”Every teen girl’s dream” in the ’90s now lives a quite life and works as a psychologist

December 14, 2025 by salah

Breaking the mold

By his mid-teens, fame was shaping every part of his identity. Publicists curated his image. Photo shoots and press junkets polished it further.

The boy America adored was suddenly a brand. Soon, he began to wonder who he really was behind the glossy covers.

“He was very well put together, and I wanted to get to know him,” he once said of his public persona.

At 16, he made a bold choice: he walked away from Hollywood to live a normal teenage life.

He enrolled in high school, joined the drama club, mostly “because it was for the rejects, the gay kids, very uncool”.

“I discovered that I liked the world of the theater, which was so different from the world of the teen star.”

Addiction took over

Raised in a devout Catholic home, he grew up with discipline and devotion. But as fame and adulthood collided, addiction soon took over.

“At the end of the day, I was alone, and I couldn’t stop drinking…

In the end, things spiraled so far out of control that he found himself sitting alone in his Malibu condo, completely isolated and teetering on the edge of death.

A close friend, actress Heather Tom, finally walked away. That was a painful wake-up call that forced him to choose between destruction and redemption.

He entered recovery and found that helping others was not just healing, it was transformative.

But 21, while starring in Dr. Quinn, his world came crashing down.

Outed, exposed, and reborn

In 1996, a U.S. tabloid published photos of him kissing another man in a hot tub at a party. The images were sold by someone claiming to be a friend of the couple and splashed across pages, paired with fabricated rumors.Continue reading…