New Book Claims Prince Paid His Journalist Friend A Visit For Painkillers

A new book claims Prince paid one of his journalist friends a visit solely for his supply of painkillers.

Page Six is reporting that in his book This Thing Called Life, Neal Karlen discusses his thirty-plus-year relationship with the singer.

Karlen broke five bones in his leg while rollerblading in 1997 and was out of commission for months. Out of the blue, Prince called and his Percocet prescription came up in conversation.

Prince told Karlen he would be right over, which “was not in character,” for this friend.

“He’d been to my apartment but not for a few years, and for him to schlep so far to pay a little sympathy call felt…meaningful,” he writes.

It turns out that Prince was not paying his friend a sympathy visit. 

“I didn’t even have time to offer him a glass of water before he spied the white Walgreen’s bottle of pills in my living room,” he writes.

“Prince gobbled a third of the bottle like they were M&Ms, and my heart sank. It was f*cking true. I’d heard rumors for years that he’d been off and on heavy painkillers ever since the ‘Purple Rain’ tour a dozen years before,” he continued.

Prince died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl at the age of 57 in April of 2016.