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Actress Halle Berry arrives for the premiere of ‘Cloud Atlas’ at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on October 24, 2012 in Hollywood, California.
JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images
Actress Halle Berry said that her three failed marriages were a result of a bad decision to marry “boys” instead of grown-up men.
The star of Monster’s Ball, Boomerang and the soon-to-be released movie Kidnap, made the impromptu comments to a group of about 300 mostly young black men who gathered in Detroit over the weekend for the annual Student African American Brotherhood conference (SAAB)
Berry, 49, who attended the event at the request of actor Dondré Whitfield, (the national spokesman for SAAB) told the young men that they had a responsibility to treat women with decency and respect.
“As women, we need our men to stand up and be men,” she told the group, who hail mostly from colleges and universities across the nation. “Take care of us and serve us. When you do that, we will fall over and bow at your feet. But you have to start it, because God made you first.”
Berry said that she was feeling the blues last year, following yet another divorce from her third husband, Olivier Martinez.
“I was feeling really down because I filed my third divorce. I thought, ‘I can’t get it right.’ I was feeling heavy-hearted, embarrassed and ashamed. I thought, ‘Surely it’s my fault. I need help. This is not where I want to be. I should be somebody’s wife. I wanted to be a wife and mother. How I became an actress, I don’t even know.’ But I was three times divorced with two baby daddies and I don’t even know how this happened.”
While at a Halloween party last year with her daughter, Nahla Berry said that she ran into Whitfield, who she credits with helping to give her “language” to understand manhood and change her perspective on men.
“Within 20 minutes I was in tears and I was vomiting all of my life to this man,” she said. “I looked at the part that I played and looked at the part the men I had married played. I had chosen boys. I wanted to do grown up things, but I was not with a grown up. I was choosing from a superficial place. I became a monster. I was head banging mad, because it was not working. Here, I am a woman, trying to be married to a boy.”
In 1993, Berry married former baseball player David Justice. The two divorced in 1997. Then, in 2001, she married singer Eric Benét. That relationship ended in 2005. For five years she dated model Gabriel Aubrey and gave birth to the couple’s daughter in March 2008. But that relationship ended in a highly publicized custody battle between the two. In June 2014, a Superior Court ruled that Berry had to pay Aubry $16,000 a month in child support as well as a retroactive payment of $115,000 and a sum of $300,000 for Aubry’s attorney fees.
In 2013, she married Martinez, a French film actor and gave birth to their son, Maceo. But the two ended the relationship last October.
She told the young men who were angling to catch a glimpse of her and were later invited one by one to the stage to shake her hand, that she won’t fall for the wrong man again.
“I got it. It took me a long time, but I got it,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Now I know exactly what I’m looking for and I’ll take my time. Because I deserve that.”
Jamal Watson is the senior staff writer at Diverse: Issues In Higher Education. He is the author of a forthcoming biography on the Reverend Al Sharpton. You can follow him on twitter @jamalericwatson
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