1414 History On Radar

"At 52, she held the Emmy she'd been owed for decades. Hollywood had spent thirty years looking past her. She made them look back."

S. Epatha Merkerson was born Sharon Epatha Merkerson on November 28, 1952, in Saginaw, Michigan. She was raised in Detroit, the youngest of five children, by her mother Ann, who worked for the post office. She graduated from Cooley High School in 1970 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre from Wayne State University in 1976. She then moved to New York City to pursue a career on the stage. Broadway noticed her talent early. She earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson in 1990. She won an Obie Award for her performance in I'm Not Stupid in 1992. She was respected. She was celebrated in the theater world. But mainstream fame remained just out of reach.

That changed in 1993. Law & Order cast her as Lieutenant Anita Van Buren, the commanding officer of the 27th Precinct's detective squad. She was not written as someone standing behind the detectives. She was the person in charge. The decision-maker. She played Van Buren with a power that never turned cold, a toughness that never lost its humanity. She appeared in 395 episodes over 17 consecutive seasons — more than any other actor associated with the program. She became the longest-running female character in the original Law & Order series. For 17 years, audiences watched her lead detectives through impossible cases while carrying the personal cost of the job. She was, by every measure, a television icon.

But even after becoming a household name, she still had something left to prove. In 2005, she delivered the performance that changed how the industry saw her. HBO's Lackawanna Blues. She played Rachel "Nanny" Crosby, a woman who became a mother figure to an entire community. The role was emotional, complex, and deeply human. She won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie. She was 52 years old. She also won a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and four NAACP Image Awards for her work. The actress who had spent years being known as a dependable character performer was suddenly standing among television's most celebrated stars.

Her story was never only about awards. In 2003, she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes after having her blood sugar tested at a health fair and being urged to see her doctor. She had a family history of the disease and had lost her father and grandmother to complications from it. Instead of hiding it, she used her platform to raise awareness. In 2014, she partnered with Merck on America's Diabetes Challenge: Get to Your Goals, traveling the country to urge people to know their A1C and work with their doctors. "I lost my father and grandmother to complications of type 2 diabetes," she said. "So I learned firsthand how important it is to know your A1C and make a commitment to getting to your goal". The same honesty she brought to her characters appeared in her real life.

Then came another major role. In 2015, Chicago Med introduced her to a new generation as Sharon Goodwin, the chief of patient and medical services at Gaffney Chicago Medical Center. Once again, she played a woman carrying responsibility, leadership, and compassion. "Sharon Goodwin remains the steady compass of Gaffney," NBC wrote of her character. She kept working. She kept showing up. She kept being the person everyone trusted.

"The measure of a life is not in how early the world notices you, but in how long you refuse to stop showing up. S. Epatha Merkerson did not become famous at 25. She did not become a household name overnight. She spent decades proving herself before the world finally caught up. At 52, she won the Emmy. After decades of work. After hundreds of auditions. After years of being respected without always being celebrated. The recognition was late. But it was earned. And when it finally arrived, she was ready. Not because she had been waiting. Because she had never stopped working. That is the quiet power of a life built on craft, not hype. A life that does not peak early. A life that keeps getting better."

The people who make fitted sheets need to sit down with the people who make mattresses and get on the same page. Making the bed shouldn't be like putting a swimming cap over a fridge

"A badge can hide a killer for decades, but DNA never forgets a face."

On February 24, 1986, Sherri Rasmussen was found beaten and shot to death in the Los Angeles condominium she shared with her husband, John Ruetten. The LAPD initially treated the case as a botched burglary, a conclusion that Rasmussen's father refused to accept from the very beginning. He suspected LAPD officer Stephanie Lazarus, a former college girlfriend of Ruetten's who had repeatedly confronted Rasmussen in the months leading up to her death. His instincts pointed directly at jealousy and obsession, but the badge his daughter's suspected killer wore made that theory almost impossible to pursue.

The investigation stalled, and the case went cold for over two decades while Lazarus continued climbing the ranks of the very department meant to solve the murder, eventually becoming a detective herself. It is a chilling detail that the person suspected by a grieving father spent years working alongside the officers who could have caught her. In 2008, cold case detectives finally revisited the file and focused on DNA evidence from a bite mark found on Rasmussen's body, which pointed toward a female killer. After systematically ruling out other suspects, investigators covertly collected a DNA sample from a cup Lazarus discarded at a Costco, and it matched the bite mark evidence exactly.

Lazarus was arrested in 2009, more than two decades after the murder, and convicted of first-degree murder in 2012, receiving a sentence of 27 years to life in prison. Her appeal failed, and it was not until 2023, during a parole hearing, that she finally confessed to the killing, describing an altercation with Rasmussen that escalated into strangulation and then gunfire. Her admission gave the family a version of the truth they had waited decades to hear, even though it came far too late to undo any of the damage. Her parole was initially granted but later rescinded, and a subsequent request was denied in 2025, leaving her still behind bars.

The case stands as a stark reminder of how institutional protection can delay justice, and how grief unaddressed by the system can still be vindicated by science and persistence. Rasmussen's father spent years being dismissed, yet his instincts about jealousy, obsession, and a woman who could not let go were proven right by the very DNA evidence that finally closed the case.

"Jealousy left unchecked can curdle into violence, and a badge does not make someone incapable of betrayal; families who sense the truth deserve to be heard, not dismissed, because justice delayed is still a wound carried by those left behind. In the end, no uniform or title can outrun the truth forever."

"Sometimes the greatest gift you can receive is losing everything you thought defined you—because only then do you discover who you truly are."

Sharon Stone was at the absolute peak of her power in September 2001. She had earned millions, commanded rooms, and defined an era. She was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, a cultural icon who had made history with Basic Instinct and Casino. Then, in one afternoon, behind a sofa in her San Francisco home, a massive brain hemorrhage hit her like lightning. A vertebral artery dissection caused bleeding in her brain for nine days, and doctors gave her a 1% chance of survival. When she woke up, she couldn't walk, couldn't read a sentence, couldn't speak clearly. At times, her own name was lost to her. The woman the world knew as brilliant, beautiful, and untouchable had become someone she didn't recognize. For seven years, her entire life became rehabilitation: physical therapy, speech therapy, cognitive therapy, over and over, relearning what had once been automatic. She had to teach herself to speak again, to write again, to exist again.

But the physical recovery was only part of the battle. While she fought to survive in hospitals, Hollywood moved on. The phone stopped ringing. Roles went to other actresses. The industry that had crowned her forgot her overnight. "I've been out for 20 years," she would later say. "I haven't had jobs." It got worse. Her marriages fell apart. Custody battles left her fighting to keep her son, Roan. And then she discovered the worst betrayal: her bank account had been emptied. Someone had stolen her entire $18 million fortune while she was too sick to notice. She looked in the mirror and didn't recognize herself—not just physically, but entirely. Who was she without the career? Without the validation? Without the identity that fame had given her? That question nearly destroyed her.

Then something shifted. A Buddhist monk told her words she'd never forget: "You were reincarnated into your same body." She decided something radical: she would stop trying to recapture what was lost. She would stop performing for approval. She would let go of bitterness and simply live for joy. Years later, during the pandemic, a friend sent her a paint-by-numbers kit. She picked up a brush—and couldn't stop. She painted for hours, days, weeks. Her entire guesthouse became a studio filled with canvases. The creativity she'd buried for decades came flooding out. Here's the strange thing: her stroke had rewired her vision. Now she saw color patterns others didn't. She painted what her damaged, beautiful, reimagined brain saw—a world only she could perceive. Her aunt had been a painter, and she'd studied art in college before acting took over. She was coming home. By 2023, she was exhibiting her work in galleries across Los Angeles, Connecticut, and Berlin—and art critics, serious ones, began to notice. Her paintings didn't look like a celebrity hobby; they looked like someone who'd spent a lifetime learning to see differently.

She is 67 now. Not the most famous woman in Hollywood. Not the most photographed. Not the woman the industry wanted her to be. But she is alive. Creating. Honest. Free from the need to be anything for anyone but herself. She survived the stroke that should have killed her. She survived being forgotten by an industry that made her famous. She survived losing the entire identity the world had given her. And in losing everything—the fame, the power, the validation, the illusion of loyalty—she found something far more valuable: herself. Not the icon on a screen. Not the fantasy created by publicists. Not the woman Hollywood invented. The actual woman who lived through catastrophe and discovered that everything she thought defined her was just an illusion. And that losing it, however painful, set her completely free. This isn't a comeback story—it's a transformation story. And transformation? That's infinitely rarer than fame ever was.

"The most beautiful portraits are not the ones we paint for the world to see—they are the ones we paint when we finally stop caring what the world thinks." Sharon Stone's story is a gift to every family: it teaches us that our worth is not measured by our achievements, but by our ability to rise after falling. It reminds us that the people we love are not defined by their careers, their fame, or their bank accounts—they are defined by their resilience, their creativity, and their capacity to love. It challenges us to look at our own lives and ask: who are we when the applause stops? When the phone stops ringing? When the mirrors no longer show us who we used to be? Sharon's transformation is a quiet revolution—a reminder that the most beautiful version of ourselves is often the one we discover after losing everything we thought we needed. So tonight, hug your family. Tell them you love them not for what they do, but for who they are. And remember that sometimes the greatest masterpiece is not a painting on a wall—it is a life fully lived, fully loved, and fully free. 🎨❤️

"Two governments decided their marriage was unacceptable. They married anyway. Two governments tried to end what they had built. They waited, in a small flat in Croydon, for the waiting to be over. Then they went home and built a country."

They met at a student dance in London in June 1947, introduced by mutual friends, bonding over jazz records and conversations that stretched late into smoky postwar nights while the city was still rebuilding itself from the rubble. Ruth Williams was twenty-three, an insurance clerk from Blackheath. Seretse Khama was a law student from Bechuanaland — and the heir to the chieftaincy of the Bamangwato people, one of the most powerful positions in his homeland. Within a year, he proposed. The world came apart around them almost immediately.

Ruth's father disowned her. Her employer fired her. Seretse's uncle — acting chief in Seretse's absence — demanded his nephew return home immediately and abandon what he called this foolish white woman. The Church of England refused to perform the ceremony without government approval. The British government refused to give it. On September 29, 1948, they walked into Kensington Registry Office and married anyway. The shockwaves moved in every direction at once. South Africa's Prime Minister Daniel François Malan — whose government had just installed apartheid as the law of the land — called the marriage nauseating and threatened economic sanctions against Britain if the couple received any official recognition. Britain, at that moment, needed South Africa's uranium for its nuclear weapons program and could not afford to antagonize Pretoria. It also needed South African gold. The imperial calculus was cold and clear — two people's marriage against Britain's strategic interests was not a difficult equation for Whitehall.

Seretse was summoned home to face a tribal assembly. In November 1948, the Bamangwato elders gathered for four days and condemned the marriage. They wanted Ruth banned from their territory permanently. Seretse stood before them and said what he had come to say. Accept my wife, or lose your chief forever. By June 1949, the elders had reversed their decision. Ruth could come. On August 20, 1949, Ruth Williams Khama stepped off a plane into the African sun for the first time. Then the rains came. Not simply rain — the best rainy season Bechuanaland had seen in decades. Abundant and life-giving and arriving at exactly the moment the land needed it most. The Bamangwato people looked at this white woman from London, at the timing of what had followed her arrival, and they gave her a name that carried everything she needed to know about how she was being received. They called her the Rain Queen. Suspicion gave way to acceptance. Acceptance gave way to something warmer. Ruth learned the language, learned the customs, learned the land. She became part of the community she had entered as an outsider.

But two governments were not finished with them. In March 1950, Seretse was summoned back to London for what was described as discussions. Ruth was pregnant and begged him not to go. She had a premonition about what the summons actually meant. She was right. The British government informed him that he was banned from returning home. Exiled from Bechuanaland. Indefinitely. They offered him £1,000 per year to divorce Ruth and live quietly in England. He refused. Ruth joined him in exile. They lived in a small flat in Croydon for six years — the heir to a chieftaincy and the Rain Queen, in a cramped apartment south of London, while their people protested at home. The Bamangwato sent telegrams to Queen Elizabeth II. They refused to recognize any other chief. They waited. Their daughter Jacqueline had been born in Bechuanaland just before the exile. Their son Ian was born in England in 1953, in a country that had decided to use his parents as diplomatic currency.

In 1956, Britain finally relented — with a condition. The couple could return home, but only if Seretse permanently renounced any claim to the chieftaincy. He agreed. He came home not as a king but as a private citizen. A cattle farmer. A man who had given up a throne for a marriage and now gave up the last formal claim to that throne for the right to go home. He was not finished. In 1962, Seretse Khama founded the Bechuanaland Democratic Party. In 1965, he won the general election and became Prime Minister. On September 30, 1966, Bechuanaland gained independence from Britain and became the Republic of Botswana. Seretse Khama became its first president. Ruth became First Lady.

Under his leadership, Botswana was transformed. When diamonds were discovered in the late 1960s, Seretse ensured that the wealth was directed toward the people of the country rather than to foreign corporations or to a narrow elite. Botswana became one of Africa's most stable democracies and one of its most remarkable economic success stories — a transformation that began with a man who had refused a £1,000 bribe to leave his wife. Ruth led the Red Cross. She championed women's rights. She became beloved across the country she had arrived in as a stranger and remained in as a chosen home. The Bamangwato had a name for her now — Mother of the Nation. The couple raised four children and never separated again after the exile ended.

Seretse Khama died of pancreatic cancer on July 13, 1980, at the age of fifty-nine. Ruth stayed. She remained in Botswana, continued her charity work, and watched her country and her children grow. In 2008, her son Ian Khama was elected as Botswana's fourth president. Ruth passed away on May 22, 2002, at the age of seventy-eight. She was buried beside Seretse in the land she had come to as an outsider, the land that had named her the Rain Queen, the land that became her home more completely than the place she had been born.

South Africa's Prime Minister had called their marriage nauseating. Julius Nyerere, who became the first president of Tanzania, called it one of the great love stories of the world. History made its verdict clear. The apartheid government that had threatened Britain over a Kensington Registry Office marriage is gone. The exile that Britain imposed on two people to protect its uranium supply is remembered as one of the smaller shameful chapters in a long list. And the country that Seretse and Ruth built — that Seretse built after being denied his birthright, that Ruth helped build after being denied everything her own society had offered her — is still standing.

"The measure of a life is not in the titles it is given, but in the courage it shows when those titles are stripped away. Seretse and Ruth Khama lost a kingdom and gained a nation. They were exiled from home and built a new one. They were told their love was unacceptable and proved that love is not subject to the approval of empires. Their story is not just a love story. It is a story about what happens when two people refuse to let the world decide who they are allowed to become." Their story was told in the 2016 film A United Kingdom, which brought it to a new generation. But the real legacy is not a film. It is a stable, democratic nation built on the principle that two people's right to choose each other was worth more than the strategic calculations of empires. Two governments decided their marriage was unacceptable. They married anyway. Two governments tried to end what they had built. They waited, in a small flat in Croydon, for the waiting to be over. Then they went home and built a country.

“At the bloody, bitter end, I really was difficult. I was out of my mind. Drugs will do that to you.”

Brett Butler was born Brett Anderson on January 30, 1958, in Montgomery, Alabama, the eldest of five sisters. Before fame, she worked as a cocktail waitress and survived an abusive marriage before discovering stand-up comedy in Houston. In 1993, Grace Under Fire premiered on ABC and became a massive hit, debuting in television's top 10. The show was based on Butler's own life—a recovering alcoholic and single mother navigating the world—and it made her a star. At its peak, she was earning 25 million over its run.

Then pain changed everything. Butler had been prescribed Vicodin for sciatica, and she became addicted. At first, she kept functioning. Then the addiction started controlling the set. She later admitted she sometimes needed multiple Vicodin just to get through a table read. Her judgment collapsed. Her behavior became unpredictable. Cast members left. Executive producers cycled through—five producers either quit or were forced out during the show's five seasons. Production halted in October 1996 when Butler sought treatment, and again in August 1997 after a relapse. ABC kept the show alive because it was still valuable, ordering 25 episodes for its fifth season. Only 14 were completed.

The network finally pulled the plug. In February 1998, due to her erratic behavior stemming from substance abuse, Butler was dismissed from the show and ABC canceled the series. Millions of dollars were suddenly gone. Hundreds of people lost work. Butler later remembered that day brutally. Her husband, Ken Zieger, left her—they divorced in 1999. She returned to the studio lot to collect her belongings and was escorted off the property by armed security guards. The woman whose name had carried the entire series was now being walked out of the workplace that once revolved around her.

For roughly another six months, Butler continued spiraling. Rehab had failed before because, as she later admitted, she had not truly wanted to stop. This time, something changed. She finally got sober in July 1998. She later said she was amazed she had survived: “It's amazing, not just that I didn't die, but that somebody didn't kill me”. But survival did not restore everything. She lost the Georgia farm where she had tried rebuilding her life. She said people she trusted stole from her. By 2021, she was six months behind on rent for her 25,000**. The former sitcom star admitted she had been too ashamed to ask for help. “I told him, 'I might've waited too long to do this, but I am so screwed right now,'” she said. “I've been ashamed. Almost ashamed to death”. Brett Butler did not lose Grace Under Fire because audiences stopped watching. She lost a hit series while it was still valuable because she could no longer safely hold her own life together. “The measure of a life is not in the height it reaches, but in the honesty it speaks when it has fallen. Brett Butler owned what happened. She blamed no one but herself. And that honesty—raw, unflinching, and stripped of self-pity—is its own kind of survival.”

"Most people have no idea he has been doing this. For seventeen years, quietly and almost entirely without press coverage, Christian Bale has been working on a problem that most people in America do not know exists."

The problem is a quiet catastrophe inside the foster care system, one measured not in headlines but in the trauma of separation. There are roughly 400,000 children in American foster care. Approximately 280,000 of them have siblings. More than half of those sibling groups are placed in separate homes—different families, different cities, sometimes different states. Bale has cited figures showing that up to 75 percent of siblings who enter foster care are separated from one another. This is not because social workers are indifferent. It is because the mathematics of the system do not work. There are not enough foster families willing or able to take multiple children at once, particularly when those children have experienced complex trauma. So the system does what overwhelmed systems do: it breaks the problem into smaller, more manageable pieces. A six-year-old goes to one family. Her nine-year-old brother goes somewhere else. Their teenage sister ends up in a group home across the county. Each placement might meet the bureaucratic standard for adequate care, but the children have just lost each other on top of losing everything else. Bale first encountered this in 2008, not as research for a film role but because he looked at his young daughter and imagined her without parents. "You imagine the trauma of that," he told CBS Sunday Morning. "But added trauma to being taken from your parents, and then you lose your siblings, you know, that's just something that we shouldn't be doing".

He visited foster care facilities. He spoke with children who were asking about siblings they were not permitted to contact. He spoke with teenagers who had spent years protecting younger brothers and sisters and were now separated from them. He watched caseworkers who had no answer to give when an eight-year-old asked when she could see her sister again. He decided someone needed to build something different from what existed. Not donate to a program that was already running. Not attend a gala and write a check. Build something new, from nothing, because apparently nothing adequate yet existed. For the next several years, he did almost no talking about this publicly. He and his wife Sibi, alongside co-founder Dr. Eric Esrailian of UCLA and executive director Tim McCormick, established a nonprofit called Together California. They identified land in Palmdale—a city in the Antelope Valley high desert, about sixty miles north of Los Angeles—and began the long, unglamorous work of figuring out what they were actually building and how to build it correctly. That process turned out to require learning things that no film career prepares a person for. Bale spent years consulting with child psychologists, social workers, trauma specialists, and former foster youth about what children who have been removed from their homes actually need. He studied existing foster care models, including where they struggled and why. He learned zoning regulations and construction requirements and nonprofit funding structures. He worked through the specific reasons that foster families who genuinely wanted to help siblings were not able to take them: the training gaps, the support gaps, the architectural limitations of ordinary homes not designed for multiple traumatized children arriving simultaneously.

The village that has now opened in Palmdale reflects those seventeen years of preparation. Twelve residential homes, each designed to house siblings together with trained foster parents who receive specialized ongoing support. There are studio apartments for young adults aging out of the system—those acutely vulnerable moments when a child turns eighteen and the state, by default, withdraws support entirely. At the center of the campus: a 7,000-square-foot community building with spaces for music, art, tutoring, therapy, and a commercial kitchen where teenagers can learn skills that translate directly to employment. The project cost approximately $22 million, with $1.7 million in public funding from the City of Palmdale and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. The Austrian American Council West helped raise nearly $9 million. Together California has been documenting the entire process—the costs, the architectural specifications, the training protocols, the staffing models, the funding strategies—with the intention of making all of it freely available to any community that wants to replicate it. "It's our job to turn their heartbreak and their pain into love and hope and a sense of future," Bale said at the opening. Tim McCormick, the executive director, described it as "a place where everyone is welcomed, a place that keeps families together, a place that creates community, a place where you can find hope in the most challenging of times".

"The most valuable thing a person can do with resources and attention is something quiet, specific, and useful." Seventeen years of learning and building, almost entirely without public acknowledgment, has produced twelve homes and a community center in the California desert where siblings in the foster care system can grow up together. Not a check written at a gala. A village. Bale learned zoning regulations. He spent a decade consulting with trauma specialists. He figured out sustainable nonprofit funding structures. None of that is cinematic. He did all of it anyway, without apparent concern for whether anyone was watching. The first children—siblings who might otherwise have been separated into different homes, different cities, different stories—are moving in. The lesson is not about celebrity philanthropy. It is about what real help looks like: it is quiet, it is patient, and it is built to last long after the cameras leave.

“At the bloody, bitter end, I really was difficult. I was out of my mind. Drugs will do that to you.”

Brandon Edwin Cruz was born on May 28, 1962, in Bakersfield, California. At the age of five, he was cast as Eddie Corbett on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, a television show that put his face in millions of American homes. He played opposite Bill Bixby, who became the stable, dependable adult figure that Cruz’s real childhood often lacked. “Bill mentored me and helped me with a lot of situations,” Cruz later said. “My family wasn’t the Ozzie and Harriet situation. My mom was a free-spirited woman, my dad was a bartender in a rowdy bar. Bill stabilized things when he could”. On television, Eddie had exactly what Cruz’s real life didn’t: consistency, attention, and a father who always seemed to know what to say.

But fame arrived before supervision did. By the time he was ten or eleven, Cruz was running around with older teenagers, drinking, getting high, and disappearing for hours without anyone asking where he was. “I didn’t know where my mom was,” he recalled. His family was riddled with addiction. He lost two aunts before he was ten years old to the disease. Almost every adult in his family was a drug addict or an alcoholic, and he started using himself at about eight years old. “I started grabbing drinks and taking sips, and people thought it was cute,” he said. At twelve or thirteen, he had become a daily ma*****na smoker and a regular drinker. He wasn’t going to school much by then because he was filming The Bad News Bears (1976). He later said he barely drew a sober breath through the entire movie.

When The Courtship of Eddie’s Father ended, Cruz was only ten. The television family disappeared. He kept growing. Hollywood kept moving. Then punk rock found him. He threw himself into skating, surfing, and the Southern California punk scene. He fronted the hardcore band Dr. Know from Oxnard, California, and later joined the reunited Dead Kennedys as lead vocalist from 2001 to 2003, replacing Jello Biafra. But the chaos underneath kept getting worse. Alcohol stayed. Drugs stayed. A he**in addiction stretched on for years. By his mid-thirties, he believed the ending was obvious. “At 33 years old, I thought I was going to die a drug addict and alcoholic,” he later said. He also believed he might never watch his son grow up.

Then August 1996 arrived. Cruz was 34. He had a wife, Elizabeth “Liz” Finkelstein, and a baby son. He was unemployed, and his behavior was becoming impossible for his family to survive. During a trip to Santa Barbara, Cruz walked into the hotel room. His wife was gone. A note was waiting. The message left no room to negotiate: get sober, or lose them. Cruz did not immediately surrender. He went on one final bender. He tried to get as intoxicated as possible. Then morning came. The note was still true. His family was still gone. Cruz finally made the call. He contacted someone he knew was in recovery. “I need to get sober.”

When Cruz returned home, several people were waiting. Some were complete strangers. They took him to a recovery meeting. The date was August 21, 1996 [3†L6-L7]. He has said he never relapsed afterward. The man who once believed addiction would kill him began helping other people survive theirs. Recovery became work. Cruz spent years helping people dealing with addiction—celebrities, musicians, people without homes, people who could afford expensive treatment, and people who could afford almost nothing. He worked as a sober companion and interventionist. He also spent years as an editor for South Park. Eventually, he founded the Brandon Cruz Foundation, a nonprofit committed to raising money for addiction recovery and providing support to those who can’t afford treatment. He is also a practicing Buddhist and incorporates the Refuge Recovery program—a Buddhist meditation recovery model—into his own life and his work.

“The measure of a life is not in the heights it reaches, but in the depths it climbs out of—and the hands it reaches back to pull others up.” Brandon Cruz was a child star who became a punk rocker who became a he**in addict who became a recovery counselor. He lost his television family. He nearly lost his real one. He found sobriety in a hotel room with a note from his wife and a phone call to a friend. And then he spent the next three decades helping other people make the same choice before it was too late. “Addiction is a disease. It makes it a lot easier to understand that way rather than a choice or a moral failure,” he has said. “It takes away a lot of the shame and confusion”. He named his son Bixby, after the man who played his father on television. He has spent years fighting to get Bill Bixby a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, raising over $85,000 for the cause. He never forgot the man who stabilized his life when he was a boy. And he never stopped trying to be that person for someone else.