Howard Stern: ‘What’s happening with Artie makes me very sad’
Howard Stern doesn’t often talk about Artie Lange, but in a new interview, he says he’s “sad” about his former “Howard Stern Show” sidekick.
“I choose my words about Artie carefully, because I love him,” Stern, 65, told the New York Times Magazine.
Lange, 51, who lives in Hoboken and grew up in Union, has long struggled with drug addiction, moving in and out of hospitals and rehab programs. He’s currently serving four years of probation after pleading guilty to heroin possession in 2018 following a State Police arrest in 2017.
The comedian was jailed for almost two weeks after he was found to have violated his probation for the second time in less than two months, testing positive for cocaine at a court appearance in December and again in January. He’s now in a drug court rehab program.
“What’s happening with Artie makes me very sad,” Stern told the magazine. “We’ve lost touch, and that’s my doing. I got my fingers crossed for the guy. And it wasn’t a clean break. It was many years of wanting Artie to get help.”
Lange, who joined the “The Howard Stern Show” in 2001, was asked to take a break from the show in 2009, in the wake of a drug binge. Not long afterward, Lange was hospitalized following a suicide attempt in which he drank bleach and plunged a kitchen knife into his stomach several times. His mother found him passed out in his Hoboken home. It was Lange’s second suicide attempt after another following a 1995 bender.
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