SAVED By the Bell star Dustin Diamond is currently in the hospital as he battles “cancer.”
According to TMZ, the TV actor found himself in a Florida hospital with “pain all over his body.”
The outlet reveals that Dustin’s family “has a history of cancer,” as his mom died of breast cancer – however, it is not yet known the type of cancer the 44-year-old is suspected to have.
Dustin is best known for playing Samuel “Screech” Powers on the massively popular show Saved By the Bell – a role he had for four seasons.
While his former costars – Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen, Elizabeth Berkley, and Lark Voorhies – were recasted for the reboot of the show on Peacock, Dustin was not called back.
The stars have distanced themselves from Dustin, especially since he has been quite controversial in the years since.
Back in December 2014, Dustin was arrested after he was involved in a bar fight – he was eventually found guilty on two misdemeanor offenses and was sentenced to four months in prison.
According to Dustin, he and his fiancée Amanda Schutz were celebrating their engagement when a man punched her in the face.
Dustin also claimed the man then proceeded to grab Amanda by the hair.
“I opened my pocket knife and said, ‘Let my wife go immediately,’ which worked,” he recalled to a previous interview with Extra.
That was not it for Dustin’s problems with the law, as two years later he was arrested again for taking an Oxycodone pill and violating the terms of his probation, according to CNN.
Dustin, who released a sex tape in 2006 but later claimed it was not actually him in the film, also wrote a tell-all book titled Behind the Bell.
The book, which featured claims that the actors on the show were having sex with each other and using drugs on the set, didn’t rub his ex costars very well.
Dustin, who went on to say he had a ghostwriter, explained the book’s fallout in an interview with Dr. Oz: “I hadn’t talked to most of the cast mates in a long time.
“Mario Lopez and I speak frequently and Dennis Haskins and I speak frequently… but the rest of the cast — Mark Paul I haven’t seen since I was 16 years old, so I feel terrible for it but what can I do?
“Unfortunately, being in the entertainment industry, you get fleeced a lot and you get taken advantage of a lot. And it hasn’t been my first bout with that and so I’ve gotten good at just kind of brushing it off and moving forward.”
He added: “If I dwell on the past, then it just eats at me and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
