'It broke my heart,' the actress said.
Sharon Stone is sharing how Basic Instinct impacted her custody battle. During an appearance on the iHeartPodcast Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi, the 64-year-old actress revealed that her 1992 flick was part of the reason she lost custody of her son, Roan, the now-22-year-old she adopted with her ex, Phil Bronstein.
"I lost custody of my child. When the judge asked my child -- my tiny little, tiny boy, 'Do you know your mother makes sex movies?'" Stone recalled, before detailing the "kind of abuse by the system."
"I was considered what kind of parent I was, because I made that movie," she said. "People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now and you saw maybe a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me and I lost custody of my child."
The situation had a deep impact on Stone, both physically and mentally.
"I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart," she said. "… It broke my heart. It literally broke my heart."
Stone opened up about her custody woes in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. In the book, she notes how, after she and Bronstein broke up in 2004, she lost primary custody of Roan, who was a toddler at the time.
At the time, Stone wrote that she couldn't disclose why she lost custody, both due to a confidentiality agreement and out of "respect" for Roan. She did share her feelings about the situation, though.
"I was punished for changing the rules of how we see women, and I understand that by writing this book I could be punished again," she wrote. "But this time I'm not afraid."
After losing custody, Stone "couldn't function," so much so that she "slept every afternoon" and "just couldn't get up." Physically, Stone soon learned that she had a prolapsed valve and was anorexic.
"I had stopped eating and fallen apart and hadn’t even noticed," she wrote. "I had just lain down and given up. My heart, it seemed, was actually broken."
As Stone worked to getter improve her health, she also continued to fight for her son.
"I did that for 13 years; I played a very long, very difficult game of custody chess in an effort to get him everything I could for his health and well-being," she wrote. "Now my home and my family are complete and I am able to re-find success in the rest of my life, as my heart is also complete."
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