Whether it was alcohol, a love child, paparazzi, jealousy, or something else entirely,
some celebrity marriages have failed for the strangest of reasons.
Let’s look at why these Hollywood couples couldn't go the distance.
Folks get tipsy and do regrettable things at wedding receptions all the time.
It's a bit rarer, however, for inebriation to be the reason a marriage happens in the first
place. But that's apparently what happened on November 14th, 1998 when NBA star Dennis
Rodman wed Baywatch star Carmen Electra in a booze-fueled Las Vegas ceremony.
Nine days later, Rodman had already filed for an annulment, because of, quote,
"fraud and unsound mind," according to the AP.
Rodman's attorney Gerald Phillips was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying,
"It is my understanding that before the ceremony,
Dennis had been partying extensively and he just doesn't feel as though he
had all of his faculties about him when all the other things occurred afterward."
Electra was the one who ultimately filed for divorce in April 1999, but in 2020 she told
the Los Angeles Times she had, quote, "no regrets at all" about her time with Rodman.
It's clear that Kim Kardashian is a savvy businesswoman who's made clever,
calculated moves to become one of the most famous — not to mention, wealthiest — people on the
planet. But is Kardashian so ambitious that she'd fake an entire wedding for television ratings?
That was her ex-husband and former NBA player Kris Humphries' theory,
according to Page Six. The two were married for just 72 days after tying the knot on August 20th,
2011. The ceremony was an incredibly glitzy affair, reported to have cost $10 million. It
was televised over two nights on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and raked in a ton of cash for
the newlyweds, including an alleged $1.5 million alone from People just for exclusive photos.
In 2012, it was reported that Humphries wouldn't sign divorce papers until Kim
admitted she and her family staged the wedding. Though he seemed to backtrack on that allegation
in a lengthy 2019 essay for The Players' Tribune, claiming their marriage was genuine, it didn’t
vibe with Kim’s remarks two years earlier on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen:
"But I knew, like, honeymoon, it wasn't going to work out."
Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman married in 1998, and from the outside looking in all seemed swell at
first. But when they had their children, Maya and Levon, Hawke said that he went from a cool,
critically acclaimed actor to a full-time babysitter. As he told ABC News in 2006,
"I'm living in a hotel room taking care of my kids while you're off on a film set six
hours a day doing what you love. […]. Do that for nine months and see what a good mood you're in."
He then inexplicably added,
"I don't know if it's just too hard to be married to a woman [who] wants to be a movie star."
The bitter irony in that statement goes without saying, but here's a bit more.
After Hawke and Thurman's 2005 divorce, Hawke eventually ended up marrying Ryan Shawhughes,
who is — wait for it — the couple's former nanny. Yeah.
For her part, Thurman at least partially agreed with Hawke's assessment of what went wrong.
While the nanny didn't come up during a 2005 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show,
the Kill Bill star was honest about the ups and downs of the marriage:
“I hadn’t really worked very much between my children, which gave us a lot of stability.
You know, I had a child and went back into an incredibly demanding job.”
For many, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat brought knee-slapping laughter. But
the film may have brought a divorce to Pamela Anderson and Robert Ritchie – otherwise known
as Kid Rock – after the "Cowboy" singer saw the film. He reportedly hated the outrageous comedy,
which centers on Cohen's character Borat Sagdiyev wanting to marry Anderson.
A friend of Anderson’s told the New York Post in 2006 that after seeing the film,
“Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling
her, […] ‘How could you do that movie in front of everyone?' ”
Cohen somewhat confirmed that story years later when he discussed Anderson and Rock's
marriage on The Last Laugh podcast in 2019. The British actor said that
he asked Anderson through text how Rock liked the film, and she wrote back that
they were getting a divorce. When he asked the reason why, she replied, quote, "The movie."
“Pamela, I will give you your own plow!”
Cohen didn't believe her at first, saying,
"I thought it was a joke. […] But then a few weeks
later they got divorced and they put as a reason for divorce, 'Borat.'"
Actually, People reported they both cited "irreconcilable differences"
in their respective divorce filings in November 2006,
the same month the film was released. They were only legally married for four months at the time.
Disagreement over a wife taking her husband's last name is reportedly what happened to Eddie
Murphy and TV producer Tracey Edmonds when they were married for a mere
14 days in 2008. Although the ceremony wasn't legally binding,
they planned to make it official once returning to the United States.
But those plans were halted when a disagreement allegedly erupted over
Edmonds taking Murphy's last name. After Edmonds and Murphy returned from Bora Bora,
they released a statement saying they would not seek a legal marriage, and that
“The recent symbolic union in Bora Bora was representative of our deep love,
friendship and respect that we have for one another on a spiritual level."
But a month later, R&B singer and Murphy's longtime pal Johnny Gill revealed that Murphy's
mother Lillian Lynch actually nixed the nuptials after she clashed with some of Edmonds' guests.
Edmonds officially rejected those claims, as reported in The St. Louis American.
Lauren Holly said that her nine-month marriage to Jim Carrey couldn't withstand the constant
invasion of overly ambitious tabloid reporters. The two exchanged vows in September 1996,
at a time when Holly said American tabloids began to, quote, "find their voice." In other
words, reporters began doing whatever necessary to nail down a juicy story.
Holly talked about that period of her life in 2013
during an interview on the now-defunct Canadian talk show George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight:
"At first it was kind of fun, and then our whole life became about, 'We have to keep them out.'”
But paparazzi didn't stop there, according to what Holly described in 2016 on Oprah:
Where Are They Now? During that interview, the Picket Fences star said she realized some of them
were living underneath her tennis court to get indoor shots of her home. The tabloid reporters
were just as invasive when she and Carrey divorced after less than one year of marriage.
As she explained, "I felt like everybody
knew. I felt like they felt sorry for me or something. […] That was kind of
a weird thing to play that part out of it, the ending part, out in public."
It looks like Mario Lopez is in that category of engaged men who
lose themselves in the fun of bachelor parties and lose their relationships in the process.
In April 2004, he wed actress Ali Landry, but the marriage lasted only two weeks,
despite the pair having dated for six years before getting hitched.
Lopez lied to her about where he'd be for his bachelor party, then cheated on her. Landry found
out about it right before their wedding, which was to take place near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
She filed for divorce two months later. Seven years on, Lopez admitted to Howard Stern that
he was unfaithful, saying he, quote, "messed around" another woman. The Saved by the Bell
star also said he just wasn't, quote, "mature or man enough" to control himself at the shindig.
As Lopez explained, Landry cracked the case with a photo that her sister sent to her, showing him and
another woman at the party. Landry talked about the cheating on The Wendy Williams Show in 2012,
explaining that she, quote, "heard something right before the wedding."
The Eve actress also said she, quote, "tapped" Lopez's phone shortly after their honeymoon,
and various women began calling her. It's safe to say the jig was fully up at that point.
Sometimes becoming a parent enhances a couple's marriage, but other times it can do just the
opposite. Take Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson, who were married in May 2008 and divorced in 2011.
Simpson was the spouse who filed, and in a statement, she gave the obligatory
"irreconcilable differences" as the reason. But in a 2015 interview with Howard Stern,
Wentz said that being a full-time dad to their son Bronx led to their split.
Wentz plays bass in the band Fall Out Boy, and he said the group being on hiatus many years ago gave
him an identity crisis, which hurt his marriage. The Illinois native also told Stern that he turned
into, quote, "Mr. Mom" around that time, grew a beard, and physically let himself go. He said that
"When your identity is what you do, it's hard when you stop doing it.”
Wentz also said that at first, it felt like Simpson walked away from him at his lowest
point by divorcing him — something that he used to have resentment about. But after age, time,
and a little perspective, the rocker realized that he also played a major
part in the marriage ending. TMZ reported in 2011 that Wentz didn't want a divorce
and tried to talk Simpson out of filing. The outlet also revealed that
she wanted out of the marriage because of Wentz's, quote, "erratic behavior."
Celebrity divorce stories don't get much more scandalous than this:
Arnold Schwarzenegger had an affair with his family's longtime live-in housekeeper
Mildred Patricia Baena. If that's not strange enough, the actor turned California governor
also fathered the housekeeper's son, Joseph, while married to Maria Shriver.
In his memoir, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story,
Schwarzenegger wrote that he tried to convince himself that he wasn't Joseph's father, but by
the time the boy was "school age," his striking resemblance to the action star was undeniable.
Then to add even more weirdness, Baena had her son less than a week after Shriver gave birth to
her fourth child with Schwarzenegger. Shriver was suspicious of her husband’s paternity for years,
but the Terminator star denied it until he finally confessed in a couple's therapy session,
one day after his governorship ended. That was effectively the end of their
marriage. They officially announced their separation a few months later, then divorced.
Schwarzenegger spoke with Good Morning America in 2012 about the affair and explained why
he allowed Baena to continue staying in the family home after she gave birth to their son:
"It's worse when you start getting rid of people, because it's kind of like punishing somebody
for having been in this situation. So that's the best way I could handle it."
Sherri Shepherd said she thought her TV writer ex-husband Lamar Sally married her for love when
they swapped I-Dos in 2011. But before their 2015 divorce, Shepherd accused Sally of tricking her
into getting a surrogate to have a baby, so he could collect child support. According to TMZ,
Shepherd did, indeed, sign a contract with a surrogate, but when baby Lamar Sally Jr.
was born in August 2014, Shepherd didn't want custody or any financial obligation.
The View host also wanted her name removed from the child's birth certificate. But in 2015,
a Pennsylvania court of appeals ruled that Shepherd had to remain on the birth certificate
and keep paying support, which is said to be in the sum of $4,100 a month. Yes, that much. How
happy was Shepherd about that? Soon after the court's decision, she publicly blasted Sally,
and threw a shot on Twitter at her first husband, with whom she also shares a son, for good measure:
"How many ex husbands does it take to get money from a single mom. Two."
In 2016, Sally told the New York Post that despite their issues,
he and Shepherd didn't fight. After their split, however, things took a turn as
"I got painted as a gold digger, that I used Sherri. Sherri's friends in the
media […] dogged me out every chance. […] [Sherri] put me through pure hell.”
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