Secret Health Revealed
True Blood's Joe Manganiello Reveals Seven-Year Health Battle and Ancestry Quest in New Memoir
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Actor Joe Manganiello is breaking his silence on a secret seven-year health battle that nearly killed him. The "True Blood" star revealed he underwent a life-saving organ removal — details he kept hidden from the public while continuing to work in Hollywood. The full story will appear in his upcoming memoir, People.
The book, titled "Bloodlines," is set for release on October 13, 2026, through Simon & Schuster. Manganiello called the ordeal "the most brutally difficult time of my life... but also my greatest adventure." The memoir covers far more than his medical crisis — it weaves in a shocking ancestry discovery that rewrote everything he thought he knew about his family.
Seven Years of Hidden Illness and a Life-Saving Surgery
Manganiello's health began to collapse around 2019, when he was in his early 40s. A cascade of autoimmune symptoms attacked his skin, thyroid, eyes, lungs, and digestive system, according to WGME. Doctors could not explain what was causing it. The crisis lasted roughly seven years while he kept filming and making public appearances.
The ordeal ultimately required what his publisher calls a "life-saving organ amputation" — an unusual term that suggests a major surgical removal of an internal organ. This came years after a separate 2016 emergency appendix surgery that forced him to drop out of the History Channel series "Six." Manganiello kept both battles almost entirely private, according to KATV.
Shamans, DNA Tests, and an Armenian Genocide Survivor
When traditional medicine failed him, Manganiello turned to shamans, pagan rituals, and ancient myths searching for answers. That spiritual quest pushed him toward genealogy research. In 2022 and 2023, he filmed PBS's "Finding Your Roots" with Harvard scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. What he learned there changed everything, according to KOMO News.
DNA results showed Manganiello is 7% Sub-Saharan African. More strikingly, the man he believed was his paternal grandfather shared zero DNA with him. His biological great-grandfather turned out to be a German officer named Karl Wilhelm Beutinger — one of whose other sons later became a Nazi SS officer. Meanwhile, his maternal great-grandmother, Terviz "Rose" Darakjian, survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Ottoman soldiers shot seven of her children. She escaped by playing dead, then swam across the Euphrates River with an infant on her back. The baby did not survive the crossing, according to News Channel 9.
A Pilgrimage to Armenia and the Theory of Inherited Trauma
In May 2024, Manganiello traveled to Armenia on a 10-day pilgrimage with his girlfriend, Caitlin O'Connor. The trip was organized in part through the Children of Armenia Fund. He described it as an act of reclamation — reconnecting with roots he had only recently discovered. Armenian cultural groups praised him for using his public platform to validate the genocide, which Turkey still officially denies, according to ABC6 On Your Side.
Central to his memoir is the idea of "inherited trauma" — the theory that extreme suffering experienced by ancestors can pass down through generations and show up as physical or emotional illness. Manganiello believes his great-grandmother's horrors may be connected to his own unexplained autoimmune collapse. The 320-page book explores whether healing his ancestral history helped heal his body, according to KUTV.
What This Story Reveals About Invisible Illness and Celebrity
Manganiello built his career on his physical image. He wrote a fitness book called "Evolution" in 2013. Outlets like "Muscle & Fitness" regularly profiled his training regimen. The revelation that his body was secretly failing during that same period is a stark contrast that health advocates say highlights how autoimmune disease can be completely invisible from the outside, according to Fox San Antonio.
"Bloodlines" is expected to be a major release for Simon & Schuster. It bridges celebrity memoir with medical survival story and historical documentation. The Armenian genocide killed an estimated 1.5 million people in 1915. Manganiello's account adds a personal, high-profile voice to that history — one that sat hidden in his own DNA for decades, according to Bakersfield Now.
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