According to a bombshell report from Radar Online, one of Hollywood’s biggest actors has been battling HIV for at least two years.
Insiders say the actor – described by Radar as a middle-aged A-lister with a reputation as a hard-partying playboy – has been keeping his symptoms at bay with the help of a “cocktail” of drugs, but lives in fear of how the disease might affect his career and reputation.
“His medical outlook is positive,” one insider claims. “He was teary-eyed as he told friends that he had it, but he felt that a public admission would destroy him and his fans.”
“His worst fear is that he will be remembered not as a great actor but as someone who contracted the disease…He has been tortured by the thought that his acting genius will be forgotten.”
It may be surprising that in 2015 an established star should have to worry about being judged by the public for his condition, but HIV is a disease that tends to bring out the ignorant side in otherwise enlightened individuals.
Even in famously left-leaning Hollywood, backwards, archaic notions about the causes and effects of HIV still abound.
To make matters worse, the actor reportedly fears that he’ll be judged as a result of his reckless past that included intravenous drug use and group sex.
UK tabloid The Sun claims the actor’s long list of exes “includes an award-winning actress, a religious movie star, a top Hollywood personality with a controversial past, a TV star, a media personality and a glamour model.”
Sources say the actor has no reason to believe that he’s infected anyone else, but his lawyers are nonetheless “preparing for a raft of potential legal claims from previous lovers.”