Actress Halle Berry’s ex-husband revealed some telling reasons why their marriage didn’t work out, explaining that it had a lot to do with how the Oscar-winning star saw her role as a wife compared to what he’d experienced growing up.
Former MLB player David Justice, who got hitched to Berry in 1993, said during a recent podcast interview that he started to question their compatibility after a brief “honeymoon phase” early in their marriage.
“My knowledge and my understanding, my wisdom around relationships just wasn’t vast,” he said on an episode of Matt Barnes’ “All the Smoke” podcast. “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?”
“Then I’m thinking, ‘OK, if we have kids, is this the woman I want to have kids with and build a family with?’ ” Justice continued. “At that time, as a young guy — she don’t cook, don’t clean, don’t really seem like motherly, and then we start having issues.”
Justice, now 59, said he and Berry didn’t receive “negative attention” until they broke up in 1996.
“She asked me to marry her after knowing me for five months,” the pro athlete added. “I said OK, because I couldn’t say no. Who’s going to say no at that time?”
“I don’t know if my heart was really into it, but I didn’t want to make her feel bad and say no, you know, or [if] I was just in the moment,” he went on.
“We spent a lot of time apart because she was doing movies in this country, that country. And we honestly probably could have made it if I knew about therapy. If we knew about therapy, we probably could have made it,” he told Barnes.
“We never had any major issues like that,” Justice said. “It’s just … because I was young and had only been in one real relationship before her.”
Justice married his current wife, Rebecca Villalobos, in 2001 and has three children with her.
Berry, 58, was married twice more: to Eric Benét from 2001 until 2005, and to Olivier Martinez from 2013 until 2016. The actress has a daughter with French-Canadian model Gabriel Aubry and a son with Martinez. She has been in a relationship with musician Van Hunt since 2020.