Martin Sheen praises Charlie Sheen’s HIV reveal: ‘The most difficult thing he’d ever done’

Charlie Sheen’s father, actor Martin Sheen, is applauding his son’s public revelation that he has been HIV-positive for about four years.

“The West Wing” star said Tuesday that he encouraged his son to go public and that Charlie had been leading up to the story for several months.

“It was the most difficult thing he’d ever done,” Martin Sheen said, according to the Naples Daily News. “And he kind of sealed it when he called Matt Lauer last week and asked if he could go on.”

Charlie Sheen, 50, of “Two and Half Men” fame, announced his diagnosis Tuesday on the “Today” show in a live interview with the NBC host, saying: “I am, in fact, HIV positive. ... It is a hard three letters to absorb.”

Speaking at CME Group’s Global Financial Leadership Conference in Florida on Tuesday, the elder Sheen, 75, said his son kept backing away from going public “because it was like going to his own execution.”

The “Grace and Frankie” star said he and his wife saw Charlie on Saturday and offered to additionally support him by backing out of Tuesday evening’s event and going with him to “Today,” but Charlie said no and that “this was his and his alone.”

“This morning, as I watched him alone, reveal his deepest, darkest secret, I couldn’t believe the level of courage I was witnessing, and that it was my son,” the veteran actor said.

Martin hadn’t yet spoken to Charlie since the show, but left him a message: “I said that if I had that much courage, I would change the world.”

Martin Sheen, who recovered from his own battle with addiction in 1989 and has been a proponent of Alcoholics Anonymous, also urged listeners to show compassion to others suffering from any form of addiction and “to realize it’s a disease.”

Charlie Sheen told Lauer on Tuesday that while he has stopped using drugs since his diagnosis, he still drinks alcohol. He said he didn’t know exactly how he contracted the virus, but crossed “needles, that whole mess” off the list of risky behaviors he’d engaged in.

His father, a sobriety activist, spoke about his own personal experiences, explaining that most people who are addicted are “looking for a transcendent experience.”

“They are looking for one, the other, God, whatever it is, and naturally they shortcut the journey because, the apparition,” he said. “It belongs to the drug, of course, but the effort to find the transcendence in our humanity, our brokenness, to accept the brokenness and to rise with it, without the drug, is what we call recovery. And I hope that this day is the first day of the rest of Charlie’s life as a free man.”

Follow me on Twitter @NardineSaad.

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