Sean Penn Denies Assaulting Madonna During Their Tumultuous Marriage

Actor Sean Penn shut down the rumor that he used to hit his ex-wife, Madonna, with a baseball bat.

The New York Times published a profile of Penn, in which the Oscar winner denied the longstanding allegations. He recalled the police catching onto the rumor that he “trussed [Madonna] up like a turkey.”

“I had a freaking SWAT team come into my 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. They had me in handcuffs,” he said.

Penn and Madonna were married from 1985 to 1989. Despite their unstable relationship, Madonna defended Penn in 2015 when she described the allegations as “completely outrageous, malicious, reckless and false.”

“While we certainly had more than one heated argument… Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up,’ or physically assaulted me,” she said in a statement that year following Penn’s $10 million defamation lawsuit against Lee Daniels for spreading the rumor.

In 2018, Penn told Stephen Colbert that he still loved Madonna “very much.” The 63-year-old married Robin Wright following his divorce from the pop star, only to divorce her and marry Leila George in 2020, from whom he separated in 2022.