Brooke Mueller, at nine months sober, gets real about the costs of rehab
Brooke Mueller says she’s nine months sober, celebrating the milestone in her first public interview in 15 years.
The actor and model, previously married to actor Charlie Sheen, discussed her challenging journey this week on the “Hollywood Raw” podcast, likening her sobriety to a badge of honor.
“It’s been hard. And a lot of people at my level of addiction don’t make it,” the 47-year-old media personality said. “In fact, most people don’t. I worked really hard. It has not been easy. I am sober. I do work a program. I do believe in the 12 steps.
“I have nine months sober,” she said. “Well, next week will be nine months.”
Mueller got candid about the cost of her sobriety — financial and personal — and said that she still goes to AA meetings and is part of a sober community in Malibu.
“You want to know how much it cost me since my first rehab at [age] 19 or 20 to my 30th rehab at 47, it’s in the millions [of dollars]. It’s no exaggeration,” she said.
Her most recent stint was in an insurance-only funded facility that did not “enable” or “cater” to her.
“They did not care who I ‘could have been’ or anything like that. ... what was fantastic about that experience [was that] it was real and it was raw and it woke me up,” she said.
“When you’re ready to get sober and you’ve hit that bottom, I think you can get sober at the very bougie [rehab facilities] or even the state-funded ones. But I think for me in particular, my experiences with treatment centers — and maybe being enabled, sometimes catered to — as long as you’re paying $60,000 to $140,000 a month, not all places but a lot of places will allow you to continue behaviors that are detrimental to recovery or get away with bad behavior that other treatment centers would give you the boot for.”
Mueller noted that there are “expensive credible places” that would boot clients, but “there are a lot that aren’t” going to do that too.
At the top of the interview, podcast hosts and TMZ alumni Dax Holt and Adam Glyn noted that they were not allowed to ask Mueller about “Friends” star Matthew Perry, or the ongoing investigation into his death, because of legal reasons.
Mueller played a key role in the investigation by volunteering information to detectives after Perry’s death that linked so-called Ketamine Queen Jasveen Sangha and Perry’s acquaintance Erik Fleming to the case, according to law enforcement sources not authorized to discuss the investigation.
Federal prosecutors allege Jasveen Sangha, one of five people charged in actor Matthew Perry’s death, was known by another name: “Ketamine Queen.”
The “Extra” and “Entertainment Tonight” alum, who appeared in “Witchouse” and the reality series “The World According to Paris,” long battled addiction as Perry did. She said she started partying almost as soon as she began her career in Hollywood, which she didn’t take very seriously at the time. Mueller reflected on her hard-partying days in 1995 at Hollywood’s Bar One when “cocaine was really big,” saying it started “with the glitz and the glamour and jet-setting and doing some lines on set.”
“It certainly didn’t end that way,” she said, noting that “sobriety wasn’t as popular [then] and as big as it is now.”
She was in and out of rehab since her tumultuous marriage and split from the “Two and a Half Men” alum, whom she met in her early 20s at filmmaker Brett Ratner’s house. She had been in and out of rehab since their tumultuous 2008 marriage and 2010 split amid Sheen’s wild “tiger blood” days and highly quotable public meltdown in the 2010s. At one point she lost custody of their twins, Bob and Max, and they were placed under the temporary care of Sheen’s ex-wife Denise Richards when they were 4.
Wait, Charlie Sheen is in a new Chuck Lorre show? The actor and the ‘Two and a Half Men’ co-creator who fired him became enemies during Sheen’s 2011 meltdown.
Mueller said her children were traumatized by “all the chaos” surrounding her and Sheen’s relationship and relocated herself and the boys to Utah for “several years.” There, she got sober briefly, snowboarded and played tennis “among wholesome folk” without the glare of paparazzi.
She said her children live with her full time and Sheen is her neighbor. She and the actor speak daily, and he comes over a lot: “We have a fantastic relationship” and “we have this pretty unique modern family over here,” she said.
Mueller said that before she was sober, she “was a nightmare.”
“Really a nightmare. I have that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing,” she said, adding that Richards “did step up” and was “really helpful,” as recently as last year, which “wasn’t a good time” for Mueller ahead of her latest effort to get sober.
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