‘Big Brother’ winner Evel Dick Donato reveals HIV diagnosis, explains why he left season 13
Even though “Big Brother” ended last week, there is still some other breaking news coming out from one of the show’s most notorious alumni.
On this week’s new episode of “Couples Therapy,” it will be revealed that Evel Dick Donato, winner of season 8 and widely considered to be one of the most notorious villains of all time, is HIV positive. Ultimately, he was diagnosed after undergoing testing for the 13th season of the CBS show, which is why he made the then-shocking decision to leave the game only a short amount of time after entering the house. To date, no one knew why this decision was made, other than that it was for an urgent matter that needed to be dealt with.
Dick spoke out about the diagnosis and more in a new article on People Magazine, including how producers and doctors for the show ultimately discovered the news after first administering multiple tests and double-checking to make sure the diagnosis was correct:
“When they told me, I just went numb … They had a car take me from CBS to my mother’s house. She was the first person I told.”
He also opened up in the interview about how the diagnosis is impacting the rest of his life, especially when it comes to what he has to do to take care of it on a daily basis:
“I take one pill a day. The only side effect I’ve noticed is that I have a lot of vivid dreams that wake me up during the night. But it’s a small price to pay: My viral load is virtually undetectable, I’m happy to say. I live a very normal life and don’t have a lot of health issues. It also means that it’s highly unlikely I could pass the disease along, although I don’t have unsafe sex anymore. I fully expect to die of something else when I get old, not HIV or AIDS.”
While it is nice to have some sort of closure for season 13, more importantly than that it must be nice for Dick to finally be able to come forward and discuss what had to be a pretty difficult secret to deal with for the past three years. Not even his famously-estranged daughter Daniele, who competed with him on both seasons of “Big Brother,” was aware of the news until today.
We wish Dick nothing but the best; it’s a brave thing to discuss, especially at a time when HIV awareness has slipped somewhat to the background in the midst of so many other social causes.
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Photo: CBS