Halle Berry’s long, nasty co-parenting battle with Olivier Martinez gets ugly again
The Oscar winner has been engaged in a nearly decade-long divorce battle with her French actor ex-husband over the care of their 10-year-old son.
Celebrity watchers who can’t believe that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are still locked in a bitter divorce fight nearly eight years after their breakup are being reminded of another nasty, protracted Hollywood divorce battle that has similarly centered on a dispute about child custody.
Halle Berry and her ex-husband, Olivier Martinez, were back in court this week — nine years after they first announced their divorce and one year after they appeared to resolve their differences by striking a joint custody and child-support arrangement for their son Matteo, who is now 10, the New York Post reported.
Berry, 57, has filed documents in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming that the French actor, 58, has violated the terms of their co-parenting agreement by allegedly taking “the summer off.” Instead of completing agreed-upon therapy sessions, Martinez chose to travel to France in July and hang out in Los Angeles with his brother, Berry said in the court documents.
Berry’s legal team said that “coparenting therapy was supposed to commence forthwith and the agreed-upon six conjoint sessions were to be completed by June 14, 2024. It is now July 26, 2024, and they have not even started.”
Berry alleged that “Olivier has effectively unilaterally decided to take ‘the summer off,’” noting that all co-parenting sessions occur on Zoom. The Oscar winner has said she’s “tried everything to foster a better coparenting relationship with Olivier” but “rather than support, she is met with resistance and conflict.”
Berry and Martinez were married from 2013 to 2016. When they announced their split in 2015, they said they came to the decision “with a heavy heart,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“We move forward with love and respect for one another and the shared focus of what is best for our son,” the pair said at the time.
But those amicable feelings didn’t last — a pattern that is all too familiar for Berry, who has a long, sad history of tumultuous relationships.
Back in the 1990s, Berry said she was in abusive relationship with a “well-known” Hollywood figure, who beat her so badly when she was filming 1991’s “The Last Boy Scout” that he permanently damaged her hearing in one ear, People reported. Berry also has revealed that she grew up watching her mother being regularly beaten by her father, before her parents divorced when she was 4.
Berry’ first husband, from 1993 to 1997, was baseball star David Justice. She then married singer-songwriter Eric Benét in 2001, but one year into their four-year marriage he underwent treatment for sex addiction.
Berry’s next romantic partner, from 2005 to 2010, was French-Canadian model Gabriel Aubry, with whom she shares her Nahla, who is now 16. But things got ugly between Berry and Aubry after they split when it came to the custody of their daughter.
By 2010, the “Monster’s Ball” star had begun dating Martinez, whom she met while working on the film “Dark Tide” in South Africa. She wanted to move to Martinez’s home country of France so she could marry him and provide her daughter with “a quieter life, away from the pressures of Hollywood,” People reported.
But a judge in November 2012 denied her request to move Nahla away from her father. Some two weeks after the judge’s ruling, Aubry and Martinez got into a fight at Berry’s Los Angeles home. As both men accused each other of throwing the first punch, Aubry specifically said that Martinez threatened to kill him if he wouldn’t allow him and Berry to take Nahla with them when they moved to France, TMZ reported at the time.
Berry and Aubry subsequently reached an “amicable” custody agreement, the actor’s attorneys announced, though details of the agreement were not released, E! News reported. A 2014 court ruling called for Berry to pay Aubry $16,000 a month in child support, as well as a retroactive payment of $115,000 and $300,000 for Aubry’s attorney fees, ABC News reported.
Berry soon found herself embroiled in a custody fight with Martinez, which went on for many more years than her dispute with Aubry. When she and Martinez finally settled on joint custody, she also agreed to pay him child support in the amount of $8,000 a month, the Los Angeles Times reported last summer. Under their dissolution agreement, Berry also must pay Martinez 4.3% of any income she receives above $2 million.
As recently as May, Berry and Martinez reached a new co-parenting agreement that mandated therapy sessions to “resolve disputes and conflicts between them in an effort to successfully co-parent” their son, according to court documents obtained by Page Six.
Both parents agreed to attend two individual sessions and at least six joint co-parenting sessions, the documents said, according to Page Six.
But Berry now alleges that Martinez has reneged on this agreement about therapy “with careless disregard,” the Post reported.
“To him, the terms of the parties’ stipulated court orders are simply suggestions to follow when it benefits him and which he ignores when it does not fit his alienation agenda,” the new court documents said.
“Olivier’s conduct harms the parties’ son,” Berry claimed in the filing, adding it also “causes further damage to the parties’ already strained relationship.”
The Emmy winner asked a judge to force Martinez to stick to the schedule for therapy. But the “Unfaithful” actor hit back, claiming that his ex-wife “knew” he would be unavailable for the therapy sessions this summer because he would be traveling.
In Martinez’s response, obtained by In Touch Weekly, he said that Berry was “constantly attempting to harass and strong-arm Respondent (Martinez) by forcing him into ‘submission’ using her wealth, and the legal professionals at her disposal.”