Sean Penn has denied ever hitting his ex-wife Madonna with a baseball bat during their four-year marriage. “I had a freaking SWAT team come into my house,” Penn told in an interview published on Saturday, June 22.
He explained that Madonna had informed the police about her concerns regarding guns in the house. “I said, ‘I’m not coming out. I’m going to finish my breakfast.’ The next thing I knew, windows were being broken all around the house, and they came in.”
Penn added, “They had me in handcuffs.”
Despite their rocky marriage and eventual divorce, Penn still holds affection for his first wife. “She’s someone I love,” he told.
“It turns out it’s a lot quicker to repair a friendship after divorce if there are no kids involved. It took [ex-wife Robin Wright] and me quite a while.
There was a lot of drama. It’s much more important to repair it if there are kids involved, but it’s not an easy process.”
Penn, 63, and Madonna, 65, were married from 1985 to 1989. Madonna initially filed for divorce in 1987 but withdrew the papers before refiling two years later.
During this period, reports surfaced alleging that Penn had not only physically assaulted Madonna but had also tied her to a chair for hours, including accusations of hitting her with a baseball bat.
Madonna has denied any physical abuse during her marriage to Penn.
“While we certainly had more than one heated argument during our marriage, Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up,’ or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless, and false,” she stated in a 2015 declaration while testifying on Penn’s behalf in a defamation lawsuit against Lee Daniels.
At that time, Penn had filed a $10 million lawsuit against Daniels, who had referred to Penn while discussing domestic violence in Hollywood.
(Daniels was defending Empire star Terrance Howard, who had admitted to hitting his first wife Lori McCommas in a 2015 Rolling Stone interview.) The lawsuit was settled in 2016.
“Not only did we win the case, but Daniels wrote a public letter and contributed to CORE,” Penn told the Times. (CORE, the Community Organized Relief Effort, was co-founded by Penn and Ann Lee in 2010.)
Penn, who has been married three times, finalized his divorce from Leila George in April 2022, as confirmed by Us Weekly.
Regarding his romantic future, Penn shared that he is “thrilled every day” to be out of a serious relationship.
“I’m just free,” he said. “If I’m going to be in a relationship, I’m still going to be free, or I’m not going to be in it, and I’m not going to be hurting. I don’t sense I’ll have my heart broken by romance again.”
