After a heavy night of drinking early last week, Daly allegedly passed out at a Hooters restaurant and was then held overnight in a North Carolina jail.

Police officers were called to the Hooters in Winston-Salem in the early hours of the morning, and when they arrived Daly, who had passed out at the restaurant, was already being treated by paramedics, but refused to go to hospital. According to police, Daly was "extremely intoxicated and uncooperative" and because he had no transportation, police held him in custody at a local jail until he sobered up.

Daly does not know why he was put into orange coveralls, or how the photo was released to the public. “The picture looks like I'm drunk,” he said. “I wasn't drunk when they took the picture. The picture people are seeing is me half-asleep.”

The whole incident could have been avoided, according to Daly, if his friends had realised he often sleeps with his eyes open when he's tired, stressed and has been drinking. He said the driver of his bus panicked when he saw Daly and called the paramedics.

“The thing I want people to know is when I called my girlfriend at 11:30 pm I was going back to the bus to go sleep,” Daly said. “I'm not going to say I wasn't drunk. I did have a few drinks. I said to them, ‘I'm tired, I'm drunk and I'm going to bed.’”

Daly said his friends woke him up about two in the morning. “The bus driver called 911 because my eyes were open,” Daly said. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘We thought you were dead.’ Anybody who knows me ... when I'm tired, I sleep with my eyes open. They know it takes a while to wake me up.”

“Nothing is going right in my life right now,” Daly said. “I’m going through a hell of a divorce. I haven't seen my son. It was an unfortunate incident, but it’s a joke what people are saying. I take full responsibility for what happened, but it wasn't that big of a deal.”