The former professional baseball player Halle Berry divorced nearly 30 years ago is speaking out about the reasons for their separation.
David Justice, who was married to Berry from 1993-1997 and retired from Major League Baseball in 2003, recently appeared as a guest on the All the Smoke podcast, where he discussed his relationship with the Oscar winner at length.
“My knowledge and my understanding, my wisdom around relationships just wasn’t vast. So I’m looking at my mom — and I’m a Midwest guy — so, in my mind, I’m thinking a wife at that time should cook, clean, [be] traditional, you know?” he shared, revealing that Berry did not do those things. “Then I’m thinking, ‘Okay, if we have kids, is this the woman I want to have kids with and build a family with?’ At that time, as a young guy — she don’t cook, don’t clean, don’t really seem motherly, and then we started having issues.”
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Halle Berry and David Justice in 1995
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to a representative for Berry for comment.
Berry and Justice met in 1993. Five months after their first date, Berry proposed to the Atlanta Braves alum.
“I said okay, but I don’t know if my heart was really into it. But I didn’t want to make her feel bad and say no,” he explained. They separated in 1996 and divorced in 1997,
Justice has publicly discussed his relationship with Berry in the past, telling PEOPLE in 2015, “Over the past 20 years, I’ve heard people saying, ‘Isn’t that the dude who hit Halle Berry in the head?'”
The Monster’s Ball and X-Men star previously stated that an unnamed former partner struck her so hard that her eardrum was punctured. Justice claimed that the ambiguity over the former partner’s identity had led some MLB fans to “scream” things like, “‘Hey Justice, hit the ball like you hit Halle!'”
Though Berry has yet to comment on these former claims or address Justice’s publicly aired grievance, he thanked her on the social media site formerly known as Twitter shortly after his initial complaint for “finally squashing all of the rumors in the past, that I had physically abused her.”
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Justice married Rebecca Villalobos in 2001, and the couple now shares three children.
Berry, meanwhile, shares daughter Nahla with ex Gabriel Aubry and son Maceo-Robert with ex Olivier Martinez. She began dating singer-songwriter Van Hunt in 2020, and celebrated their enduring intimacy with a cheeky video posted from bed this past Mother’s Day. In June, Hunt revealed that he’d proposed to Berry, but the actress had yet to accept or reject the proposal. “It’s just out there floating,” he noted in a joint interview.
You can watch the rest of Justice’s interview on the All the Smoke podcast above.
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