Charlie Sheen says it's 'liberating' to talk about his sexual encounters with men as he admits he was 'probably a sex addict'

Charlie Sheen has opened up about how 'liberating' it is to talk about his past sexual encounters with men.

The Two and a Half Men actor, 60, has lifted the lid on his personal life in memoir The Book of Sheen, and new Netflix documentary, aka Charlie Sheen.

While his 2011 HIV diagnosis and troubles with addiction have been well documented, it is the first time he has revealed that he 'flipped the menu over', as he calls it.

"I'm not going to run from my past, or let it own me," he said in a recent interview with People.

Sheen - who has been sober since 2017 - revealed that his first sexual experience with men came after using crack.

"That's where it was born, or sparked," he told Good Morning America.

"And in whatever chunks of time that I was off the pipe, trying to navigate that, trying to come to terms with it — 'Where did that come from?...Why did that happen? — and then just finally being like, 'So what?' So what? Some of it was weird. A lot of it was f**king fun, and life goes on."

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The reason why he didn't come clean sooner was because he was faced with extortion.

“It did come with a tremendous amount of extortion,” he told Michael Strahan.

“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.”

In the documentary, Sheen said it's 'f**king liberating just to talk about stuff'.

"It's like a train didn't come through the side of the restaurant. A f**king piano didn't fall out of the sky. No one ran into the room and shot me."

Sheen regrets his previous behaviour, such as the the infamous 20/20 interview in 2011 when ABC’s Andrea Canning sat down with him during his battle with Two and a Half Men producers.

“I’m on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen,” was one of his most memorable quotes, as well as: “I was bangin’ seven-gram rocks,” and, “I got tiger blood, man.”

“That tour didn’t have to happen,” he admitted. “I’m not a victim, but somebody should have tapped out for me and said, 'This is a bad idea.' I’ve combed through all the mental health manuals, and I’ve never found ‘exploitation’ as a good treatment protocol.”

The Book of Sheen comes out 9 September, and his Netflix documentary aka Charlie Sheen drops on 10 September.