The_Hollywood_Reporter__February_07_2018

as she told stories of domestic abuse by Sheen,
including battery, false imprisonment and
that he knowingly exposed her to HIV (all of
which she alleged in a December 2013 lawsuit).
Rossi told Dykstra and confirmed to THR
that Sheen, concerned over how his crack use
would affect the fetus, pressured her to get
an abortion. “Right now,” says Rossi, “I would
have a 3-year-old running around.”
Dykstra shakes his head in repudiation. He
is bothered less by the possibility of Sheen’s
involvement in Calamaro’s death than what
allegedly happened to Rossi. “Killing the guy
that fucking tried to extort him: That’s his
business,” he says. But what Rossi alleges happened
to her is too much for him. “Men, they
get in rages. But no pummeling.”
Dykstra’s evident frustration with how things
always seemed to go for him when it came
to Sheen — sideways, to his mind, with him
playing the good guy but getting no recognition
to show for it — reaches a crescendo as he
recalls another grim episode involving Rossi
in November 2014. As he has it, she dialed him
in tears, having overdosed on Valium in her
Encino home, which she’d moved into after her
breakup with Sheen.
“Scottine says, ‘I’m dying.’ I say, ‘There’s a
number for that: 9-1-1.’ ‘No, Charlie won’t like
that.’ I go over there, she says she needs to go
to the bathroom. It hits me. I run in and she’s
swallowing a handful of pills. I tackle her
and they go all over, but she gets a lot down.”
Dykstra is an often-demonstrative raconteur,
acting out the maneuver. “It was out of Pulp
Fiction. Soon I have her in my car, driving to
Cedars, flying down the 405, shaking her:
‘Don’t fucking die on me, bitch!’ ” He pauses,
shakes his head. “I was on probation, dude!”
He’s still irritated that “no one knows I
saved her life.” Worse, he adds, getting worked
up, Rossi never acknowledged his heroism.
“The amount of times she thanked me is zero.
Can you believe it?”
Rossi confirms the pill incident but says
that Dykstra — whose ditching of her at the
hospital was so abrupt, she was forced to submit
to a rape kit (“That’s what happens when
some guy just drops you off and goes, ‘Bye!’ ”)
— should be gallant enough not to ask to be
recognized as her “knight in shining armor.”
She laughs. “He’s still talking about that?”
D
ykstra began to lose favor in the court of
King Charles — all of those gone-nowhere
deals, all of that advice not taken. And
what he considered his one, momentarily
satisfying victory was, in hindsight, the thing
he’s sure will be Sheen’s ultimate demise.
Dykstra long suspected that another mansion
nemesis, Sheen’s head of security, was
ripping off the boss — charging personal
expenses, including getaways and real estate
taxes, back to Sheen. And he believes he has
the AmEx bills (shared with THR) to back it up.
The military veteran insists zero embezzlement
took place and that any and all charges
“were made with Charlie’s permission.”
In any case, it wasn’t any purported theft
that led to the employee’s firing. “What did it
is that Charlie went to check his guns,” recalls
Dykstra. “He calls me drunk, freaking out:
‘He took the fucking pins outta my guns! He
put my family in danger!’ He went the most
nuclear I’ve ever seen him.” Dykstra laughs,
observing that in spite of his feelings about
the security chief, “I would’ve taken those pins
out too, the way Charlie was [behaving].”
Still, Dykstra worried that the terminated
employee would seek retribution and sought
to neutralize him. Given Dykstra’s probationary
status, he figured his best bet would
be to pass on documents that he believed
incriminated the man to the IRS. On Oct. 8,
Dykstra got an email from an IRS agent, asking
for a follow-up call. But the investigator
wasn’t interested in talking more about the
security chief. He had turned his attention
to Sheen. “[The IRS agent] says, ‘What do you
know about these $20,000 cash payments
for “women of the night”?’ That’s when I
knew they’re going to come at him with tax
fraud, wire fraud — everything.” (The IRS
will not comment on particular tax cases.)
Dykstra knows from experience what it’s like
when the government, patient and powerful,
zeroes in on you. “It was a felony if you didn’t
tell a woman you have HIV when you know
it. Nothing has happened to him since all of
those women went public. Think about it,” he
says, proffering his own legal analysis. “This
is how he is going to go down.”
Dykstra and Sheen haven’t spoken since
Dec. 21, 2014 — a final two-hour call
initiated by the actor, whom Dykstra characterizes
as downbeat. “He kept on saying
how sorry he was,” he recalls. “Charlie said,
‘Everything you told me was right, they all lied
to me.’ ”
Dykstra believes that although they reconciled
during the conversation, Sheen couldn’t
bring himself to ever hang out with his old
buddy again, since during a heated argument
weeks earlier, Dykstra had revealed he had
seen Sheen’s allegedly compromising sex tapes.
“He couldn’t face me. He knows what I saw.
He’s humiliated.”
Yet livid texts sent by Sheen to Dykstra
on Sept. 9 and obtained by THR from another
source point to betrayal, not shame, as the
actor’s reason for cutting off his friend. Sheen
discovered that Dykstra planned to pocket
5 percent of that Warner Bros. payout deal — a
cut the star felt had been arranged behind his
back. Sheen typed: “bro – I repeatedly asked
you, (and DO NOT CHALLENGE MY MEMORY)
‘Hey Len, what’s in this for you?’ and you
always said; QUOTE: ‘Oh hey man, we’ll figure
out something fair later on …’ well now I have
to re invent what later on means between us.
Newsflash GasLighter; You FUCKING KNEW
FROM JUMP STREET WHAT IT WAS … you
came in here to clean house and also clean my
HARD EARNED CLOCK!”
More than anything, Dykstra wants to present
himself as the ultimate cleanup hitter, an
unsung hero (OK, antihero) who in selfless
service of a buddy went up against Hollywood’s
most sordid retinue. He can’t countenance
the prospect that he might not have been trustworthy,
that maybe he was just out to extract
his piece like all the rest of them.
Or perhaps his initial motive for joining
Sheen’s team truly was as simple as friendship.
This just wasn’t his sport.
Following that final call on Dec. 21, 2014,
Dykstra texted Sheen once more. “It makes
me feel so good that you know ‘I AM WHO
I AM’ and the fact that you know I am your
REAL FRIEND!” And continued, “FYI — I
deleted everything on this phone and nobody
knows we spoke tonight.”
His signoff: “NAILS OUT!”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
69
FEBRUARY 7, 2018