Bleeth met the man she would later marry, Paul Cerrito, during her stint in rehab. Despite the awkwardness of their first encounter, she told Glamour that the relationship is what ultimately helped her get off—and stay off—drugs.
“They say you shouldn’t get into any relationship within the first year of sobriety—especially not with someone in the program. But what can I say? We fell in love immediately,” she confessed (via Baywatch TV). “And because of him, I’m sober today. Nothing used to make me feel as good as cocaine until I fell in love. Now the feeling I have when I’m with Paul is better than how I felt on cocaine.”
Of course, their road to tying the knot in 2002 wasn’t easy. In fact, Cerrito was with Bleeth when she crashed her car in Detroit. She explained the situation to Glamour. “Two weeks after I left rehab, I invited Paul to stay with me in L.A. Titans hadn’t been picked up as a regular series, but I was happy to be sober, and I was falling in love. I thought that if ever I could handle doing drugs casually, now would be the time. And I figured, Hey, I stopped in rehab, I can stop again. But once I started doing coke, I lost control and it took over my life again. Paul and I were talking about marriage and wanted it more than anything, but I had learned that I couldn’t have drugs and love at the same time. Drugs become your best friend, your lover, your parents—they become everything to you. The only reason Paul and I are together today is because we had some divine intervention: our accident.”
Bleeth’s acting career ground to a halt right around the time her personal life hit rock bottom. Her last completed credit listed on IMDb is Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding (2003).
It’s unclear whether she left Hollywood to recover, or if the roles simply dried up as a result of her personal woes (or both). However, given all she went through, the fact that she’s no longer running along the beaches in a red bathing suit should surprise absolutely no one.
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