14 DAY TRIAL // Danny Pintauro, the 39-year-old actor who rose to international fame as Jonathan Bower on the classic sitcom “Who’s the Boss?,” has come out as HIV positive on the latest episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show Where Are They Now?.
Pintauro says that he’s known of the diagnosis for the last 12 years, and he explains that he contracted the virus during the height of his addiction to crystal meth. Two excerpts from the show are included in the videos below.
A troubled transition to adulthood, failing expectations
Pintauro tells Oprah that he was introduced to the drug after a particularly bad breakup and that he started experimenting more with it when he realized that it was doing away with all his inhibitions. For a very long time, he didn’t think he had developed a problem.
This only happened when he realized that he was doing drugs every weekend and that coming down from the high left him depressed and completely miserable for a few days in a row.
The actor admits he still gets cravings, which pushed him to several “regrettable” relapses in his adult years, but he is determined to stay clean and not make the same mistakes he did as he was making his transition to adulthood.
Pintauro says that what hurts him “the most” about his past behavior isn’t so much the thought that his HIV positive diagnosis could have been avoided, but rather the realization that he failed expectations. He became one of the many former child stars who, instead of using their fame for the greater good, end up addicted to drugs and alcohol, as cautionary tales.
From nobody to activist
This brings Pintauro to the reason why he wanted to come out as HIV positive, a decision that he admits wasn’t an easy one: because he failed to do something good when he was young and had every opportunity to do it, he hopes to make amends now.
He wants to be an activist.
“So now that all of this is happening, I feel like the fates are telling me that this is my opportunity to be that beacon of light, and I’m going to do everything and anything I can to live up to that,” he says. “I feel like one of the ways the community is going to listen is for me to be pretty harsh. It’s not going to be, ‘Hey guys, let’s work on fixing this.’ It’s going to be, ‘Get your [expletive]-ing [expletive] together,’ pardon my language.”
He doesn’t say if he has anything more concrete than that to help others, but as you can see from his Instagram post below, which came shortly after the Oprah interview aired, he’s quite thrilled at the thought that he’s making the transition from “nobody” to “activist.”
Last meal as a nobody. ;) first meal as an activist. #lifelovelive A photo posted by Danny Pintauro (@dannypintauro) on Sep 26, 2015 at 6:11pm PDT