In the days before social media, Sean Penn and Madonna were tabloid fixtures with reports of shocking alleged violence coming out about their short marriage from 1985 to 1989 — but at least one of those stories was true as he says a SWAT Team did raid their home!
Before people were doubting everything they read online, the celebrity tradition was to doubt everything seen on the covers and in the pages of all those tabloid magazines at the supermarket checkout lane. That’s something Sean Penn and Madonna certainly knew a lot about, as they were regular fixtures there.
As the biggest pop star on the planet in the 1980s, Madonna was of course going to be front and center as often as possible. So when she married Sean Penn in 1985, their union became the stuff of tabloid fodder, with all kinds of disturbing stories about the goings-on within their marital home spreading around.
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In an era where it wasn’t as easy to fact-check anything seen, many of those rumors picked up steam and became “fact” in the minds of likely millions of people. And some of the stories became legend — even if they weren’t necessarily true — like one that claimed Penn hit Madonna with a baseball bat. In another, he “trussed her up like a turkey.”
As with most celebrities at the time, neither deigned to respond to the wild and often baseless accusations being thrown around about them. Celebrity was a very different experience then. But now, there’s an opportunity for Sean Penn to set the record straight about “someone I love.”
Despite their marriage ending just four short years after it began, Penn told The New York Times that he and the pop icon were able to land in a good place. “It turns out it’s a lot quicker to repair a friendship after divorce if there are not kids involved,” he said.
Penn went through a similar post-divorce journey with Robin Wright, with whom he shares two children, Dylan Frances, 33, and Hopper Jack, 30. Penn and Wright got together shortly after his marriage to Madonna ended and were married from 1996 to 2010.
“It took Robin and I quite a while. There was a lot of drama,” Penn said of coming to a better place in their relationship after their divorce. “Much more important to repair it if there are kids involved, but no easy swing, right?”
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When talking about some of those rumors about his supposedly tumultuous marriage to Madonna, Penn said he didn’t even know what some of them meant, like the one where he allegedly “trussed her up like a turkey.”
“I didn’t know what ‘trussed up’ meant,” Penn told the Times. Another story came back to haunt him in a later relationship, with Penn sharing that after a “lovely night” together, he found her the next morning “looking at me like I killed her dog.” She then asked “about this hitting Madonna in the head with a baseball bat” rumor.
“‘I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about,” Penn admitted. “Now I think it’s fair to say that I’m not the biggest guy in the world. But if I hit Mike Tyson in the head with a baseball bat, he’s going to the hospital.”
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In the years since their divorce, Madonna has also pushed back against those persistent marital violence rumors. In 2015, she testified that he’d never abused her in support of his $10 million defamation lawsuit against Lee Daniels, creator of Empire. The suit was ultimately settled, with Daniels apologizing pubicly.
After Empire star Terrance Howard admitted that he’d slapped his wife in front of their children, Daniels jumped to his star’s defense by saying he at least had never done what “Marlon Brando or Sean Penn” did. In her affidavit supporting her ex, Madonna not only denied physical violence, but specifically cited the “trussed” and baseball bat stories.
“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 said, as noted by The Daily Mail.
But with all the stories that were categorically false, per both parties involved, Penn did admit that one had some truth to it. A SWAT Team did raid their house in response to one argument after Madonna called them concerned about guns in the house.
According to Penn, they smashed in windows, bursting into the home and putting him “in handcuffs.” According to Penn, he’d said he wasn’t going to come out, but was “going to finish my breakfast. The next thing I knew, windows were being broken all around the house and they came in.”
