Former NFL football player Aaron Hernandez, who was arrested and convicted for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2015, may have been battling a secret struggle with his sexuality at the time of his in-prison suicide on Apr. 19, 2017, according to the new Oxygen documentary, Aaron Hernandez Uncovered. The highly anticipated television special features intimate interviews with some of Aaron’s closest friends, ex-girlfriends, and legal team and they claim that emotional pain from his reportedly secret gay lifestyle is what could have led him to violence.
One person that supported the claim about Aaron is his ex-girlfriend, Alyssa Anderson. In the documentary, she explains that she first learned about the athlete’s relationship with a man when they were attending the University of Florida together, according to TMZ. Although she claimed Aaron denied it at the time, she later learned her suspicions about him were true.
Another person who has similar claims about Aaron is an openly gay member of his defense team, George Leontire. He talked about how he had lengthy conversations with Aaron about his sexuality. “This man clearly was gay,” he said in the doc. “[He] acknowledged it. Acknowledged the immense pain that it caused him. I think that he also came out of a culture that was so negative about gay people that he exhibited some self-hatred.”
Despite the new claims, Aaron never admitted to being gay and was engaged to a woman named Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, whom he had a daughter with at the time of his death. He was found dead in his prison cell after hanging himself with a bed sheet. Aaron was convicted for killing Odin with a gun and was set to serve a life sentence. After his death, a judge caused controversy and cleared him of the killing.
Aaron Hernandez Uncovered airs on Oxygen in two parts on Mar. 17 and Mar. 18 at 7/6 c.