This image was posted on Facebook by Bree Olson
Bree Olson, the former porn star and ex-girlfriend of Charlie Sheen, sat down with Howard Stern for a raw, angry interview on Tuesday roughly an hour after Sheen announced on the
Today show that he has HIV. Olson, who lived with Sheen for a year around his 2011 meltdown, says that he never told her about his diagnosis.
Olson said she first heard rumours about Sheen being HIV-positive a few days ago when gossip sites like Radar posted stories. Panicked, she went to a clinic to get tested for HIV; the test turned up negative.
Furious that she had to find out with the rest of the world - and to stop death threats from misguided people accusing her of infecting Sheen - Olson drove overnight from Indiana to Stern's New York studios to appear on his Sirius XM radio show. Stern (who kept erroneously saying that Sheen has AIDS) set the scene: Sometime after Sheen's marriage to Denise Richards ended in 2006, he contracted HIV.
"He never said anything to me. I was his girlfriend. I lived with him," Olson said. "We were together. We had sex almost every day for a year." She clarified they used lambskin condoms, but those only prevent pregnancy.
Things got most contentious when Olson said Sheen admitted on the
Today show that he learned he had HIV around the time of his erratic behaviour in 2011, those memorable months when he was fired from
Two and a Half Men; coined the phrases "winning!" and "tiger blood"; and gave a spate of crazy interviews. Olson was one of the two "goddesses" that Sheen lived with at the time, though she broke up with him about halfway through his "Violent Torpedo of Truth" cross-country tour in spring 2011.
This is where the timeline gets murky: Sheen didn't say on "Today" exactly when he found out he had HIV, just that he was diagnosed "roughly four years ago." When Lauer asked him directly if his 2011 meltdown was related to him finding out about his diagnosis, Sheen replied, "I wish I could blame it on that. That was more of a 'roid rage, but this was - this was on - on the heels of that, let me say, yeah."
Either way, Olson was insistent that Sheen knew he was sick while they were together, and she specifically remembers Sheen suffering some of the symptoms he talked about on the "Today" show (horrible headaches, waking up covered in sweat), along with doctors coming and going from the house where they lived. And though he's known about it now for four years, he never gave her a warning that she should get tested because she could have possibly been at risk earlier.
Plus, she said, Sheen made it seem on
Today that he had notified all of his partners. When Lauer asked if Sheen had told every one of his sexual partners about his diagnosis before they had sex, Sheen said absolutely, no exceptions.
Stern was his typical self in trying to get a reaction from Olson: "Do you flashback to literally having sex with him ... and the whole time he's thinking to himself, 'I have AIDS?'" he asked. (Again: Sheen does not have AIDS.) Stern harshly criticized Sheen for allegedly "tricking" Olson: "He wasn't in love with you ... he didn't care enough to tell you, you could die from having sex with him."
Olson was also hurt that Sheen told Lauer he made a habit of sleeping with "unsavory" women. "He came up with this word of saying 'I made this choice of sleeping with low-class women,'" Olson said. "Like, that's how he had to have seen me and almost every other woman he's been with, just because I'm a former sex worker. I'm a human being! I have a family. I have a future. I'm doing so many positive things now. To think that you could have taken that away from me, that you knowingly were doing that."
Stern asked what Olson would say to Sheen if he called her today. "I would say '(expletive) you' and hang up the phone," she replied.
Stern corrected her: "You would say to him, 'Stop going around telling everybody that you told us all before you had sex with us when you knew you had HIV.' ... You would say to him, 'Hey, you (expletive) put my life in danger.'"
Things got emotional when Robin Quivers asked if Olson was upset the other women in Sheen's life never said anything, such as ex-wives Denise Richards or Brooke Mueller, whom Sheen said he told about the HIV diagnosis. Olson hedged (though she did say she knew Mueller, as they had threesomes with Sheen), and brought it back to Sheen never saying anything.
"He knows exactly what he's doing," Olson said. "He's one of the most functional addicts I've ever met in my entire life. He was able to do the whole show of 'Two and a Half Men' completely on drugs."
Overall, her takeaway from being with Sheen?
"I was (expletive) crazy, absolutely I was," Olson said. "It is by far the most stupid thing I've ever done. Even more so than porn."
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