Beaches, tabloids, and loads of cocaine. It looked like Yasmine Bleeth had a long and successful
acting career ahead of her, but her time on and off the set of Baywatch wasn't all fun in the sun.
Yasmine Bleeth struggled with substance abuse as a way to forget her problems,
and it greatly impacted her life and her career. Her work on Baywatch had earned
her a large and loyal fan following, but this didn't stop her from feeling overwhelmed due to
her drug habit. In a 2012 oral history of Baywatch that appeared in Esquire,
Bleeth's castmate Traci Bingham commented on her cocaine addiction, saying:
"Who does that? Really? To the point where she's so out of the business now. Completely M.I.A."
But Bleeth was also honest about her substance abuse, notably in an essay she wrote for Glamour
in February 2003. In the essay, she acknowledged she made mistakes and spoke on the difficulties of
staying clean. She claimed that many circumstances triggered her desire to use drugs. She said:
"Consciously trying to stay off drugs is now part of my life,
and it always will be. But I'm happy to do what I have to do."
Bleeth also addressed how she was making the necessary changes in her
life and trying to take pleasure in the simple things. She wrote:
"Now I'll stay in bed for two days and tell my friends and family,
'Come on over, the door's open.'"
Perhaps the most significant impact of Yasmine Bleeth's drug use on her career is that she was
fired from the show that had catapulted her to a global audience. In Esquire's 2012 oral history,
screenwriter Douglas Schwartz discussed Bleeth's termination from Baywatch in 1997. He said:
"Bleeth [...] was doing drugs at the time, and so we were dealing with Yasmine not showing up
and having difficulties, again with men. That's why we let Yasmine go off the show:
because it was too difficult to deal with her after a while."
Bleeth commented on the relationship issues
Schwartz had alluded to in her penned Glamour article, saying:
"The way I saw it, cocaine was easing me through the problems I was still having
with my boyfriend. On cocaine, I didn't think about the problems. I had no pain."
Yasmine Bleeth got specific about her lovelife in her 2003 Glamour essay. She
recounted the challenges she went through in her relationship with businessman Paul Cerrito,
whom she met at a rehab center in Malibu. Their arrangement was long-distance,
as Bleeth often needed to work on location in San Francisco, while Cerrito remained in Los Angeles.
The difficulties of a long distance relationship
made Bleeth start questioning her belief in love. She wrote:
"You hear about people who are made for each other;
I wanted to be one of those people. I was tired of feeling hurt. I was losing faith
in love. I just wanted to feel good again. And I knew an easy way to get that feeling."
And her loneliness meant falling back on cocaine. Bleeth revealed:
"It was like ordering Chinese food. I made one phone call,
and they delivered it to my front door."
She eventually stopped visiting Cerrito in L.A. and ended their relationship.
But Bleeth and Cerrito eventually found their way back to each other;
the couple reunited and were married in 2002.
Yasmine Bleeth's eventual wedding to Paul Cerrito two years after she met him in rehab took place
at Bacara Resort in Santa Barbara. In 2001, the couple had been involved in a car accident
in Detroit. As a result of the incident, Bleeth was arrested for cocaine possession,
which made headlines. But the moment would change her relationship with Cerrito for the better.
"Why did you come back for me?"
Though the couple had attended rehab together, it wasn't long before
Bleeth eventually relapsed. She noted in her Glamour essay that she lost control, saying:
"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."
She claimed that the only reason she and Cerrito were still together
was due to their accident, which she called "divine intervention."
Most may not have been aware of all of the problems Yasmine Bleeth faced during
the peak of her fame. As Bleeth put it herself in her Glamour essay, she had become a master
at concealing what was wrong and excusing her substance abuse — at least initially.
"No, I don't really dri– Yeah. Yeah, I'd love one."
Bleeth opened up about her mistakes and the struggles she's endured because of her addiction,
detailing how drugs had taken a toll on her body. At one point, a doctor discovered that
her drug use had led to gangrene in her nose. She described her nasal damage,
recalling that she would blow her nose and pieces of skin would come out. Bleeth wrote:
"I had an infection that had completely eaten out the inside of my nose, leaving it raw and bloody."
Bleeth's doctor informed her of the severity of the infection, which, if left untreated,
could have reached her brain and been fatal. Although she made an attempt to get sober,
her habit resumed just six weeks later.
Despite Yasmine Bleeth's cocaine addiction impacting her life in numerous ways,
she still had a strong support system, most notably in her dad. In her 2003 Glamour essay,
Bleeth wrote that while her drug use made a lot of her relationships unstable,
it never broke the bond she had with her dad. She recalled:
"During that time, we were closer than ever because when I tried to pull away,
he forced his way back into my life."
In 2001, Bleeth's father picked her up from an airport in Los Angeles,
and it wound up being something of a wake-up call. Bleeth's appearance
had changed — she'd lost weight and her face was swollen. She recalled:
"He took one look at me and started to cry. He said I looked like a shell of myself. [...] Seeing
the expression on my father's face and knowing his heart was being ripped out
of his body — that was the first time I was truly confronted by how I was affecting other people."
"You guys are lucky to be alive. You could've been killed out there."
The media continued to cover Yasmine Bleeth's addiction problems closely,
usually in an unflattering light. Even when Bleeth publicly commented about her journey
away from substance abuse and toward sobriety, the paparazzi seemed to have it in for her.
Bleeth's Baywatch cast mate Gena Lee Nolin was quick to acknowledge that the media's
treatment of Bleeth was extremely unfair. In a 2017 interview with Cosmopolitan, Nolin recalled
a time when paparazzi were taking photos of Bleeth close to the set of Baywatch. She said:
"I remember Yasmine Bleeth, she was at the payphone where we filmed — this was before
cellphones — and she scratched her nose, and the Enquirer had three pictures of her,
like front cover, 'Yasmine Bleeth — there's drugs' or whatever. And at the time,
when I knew her, there was none of that going on."
Very few people look the same now as they did 20 years ago. So it might be a bit of a
surprise that the media still focuses on Yasmine Bleeth's appearance. While her looks have changed
since she was on Baywatch in the '90s, she's now living a healthy and sober life. Bleeth doesn't
make headlines often these days, choosing to stay away from the limelight. In 2020, she caught the
media's attention again when she was photographed walking her dog in Southern California.
For the most part, Bleeth has retreated from the public eye, and very little is
known about her life. Esquire's 2012 oral history of Baywatch noted that Bleeth lived
with husband Paul Cerrito, and that they had two homes, one in Scottsdale, Arizona,
and the other in Los Angeles. Her name also made headlines in 2017 when TMZ claimed her
husband intended to sue Disney for causing him injury while shooting a series in their home.
In addition to her troubles with both drugs and the media's obsession with ongoing changes in her
appearance, Yasmine Bleeth became reliant on what some might call retail therapy. Bleeth admitted
that the satisfaction of shopping online began to replace her cocaine addiction. And she's revealed
that she spent thousands of dollars at a time. She wrote in her essay for Glamour that shopping was
the most important part of what had developed into a series of nightly post-work rituals.
This also included activities like rearranging her linen closet, making photo albums of her time on
TV, and dancing to music. But Bleeth disclosed that mostly, she would shop on the internet,
ordering from high end stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. She wrote:
"It was the biggest joke — I bought all these beautiful things, but I never went out. Forget
the money I was spending on drugs — I'd spend literally $5,000 to $10,000 in one night
shopping on the Web! I was obsessed. Shopping was instant gratification. Just like the drugs."
Yasmine Bleeth was once a television darling with a role on one of the most popular shows
of the '90s. Very little is known about her these days, and she has mostly continued to stay out of
the limelight. But in 2021, Bleeth returned to acting with an appearance in the movie Whack the
Don. The comedy also stars Richard Grieco, who Bleeth was previously in a relationship with.
But Bleeth remains notoriously private. The question of what may have become of
her career had she not had a terrible substance abuse problem will never be
answered. Bleeth seems to be retired from acting and living a quiet life.
In 2012, Baywatch screenwriter Michael Berk noted
in Esquire that her life changed due to her continued fight to stay sober. Berk said:
"I know she gets offers that she turns down. She was an actress at the time she was a little girl,
she was very smart with her money, and I think she invested well."