Not every celebrity split ends in quiet co-parenting and friendly brunches. These 30 marriages and long-term relationships ended in public accusations, courtroom battles, and bitterness that never fully faded. Here’s a look back at the exes who never made peace.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner
Affleck and Garner married in 2005 after meeting on set years earlier, and stayed together a decade before announcing their separation in June 2015. They didn’t file for divorce until April 2017, and it took another year and a half to finalize that October. Affleck has since called the split “the biggest regret of my life,” even while describing their eventual settlement as amicable.
Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber
Watts and Schreiber were never married, but their 11-year relationship and 2016 split still made headlines given how private the two had kept their life together. The couple share two sons and have continued co-parenting since, though Watts has said the transition was harder than it looked from the outside. She remarried actor Billy Crudup in 2023, while Schreiber has mostly stayed out of the tabloid spotlight since.
Jon Gosselin and Kate Gosselin
The stars of Jon & Kate Plus 8 announced their divorce in 2009, right as the show was hitting record ratings, and the split played out almost as publicly as their marriage had. Custody and finances stayed contentious for years, and at one point Jon’s lawyers tried to halt production entirely on the family’s Pennsylvania property. The show limped on for years afterward as Kate Plus 8, with Jon appearing less and less.
Loni Anderson and Burt Reynolds
Anderson and Reynolds married in 1988 and adopted a son together, but their 1993 split turned into one of the ugliest celebrity divorces of the decade. Reynolds filed first, and both sides gave dueling tell-all interviews accusing each other of infidelity and worse in the tabloids for months. The fight over custody and finances dragged on for years, and neither ever fully walked back what they’d said about the other.
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony
Lopez and Anthony married in June 2004 and had twins in 2008, but announced their separation in July 2011. Anthony filed for divorce in April 2012, and the case dragged on for more than two years before it was finalized in June 2014, with Lopez retaining primary custody of their children. Both have since remarried other people, more than once.
Robert De Niro and Grace Hightower
De Niro and Hightower married in 1997, split just two years later, then reconciled and renewed their vows in 2004 rather than finalize the divorce. They separated for good after 20 years together in 2018 and finally filed for divorce that year. The case dragged on afterward, with Hightower’s lawyer accusing De Niro of unfairly cutting her payments and his team countering that he was working nonstop just to cover them.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West
Kardashian filed for divorce from West in February 2021, ending a seven-year marriage that had made them one of the most-photographed couples in the world. What followed was anything but quiet: in early 2022, Kardashian told a Los Angeles court that West was deliberately dragging out the proceedings, saying he “does not accept” that the marriage was over. She was declared legally single that March, and a final settlement wasn’t reached until November 2022, nearly two years after she filed.
Sean Penn and Robin Wright
Penn and Wright’s relationship stretched back to the late 1980s, on and off, before they finally married in 1996. Even married, the split-and-reconcile pattern continued for years, and they separated for good in 2009, with the divorce finalized in 2010. Both have remarried since and rarely discuss the marriage in interviews.
Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale
Stefani and Rossdale married in 2002 and built a very public life together across both of their music careers, but Stefani filed for divorce in August 2015. The split followed reports that Rossdale had an affair with the family’s longtime nanny, a revelation that blindsided fans who’d followed the couple for over a decade. Stefani has since said the breakup shaped much of her 2016 album, This Is What the Truth Feels Like.
Mike Tyson and Robin Givens
Tyson and Givens married in February 1988 after a whirlwind courtship, but the marriage collapsed within months. In a widely watched 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, Givens described life with Tyson as “torture, pure hell, worse than anything I could possibly imagine,” with Tyson sitting silently beside her. She filed for divorce that October, and the marriage was dissolved by 1989.
Brandi Glanville and Eddie Cibrian
Rimes and Cibrian met filming a TV movie together in 2009 while both were married to other people. Their affair became public within months, and the two married in 2011 once both of their divorces were final. Cibrian’s ex-wife never quite let it go, turning her frustration with Rimes into a recurring storyline on a hit reality show for years afterward.
Peter Andre and Katie Price
Andre and Price met on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! in 2004, married the following year, and turned their marriage into the reality show Katie & Peter, which ran until their 2009 split. The divorce played out almost entirely in public, with both releasing competing memoirs and interviews blaming the other for the end of the marriage. More than a decade later, the two were still trading barbs about each other in the British press.
Tom Cruise and Mimi Rogers
Rogers married Cruise in May 1987, when he was still years from his biggest fame, but the marriage broke down by the end of 1989 and their divorce was finalized in February 1990. Rogers is widely credited with introducing Cruise to Scientology during their marriage. In a 1993 interview, she suggested his interest in becoming a monk had affected their intimacy, a comment she later said had been misinterpreted.
Josh Brolin and Diane Lane
Brolin and Lane married in August 2004, and the relationship made headlines within months when Lane called police after an altercation at their home that December, leading to Brolin’s arrest on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge; Lane declined to press charges. The couple stayed together for years afterward before finally divorcing in 2013. Both have since remarried.
Seal and Heidi Klum
Klum and Seal filed for divorce in 2012 after seven years of marriage, and things turned hostile fast. In an unannounced TMZ interview, Seal suggested Klum had moved on with her bodyguard before their split was even finalized, and said he wished she’d shown “a little more class.” Klum’s team fired back publicly, and the two rarely appeared friendly in interviews for years afterward.
Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott
McDermott’s affair became public in December 2013, just after the couple welcomed their second son, and the fallout played out on their own Lifetime series, True Tori. They stayed together for another decade despite it, weathering public reports of unpaid bills and mounting debt along the way. McDermott announced their separation in a since-deleted Instagram post in June 2023, and Spelling filed for divorce the following March, citing irreconcilable differences after 18 years together.
Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green
Fox and Green married in 2010 after years of dating, and split in 2020 after a decade together and three children. The timing drew scrutiny when Fox went public with a new relationship just months later, and their divorce wasn’t finalized until 2022. Green has said in interviews that the split and its aftermath were harder on their kids than either parent anticipated.
Heather Locklear and Richie Sambora
Locklear filed for divorce from Sambora in February 2006 after twelve years of marriage, and the split quickly turned into a legal fight over their young daughter. Weeks later, Sambora filed his own petition seeking joint custody and enforcement of their prenuptial agreement, dragging the case out for more than a year. Their divorce wasn’t finalized until April 2007.
Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth
Cyrus and Hemsworth’s on-and-off relationship finally led to marriage in December 2018, in a private Nashville ceremony held just weeks after a wildfire destroyed the home they shared. The marriage didn’t last eight months: Cyrus announced their separation that August, and Hemsworth filed for divorce days later, citing irreconcilable differences. Cyrus has said her 2019 song “Slide Away” captured what she was going through at the time, and their divorce was finalized in January 2020.
Scottie Pippen and Larsa Pippen
Pippen filed for divorce from Larsa in 2016 after nineteen years of marriage and four children together, then withdrew the petition, and the couple tried to move past it. It didn’t stick: Larsa filed for divorce herself in 2018, and this time neither side backed down. The case dragged on for three more years before it was finally finalized in late 2021.
Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger
Baldwin and Basinger’s marriage ended in 2002, but their custody battle over daughter Ireland dragged on for years and turned unusually bitter. A furious voicemail Baldwin left for Ireland in 2007, after she missed a scheduled phone call, leaked to the press that same month and became one of the most talked-about audio clips of the decade. Baldwin later apologized publicly, but the recording overshadowed the rest of the custody dispute for years.
Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen
Stallone and Nielsen’s whirlwind romance led to marriage in December 1985, barely a year after they met on the set of Rocky IV. The marriage lasted less than two years, ending in divorce in 1987 amid tabloid reports of affairs on both sides. Stallone later described the relationship as one of the more chaotic periods of his life, and the two rarely crossed paths publicly again.
Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock
Anderson and Kid Rock dated on and off for years before marrying aboard a yacht in the south of France in 2006. The marriage lasted only about four months before Anderson filed for divorce that November, one of the shortest celebrity marriages of the decade. The two got back together briefly afterward before splitting for good, and Anderson has said in later interviews that the relationship was far more turbulent than it looked from the outside.
Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey
Simpson and Lachey’s marriage played out on their own reality show, and years later a resurfaced clip of Lachey calling a 22-year-old Simpson a “spoiled brat” went viral and reignited old grievances. In her 2020 memoir, Simpson wrote that she wished they’d been the kind of exes who could stay friends, but that her own actions during the marriage had hurt him. The two divorced in 2006 and have mostly avoided commenting on each other publicly since.
Larry King and Shawn Southwick
King married Southwick in 1997, his seventh marriage, and the couple had two children together. They filed for divorce in 2010 but reconciled, only to file again in August 2019, and the two were still estranged and in the middle of divorce proceedings when King died in 2021. The fight didn’t end there: Southwick later went to court to contest his handwritten will, alleging one of King’s sons had pressured him into rewriting it.
Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas
Griffith and Banderas married in 1996 and worked together on several films over the years, including 2014’s Automata. After 18 years of marriage, Griffith filed for divorce in 2014, citing irreconcilable differences, and it was finalized the following year. Griffith later said in interviews that she felt she’d lost a sense of herself during the marriage and needed the divorce to rebuild her own identity.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie
Pitt and Jolie’s marriage ended after an alleged altercation aboard a private plane in 2016 that Jolie’s team said involved their children. Pitt denied wrongdoing, and FBI records released in 2022 showed the agency ultimately declined to pursue charges, though the documents included photos of injuries Jolie reported from the incident. The custody battle that followed dragged on for years, turning one of Hollywood’s most-watched marriages into one of its most public breakups.
