On Wednesday, April 8, 1992, American tennis great Arthur Ashe stood reluctantly in front of 30 television cameras. Ashe was to have a difficult time keeping his emotions in check as he spoke to a national audience about a deeply personal matter.

“I have AIDS,” Ashe said.” I am sorry that I have been forced to make this revelation now, at this time. There is no good reason for this to happen now, but it has happened.”

Ashe, who had retired from tennis 12 years earlier, had known for more than three years that he was suffering from HIV. Ashe believed he had contracted the illness from a blood transfusion he had received during a 1983 heart bypass surgery. (Ashe had undergone a bypass in 1980, as well, after a heart attack the previous year at the age of 36 that forced his retirement). It wasn’t until he went in for emergency brain surgery in 1988 to address sudden paralysis that blood work showed he had AIDS.

At the time, there was much fear around AIDS, and people who had it were often shunned. The notoriously private Ashe had not even told his own young children he had the disease. A cadre of journalists had been aware of Ashe’s condition for some time. Ashe in fact affectionately called the well-kept secret “their conspiracy,” as none among them had ever threatened to disclose his condition. All of that changed the afternoon Ashe received a call from Doug Smith, a reporter for USA TODAY. Smith asked the tennis great if the rumor was true that he had AIDS. The reporter indicated the newspaper would run the story whether or not Ashe chose to go on the record about it.

“Someone just called and ratted on me and [USA Today] felt journalistically they had to follow it up,” Ashe said. With the threat to “out” him imminent, Ashe held a press conference the following day to tell the world himself.

USA Today defended its decision to expose Ashe’s condition.

“For any news organization when any public figure becomes ill … there’s no question that it’s news,” said Gene Policinski, USA Today’s managing editor of sports at the time. “We were treating AIDS as any other illness … [Ashe] is a public figure far beyond the world of tennis.”

John M. Simpson, managing editor of USA Today International, which raced to publish its story in Europe as soon as it learned that Ashe had organized a press conference, agreed, also citing "the good that may come out of the process," as AIDS loses its stigma.

Critics were many, however, and they argued that Ashe’s right to privacy exceeded the public’s right to know. The Freedom of Information Act is broad, but has nine exemptions. The seventh exemption regards facts gathered during law enforcement investigations (personnel files, medical files, and so forth), but omits any records where an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” is at issue.

The Privacy vs. Right to Know became a matter of public interest a few years earlier during the 1988 presidential campaign. Democratic Candidate Gary Hart invited the press to examine his personal life on the premise he had nothing to hide. Reporters responded by trailing his every move, even going so far as to hide in the bushes in front of his home to track his comings and goings. It didn’t take long for the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer to break the story that Hart, a married man, was having an affair. Adding insult to injury the magazine published proof in the form of a photo taken aboard a yacht christened “Monkey Business.” The revelation forced Hart to drop out of the race.

While the Hart scandal generated debate as to how much the public needed to know, it did not garner the level of criticism or sympathy that Ashe did. Further, the harshest critics hailed from the press itself, viewing Ashe’s forced “outing” as an ethical crisis. News organizations across the country ran editorials rebuking USA Today’s threat to disclose Ashe’s illness. The Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Newsweek, and others claimed a line had been crossed.

Michael Olesker in a Baltimore Sun editorial wrote:

Journalism think tanks responded similarly. “Our questions and values are being skewed by the focus on celebrity journalism, William Kovach, curator of the Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, said. “I don’t think that celebrity makes Arthur Ashe fair game.”

Still others supported USA Today’s actions. “The fact that you are thrust into the public light even when you don’t want to be is a fact of journalism,” said Dennis Hetzel, then editor of the Daily Record (York, Pa.).

USA Today for its part cited “the good that may come out of the process,” indicating that perhaps that Ashe could help destigmatize the disease.

A month after his press conference, Ashe held another one, this time to question the ethics of privacy versus right to know.

After going public with his disease, Ashe turned his focus to AIDS awareness, raising $5 million for a United Nations fundraising campaign.

Arthur Ashe died in New York City on February 6, 1993, not quite a year after the first press conference. He was 49.