Ricki Lake Cheers On Charlie Sheen After HIV Diagnosis


Charlie Sheen has added another person in his corner since revealing that he’s HIV positive on the TODAY show. Former TV host and actress Ricki Lake spoke out to Entertainment Tonight about a new initiative called #TreatmentForAll, and during that chat, she brought up Charlie Sheen.

Lake then went on to praise Sheen for publicly announcing the news to everyone.

“I think it was incredibly brave of him. Anytime we can raise awareness and for him to come out as he did. The fact that he said he’s been on treatment since the point of diagnosis. It’s very hard to transmit the disease when you’re on medication. If everyone, at the point of diagnosis, is put on these anti-viral meds, they not only will not get sicker themselves, but they will keep from transmitting it to other people.”

Lake went on to say that HIV is not a topic of discussion despite Sheen and others afflicted spreading awareness. She notes that this needs to change quickly. “We are at a point where we can turn it around.” Treatment For All is a digital campaign that was launched to help stop the AIDS epidemic. It plans to do that by creating awareness and helping treat everyone who’s diagnosed with HIV. In addition to Ricki Lake, President Bill Clinton is also involved in the campaign.

The support for Charlie Sheen isn’t a surprise, given that it’s a huge announcement to make on an even bigger platform. Even though the TODAY show gathers hundreds of thousands of viewers every morning, Charlie Sheen’s announcement saw a huge boost in the ratings when he sat down with Matt Lauer.

Another supporter of Sheen’s is his father actor Martin Sheen. As the Inquisitr reported, Martin was touched by Charlie’s public announcement and has been trying to convince him to go public with the news for months. He even said that up until the night before, he still didn’t know if Charlie would go through with it because he had backed out of going public before.

Of Charlie’s appearance on the TODAY show, his father told a crowd at the CME Group’s Global Financial Leadership Conference, “It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done. And he kind of sealed it when he called Matt Lauer last week and asked if he could go on.”

“I couldn’t believe the level of courage I was witnessing, and that it was my son. I left him a message, and I said that if I had that much courage, I would change the world.”

Charlie said he decided to go forward with going public due to the millions of dollars that was extorted from him. According to Sheen, he had told people he trusted as good friends, and they turned around and blackmailed him. Over the last four years, Sheen has paid upwards to $10 million to keep people from going public. Despite that, the National Enquirer obtained the news story and was going to go public with it regardless, so that added more fuel to go public.

That said, not everyone is standing with Charlie Sheen. In the wake of his announcement, his former co-star Jenny McCarthy had huge concerns about not being told while she shared romantic scenes with him on the set of Two and a Half Men. She used the example of having to write down that she had cold sores before signing a contract for a project in Hollywood to argue her point, and furthermore wanted to know why Sheen didn’t disclose his HIV status to his colleagues. That said, Sheen’s manager confirmed that Sheen had contracted the virus “long after” he left Two and a Half Men.

[Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images for Trevor Project]

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