A jury found Rock Hudson hid his AIDS from his lover and awarded $21.75 million against his estate

On July 25, 1985, Rock Hudson's spokeswoman in Paris said he had AIDS and had been diagnosed more than a year earlier. He died that October at 59. His will left his estate to a trust he set up in 1974. A bond of $8.6 million was posted for the estate, and in 1986 his Beverly Hills house went on sale for $2.95 million. Marc Christian, who had lived with Hudson since late 1983, sued the estate and Hudson's secretary, Mark Miller, for $10 million. Christian said Hudson kept having sex with him while hiding the diagnosis, and that he learned of it from a news broadcast. He tested negative several times. Before suing, he had asked Hudson's managers to put $300,000 in a trust to cover his care if he got sick. They refused. In 1989 a Los Angeles County jury found Hudson's conduct "outrageous" and awarded Christian $21.75 million. The award was cut to $5.5 million, and a state Court of Appeal upheld that amount. After the California Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the sides settled privately in 1991 for less than $6 million, Christian said. Estate lawyers had portrayed him as a gold-digger. Christian never developed AIDS and died in 2009 at 56.