, Ronald Richards, was approached with a $60,000 offer from a lawyer named Keith Davidson to take down the posts.
According to the Times, “Mr. Richards said that he did not ask Mr. Davidson whom he was representing. “It was irrelevant to me,’ he said, adding that the posts were taken down for “business reasons.'”;
The Times further writes, “Mr. Davidson later thanked Mr. Richards in an email for “the prompt work of deleting and/or redacting the offending content,’ and spoke of four payments of $15,000 being made as a result.”;
Sheen made his announcement months after the posts were deleted, with Sheen’s manager Mark Burg maintaining his client “had nothing to do with the payments.”;
Richards told the New York Times, “They were legitimate stories and we knew them to be accurate at the time.”;
