Days ago, the Internet almost went ablaze when a photo of baseball pro Sammy Sosa emerged, showing him with obviously much lighter skin tone. Speculation of him bleaching his skin to appear “whiter” immediately started to make the rounds but, strangely enough, no matter how intense the rumors got, Sosa himself did not address the matter.

Until just recently, when he said, during an interview cited by Bossip, that his skin not only looked lighter, it actually was so. However, the star denied this happened because he was not proud of who he was and the color of his skin, but rather as a side-effect to a new cream he was using. As per his own words, the cream was meant to make his skin softer, but, as it turned out, it also made it a few shades whiter than it naturally was.

“Speaking publicly for the first time since photos of him from a recent musical awards ceremony were published on the Internet, Sosa said that the skin lightening is the result of the use of a facial cosmetic cream. ‘It’s a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin some,’ said the former slugger during the ‘Primer Impacto’ program at the Univision Spanish network. ‘It’s a cream that I have, that I use to soften [my skin], but has bleached me some. I’m not a racist, I live my life happily,’ said a smiling Sosa during the interview,” Bossip writes of the recent admission.

As we also reported a few days ago, as controversy began to spread on the Internet, mostly through celebrity blogs and rags, longtime friend of Sosa Rebecca Polihronis stepped forward to speak in his defense. Initially, she thought the photo she was being shown was that of a body double for Sosa; afterwards, she tried to downplay the whole thing by saying that the photo was taken from a bad angle and in poor lighting to make him look so many shades lighter.

Eventually, Polihronis too admitted that Sosa was doing something to his face, but said that the whitening part was not what he was aiming for. “He’s not trying to be Michael Jackson. He is going through a rejuvenation process for his skin. Women have it all of the time. […] He is in the middle of doing a cleansing process to his skin. The picture is deceiving. He said, ‘If you saw me in person, you would be surprised. When you see me in person, it is not going to seem like the picture’,” Polihronis said at the time.