Charlie Sheen returned to NBC's Today Show to talk to Matt Lauer Tuesday seven months after going public with his HIV diagnosis.
The interview had been scheduled to happen last Monday but was pushed back a week following the Orlando shootings.
The former Two and a Half Men star told Matt Laurer that his November 17 admission was "like being released from prison." And years after his "winning" phase of bizarre proclamations like being a warlock assassin and having tiger blood, he also proved that he can still uncork a quality weird quote, telling Lauer that their original interview "unleashed the stepping stones to a rubicon of change."
He added that he's no longer paying extortion money to the people who threatened to leak his diagnosis. The November interview "initially poured a little more gas on that fire that morning, "but they're all sort of going back into the woodwork where they belong."
The fires aren't out completely —several women have sued Sheen, disputing his claims that he never put any sexual partners at risk by not being upfront about his HIV status following his diagnosis four years earlier. Asked by Lauer whether he'd been telling the truth in November, Sheen doubled down on that statement, saying the lawsuits against him are "baseless" and that "no one's been infected."
Lauer wouldn't let him off that easily, asking him to clarify whether he had "informed every partner" with whom he had sex or "not informed some people but used protection." Sheen's reply was murky: "Protection was always in place and it was for the right reasons because everyone I had told up to that moment had shaken me down."
In addition to claiming he didn't inform her until after numerous encounters, ex-fiancée Scottine Rossi, filed a restraining order against him following the discovery of an audiotape in which Sheen is alleged to have made threats against her, resulting in an LAPD criminal investigation. Sheen's attorney Marty Singer called it a publicity stunt intended to keep her civil suit against the actor in the news.
Asked about his financial status, Sheen said he's fine. "It ebbs and flows." he shrugged off Lauer's question about his current disputes over disputes with ex-partners over alimony and child support payments, saying, "What else is new?"
Although he professes not to "live in Regretville," he does have some. "I regret not using a condom. I regret ruining Two and a Half Men. I regret not being involved in my children's lives, which I am now."
He also regrets his decision to briefly go off his regimen of anti-HIV drugs in favor of a controversial experimental treatment in Mexico due to the side effects of taking so many pills on a daily basis. "That didn't go so well." He went so far as to describe Dr. Robert Huizenga, the American physician who treated him, as a "criminal" and "charlatan." He added, "He's hurting a lot of good and decent people."
While on Huizenga's treatment, Sheen says his viral load "went from zero to 7,000" and that after resuming his previous regimen, the number dropped back into the undetectable range.
He's now taking part in an FDA-sanctioned drug trial, in which he receives one injection per week rather than daily pills and must adhere to a strict schedule, and the new treatment seems to be agreeing with him. "The change isn't just physical but psychological and emotional," he told Lauer. "There's no depression. There are no shades of dementia. What I'm doing now is the future of treatment."
