How Aaron Hernandez's Double Life Veered Fatally Out of Control

Perhaps there's no way to intercept fate, but a look at the trajectory of Aaron Hernandez's life is a study in what-could-have-been-if-only moments.

But during so much of his existence, which ended at 27 when he died by suicide in a prison cell on April 19, 2017, two years after being found guilty of murder, those off-ramps not taken were brushed to the side by his ability to play football. The Bristol, Conn., native was part of a 2009 national title-winning team with Tim Tebow at University of Florida and played in the 2012 Super Bowl for the New England Patriots, catching eight passes from Tom Brady in one of the team's rare losing efforts in the big game.

Aaron signed a five-year extension worth $40 million in August 2012 and became a father months later, sharing a Nov. 6 birthday with his and fiancée Shayanna Jenkins' daughter Avielle Janelle Jenkins Hernandez.

And then his life violently unraveled. His downfall was of course shocking in the moment, but upon closer inspection it wasn't that illogical of an outcome.

"If you chart his life, if he hadn't gone to college just after losing his father at such a young age, while he was struggling with his sexuality and holding so many secrets, if he didn't get drafted by the Patriots, maybe this story doesn't end this way," Stuart Zicherman, creator of FX's American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, exclusively told E! News ahead of the series Sept. 17 premiere. "Because he's drafted to a team that's so close to home and home was such a toxic thing for him."

The anthology series, the latest offering from producer Ryan Murphy's sprawling TV universe, is adapted from the Boston Globe-Wondery podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., which delved into how the athlete's story dovetailed with larger issues, including sports and celebrity culture, hero worship, toxic masculinity and homophobia.

Among the pivotal destructive events in his life, Aaron had worshiped his own abusive dad and then lost him suddenly at 16, Dennis Hernandez dying unexpectedly following hernia surgery in January 2006.

Moreover, the Globe's posthumous deep dive into Aaron's life uncovered that he had talked as an adult about being molested at a young age. Brother Jonathan Hernandez wrote in his 2018 book that Aaron was 6 when an older boy first abused him. Aaron later told their mother Terri Hernandez from prison, he wrote, but when it happened Jonathan had "no idea what he had just been through."

There has also been nonstop speculation since his death that Aaron was gay and desperately tried to keep that part of his life concealed.

"I asked Aaron if he was gay," Jonathan wrote, recalling that he told his younger brother that he loved him no matter what. "'Don't you ever ask me that again,' Aaron said. 'If you say that again, I'll f--king kill you.'"

Shayanna said in 2020 that, while she had a child with Aaron, "I still can't tell you how he was feeling inside."

"If he did feel that way or if he felt the urge [to be with men], I wish that I was told," she said on Good Morning America of the high school sweetheart she'd planned to marry. "I wish that he would have told me because I would not have loved him any differently."

So while Aaron's story on its face is gripping, the unanswerable questions about his true self are what spurred a cottage industry in trying to understand him.

"When we talk about authenticity or double lives or secrets, he has no idea who he is," Zicherman told E!. "He's drafted to a championship team where he's expected to be a man." 

To compound matters, researchers at Boston University's CTE Center said they found textbook signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in Aaron's brain. The condition, which can only be diagnosed posthumously, has been linked to symptoms ranging from mood swings and violent impulses to dementia in athletes who suffered repeat head trauma.

The consensus, however, is that it wasn't any one thing that led to Aaron being convicted of fatally shooting 27-year-old Odin Lloyd on the morning of July 17, 2013. Or deciding to end his own life in 2017, days after being acquitted in a 2012 double homicide case and while his previous conviction was being appealed. 

"There's kind of an amalgamation of factors that created this outcome," Josh Rivera, who plays Hernandez in American Sports Story, exclusively told E!. "And there's a lot of different entities and cultural relationships that enable this kind of behavior in a multitude of different industries, but this obviously focuses on professional athletes. These are young men who get very famous and come into a lot of money, and that has its uses to people on the outside" who don't have the athletes' best interests at heart.

And Hernandez, the actor continued, must have faced "an immense amount of pressure" to perform.

In 2007, Scout.com named him the top tight end among high school recruits. After he initially committed to play in his home state for University of Connecticut, Florida's then-coach Urban Meyer visited the 17-year-old personally to woo him to Gainesville. 

Though a first-team All-American in 2009, Hernandez wasn't picked up by the Patriots in the 2010 NFL Draft until the fourth round—a decision widely attributed to his off-the-field issues, including multiple failed drug tests (testing positive for marijuana) and his alleged role in a 2007 bar fight (for which police wanted him charged with felony battery but prosecution was deferred).

"If he had more time to mature and grow up before going to college, that might've changed a lot," American Sports Story producer Nina Jacobson told E!, listing more if-only moments in Hernandez's life. "Had he stayed at Florida longer as a player to mature before he went to the NFL, that might have changed  things. And if he had faced real consequences—if he had been benched every time he got in trouble, so that he could only play if he could get it together off of the field—that might've changed quite a few things as well."

Even if another team had drafted Hernandez, then he at least would have been further away from the influences in his hometown of Bristol that contributed to his downfall.

"If he's playing in Seattle," series creator Zicherman noted, "it's a different story."

But ultimately the series is about "the way we turn our heroes into people that we worship in America and then erase them when they fall," said producer Brad Simpson. "It's a story about race, it's a story about class, and it's a story about what we do to these young men who have these great talents."

Norbert Leo Butz, who plays longtime Patriots coach Bill Belichick (speaking to reporters a month after Hernandez was charged with murder, the famously undemonstrative Belichik called it "a sad day on so many levels"), concurred that the series is ultimately not about just Hernandez or football.

"Aaron is a tragic figure and football was his game, that's what made him famous," the two-time Tony Award winner told E!. But the show is in part "about our responsibility, our complicity as a culture and as a society, how we lionize and put on a pedestal our great athletes and our great actors—and then also sometimes feel a little judgmental of them. In hindsight, we like to see them torn down."

At the same time, Hernandez still has a legacy in the form of his daughter, Avielle.

"I can't just be young and reckless Aaron anymore," he told reporters in 2012 when the child was 2 days old. "I'm going to try to do the right things, become a good father, and be raised like I was raised."

He was arrested on suspicion of murder seven months later. But while prosecutors would inevitably paint him as a cold-blooded killer who deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison, the memories from loved ones who saw Aaron's humanity have kept his story from being too easy to judge.

In American Sports Story, "we have the luxury of being able to explore the nuance of these relationships and the conversations behind closed doors that we don't necessarily know all about," Jaylen Barron, who plays Aaron's fiancée Shayanna, exclusively told E!. 

The actress was admittedly taken by Shayanna's devotion to Aaron throughout everything that happened.

"I just loved how passionate she was about him and how he was to her," Barron said. "And it might not be the typical love story that people might agree with, but it was their own personal and complex love. And she accepted him for who he was completely."

Obviously "Aaron was a different person to different people," Barron continued, "but [Shayanna] knew him as this high school boy that she was in love with and she grew with him. She stayed loyal to him and I feel like that's also why he loved her so much, in his own way. Just because love is complex, and just because love is shown in different ways, doesn't mean it's always bad."

Rivera called Aaron's relationship with Shayanna "double-edged."

"It must have been such a relief to have somebody who knew him for such a long time," the actor said, "and it also must have been kind of difficult to explain" to Shayanna what he was really going through.

Whatever that was, exactly.

"This was a story about authenticity," Zicherman mused. "We all, as we come of age, struggle to figure out who we are, and some of us find it quicker than others. Some of us never find it."

"In the world of football," he added, Aaron "could not just be who he wanted to be or at least explore who he wanted to be."

As producer Jacobson put it, Aaron was "trying to find a space to occupy in the world and having no place to take the parts that don't fit into that identity." There's that sense of "feeling lost and alone and isolated, and having to suppress so much of yourself until finally all of those illusions collapse and you implode from these fractures in your identity."

And it's natural to want Aaron to be a little less human as well. 

"There was always a tension within us, because of course we remembered the murders," recalled Boston Globe Magazine reporter Patricia Wen, who as Spotlight Team editor oversaw the paper's extensive 2018 investigation into Aaron's life that included the Gladiator podcast. "You remembered the kind of damage he did to so many other lives. Meanwhile, we would be learning about his childhood and start to feel sympathetic."

But, she told E!, "I think all of us have this human quality of, we want to come out [feeling] one way or the other. We either like you or we don't like you. You're evil or you're good."

As Zicherman put it, "I thought I knew the story, and then I read the Spotlight piece."

—Reporting by Nikaline McCarley

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez premieres Sept. 17 at 10 p.m. on FX. New episodes stream the next day on Hulu.