Aaron Hernandez Was Secretly Gay, Confidants Claim

Two of Aaron Hernandez's confidants have claimed the late New England Patriots player was secretly gay.

Hernandez, who committed suicide in April 2017, reportedly opened up to ex-girlfriend Alyssa Anderson and defense attorney George Leontire about his sexuality while in prison for the June 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.

In new clips from the Oxygen special Aaron Hernandez Uncovered, Anderson recounts her reconnection with Hernandez while he was locked. The two apparently dated while at the University of Florida, and she reached out to him in the form of letters.

The two corresponded for quite a while, with the letters eventually dipping into Hernandez's troubled childhood and resulting struggles with sexuality.

"The letters became more intense," Anderson says. "He did open up about some of the struggles he had gone through as a kid. He admitted to being molested as a kid, but he never dealt with it. And it lead to issues with his sexuality."

She also brought up an incident from their time together that first made her question his sexuality. He apparently received romantic text messages from a male, but would not come clean about it to Anderson.

"Back in college, there were text messages I saw on his phone when he came back home from Connecticut," she says. "It was a male, didn't have a name, didn't say too much, but it was a relationship with someone. When I questioned him about it, he always denied it. Then in one of the letters, he opened up about it. He did admit to it."

The letter in question is shown on screen, with producers highlighting the passages in question.

"Please keep this between us," Hernandez wrote, presumably referring to his sexuality. "But it's not a shock, you caught me, [laugh out loud]."

Hernandez apparently also "acknowledged" his sexuality to Leontire, who himself is an openly gay man.

"This man clearly was gay," Leontire says. "[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."