Charlie Sheen sets record straight about hooking up with men in the height of his drug addiction

Charlie Sheen has sought to clarify something about when he said he'd had sexual encounters with men while he'd been addicted to drugs.

The actor said he'd experienced 'a tremendous amount of extortion' over some of these incidents, saying there were times when he'd been 'held hostage' and decided to pay.

“And so at the time, I was just like, ‘Alright, let’s just pay to keep it quiet. And just hope it just stays over there, make it go away, you know? Make it go away.’”

“They had videoed things or whatever, or had stuff over me,” he explained.

Sheen has opened up on it more now in his memoir, The Book of Sheen, and the documentary, aka Charlie Sheen, where he discussed many aspects of his life after deciding 'it seemed like the right time' to speak out.

He wanted to clarify what he meant (Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

However, he recently told the In Depth With Graham Bensinger podcast that he realises some people hearing his account of sexual encounters with men would have 'immediately' thought of sex.

The 60-year-old said that sex was a 'broad category' and many of those encounters he'd spoken about weren't as 'graphic' as people might have assumed.

Setting the record straight about what he meant, he explained that he wasn't talking about something that was 'full-fledged'.

"When people say sex with men, you immediately think of like butt sex. I mean, sorry to be graphic, but that's kind of like where the mind goes, right? Yeah. And it wasn't that," Sheen told the podcast.

"I don’t want to be like, 'OK, I did this thing, but this and that part of it didn’t happen'. But it didn’t, I don’t know that that matters. That's the only part of it that I'm like, 'it wasn't full-fledged, man'.

Sheen explained that his sexual encounters with men were not 'full-fledged' (Dominik Bindl/Getty Images)

"They say you experiment in college, you know? I never went to college, so maybe that explains it.”

Sheen had said he was also extorted following his HIV diagnosis, with him being diagnosed with it in 2011 but not making it public until 2015.

He revealed that people 'would extort me with that information' as they would take pictures of his HIV medication while he was asleep and then 'do all kinds of nefarious s**t'.

The actor claimed he'd once paid someone $1.4 million to keep the diagnosis quiet, and it left him feeling like he was 'locked in a fear prison' until he came clean about what was going on.

These days, he's been sober and celibate for about a decade.