Richard Gomez Denies AIDS Charges

[Jim Ayson]

'I Don't Have AIDS' - Gomez

From TODAY, p.1 Sept. 8, 1994

Movie actor Richard Gomez yesterday denied he was hospitalized for AIDS
in the United States, accusing two society writers of spreading rumors
to discredit him.

In a news conference for the movie "The Secret Diary of Sarah Jane,"
ironically a film on AIDS victim Sarah Jane Salazar, Gomez said he went
to the US last July to take a crash course on filmmaking at New York
University.

"While these two media men reported that I was alreday dying in London,
I was in reality the house guest if Tommy Manotoc and Imee Manotoc at
Sintra, a city off Lisbon in Portugal."

Gomez arrived yesterday from the US, where he proceeded from a
rendezvous with girlfriend Patricia Borromeo in London.

He vowed to slap the faces of the writers, who wrote about his alleged
ailment, and lashed out at the late Louie Beltran for discussing the
issue on his radio program.

Look at what happened to him," he said. Beltran died of cardiac arrest
last Tuesday.

Gomez, whose flamboyant lifestyle has for years been the subject of
speculation in the media, denied having homosexual affairs and said he
was never hospitalized for lacerations in his anus.

"I was hospitalized only twice in my life. In 1966 when I was born, and
in 1991 for amoebiasis and bleeding ulcers," he said.

Gomez plays one of Sarah Jane Salazar's lovers in "The Secret Diary of
Sarah Jane."

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