Antonio Sabato Jr. said he was "blacklisted" just like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant Friday on the basis that she works for President Donald Trump.
Sabato told the New York Post that the "unfortunate" incident was something he was all too familiar with.
"She's a lovely lady and it's disgusting," he said. "And I know more than anybody else because I've been through it and I'm still going through it."
The conversation was brought up during a visit to the Trump International Hotel in D.C., where Sabato was among hundreds gathered to attend the Virginia Women for Trump high tea in celebration of the president's June birthday.
The Italian-born heartthrob, now running for U.S. Congress in California, made a brief on-stage appearance to address the crowd and spoke about how he was "blacklisted" just like in the 1940s and 1950s, when Hollywooders thought to be communists were alienated.
"When I went to Cleveland and spoke for our president, as I came back my agent, my managers were all gone," he said, according to The New York Post. "I had jobs lined up, they were all gone."
Sabato said that Friday's incident, in which the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, asked White House press secretary Sanders to leave the restaurant, was reminiscent to how he had been treated in the past.
"For me, from when I came back from Cleveland, that was it,” he told The New York Post. "That woke me up. It was Communism all over again. You know, they're not allowing us to speak our minds, to express how we love this country and it's unfortunate."
He said that there were many Trump supporters in liberal California who felt they needed to keep their fandom quiet because they were afraid.
"They care about their paycheck and they care about working in TV shows and movies and they don't want to jeopardize that and I totally understand that," he said.
Political differences have been aggravated amid debates surrounding the separation of families trying to enter the U.S. at the southern border.
Sabato has spoken up on immigration before, stating that he was tough on immigration reform and strongly supports the building of Trump's proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall.
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