Watch: Man Claims in Doc He Was Aaron Hernandez's Gay Lover

"He was tired, depressed, struggling... what was he supposed to do? He wasn't gonna come clean. I mean, he couldn't."

Such is the account offered by Dennis SanSoucie in an explosive documentary from Investigation Discovery. In the on-camera interview, SanSoucie is talking about former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez.

SanSoucie alleges that he was Hernandez's lover when the two played football on the same high school team, reports UK newspaper the Daily Mail.

The purported sexual relationship began in middle school, SanSoucie claims and lasted into high school.

"We had shared some sexual activity together and it continued into high school," the Mail article quotes SanSoucie as saying, "but we didn't want anyone to know."

SanSoucie also seems to touch upon the rampant homophobia of high school, as well as sports, in saying that he and Hernandez "prided ourselves on sports, and if anyone knew that we had gay sexual activity together our lives would be ruined."

Hernandez played with the Patriots for three seasons, but his NFL career ended with his arrest and conviction for the 2013 murder in the death of a man named Odin Lloyd, who had been a player for a semi-pro New England Football League team called the Boston Bandits. Media reports indicated that Lloyd had been dating the sister of Hernandez's fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins.

Hernandez was convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence. He was also charged with two other murders but was acquitted of those crimes in 2017. On April 19 of that same year, Hernandez was found unresponsive in his prison cell and subsequently declared dead. His death, at age 27, was ruled a suicide.

An autopsy found evidence of a degenerative brain condition linked to head injuries that many football players have sustained in the course of playing the game.

Rumors swirled following his death that Hernandez was secretly gay. SanSoucie told the Boston Globe that they had been sexually involved, the New York Post recounted in 2018.

That news report also says that Hernandez's brother Jonathan claimed Aaron had disclosed to him that Aaron suffered sexual abuse as a child. The article further claims that Hernandez's father was intensely anti-gay, as well as physically abusive toward his children.

Claiming that he and Hernandez "had a great relationship and bond," SanSoucie - who has come out since Hernandez's death - told the Investigation Discovery documentary, "We were just in complete denial of what was really going on. But I think it was something that we both were naturally born with."

Documentary interest in Hernandez and the crimes he was accused of is also reflected in an upcoming three-episode Netflix miniseries titled "Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez."

Watch a clip from the Investigation Discovery documentary below.