Report: Blog Was Paid $60,000 to Remove Posts About Charlie Sheen's HIV Status Last April
LatestIn a piece published Tuesday, The New York Times explored the series of events that led to Charlie Sheen’s public announcement of his H.I.V. status last November. “To track the push and pull between Mr. Sheen and the media over several years,” Colin Moynihan writes, “is to see behind the veil of how celebrity secrets are kept hidden and ultimately disclosed.”
One of the more reliable ways of keeping secrets hidden, as Sheen made clear in his interview with Matt Lauer, is spending money. Lots of money. We already knew he spent “millions” keeping the women in his life silent, but until today, little was known about how much he spent paying off the gossip blogs who were ready to break the story.
Last April, a blog called Diary of a Hollywood Street King published “about a half-dozen” blog posts which reported “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 eventually approached by a lawyer named Keith Davidson, who made Richards an offer he couldn’t refuse: take down the posts, and get $60,000.