Photo: Lia Toby/Getty Images
I’d say Sharon Stone had a pretty good reason to leave her husband in the early 2000s. In a recent episode of The Person Who Believed in Me podcast, she shared that she decided to get a divorce when her then-husband got “furious” at her decision to get a double mastectomy after doctors found tumors in both of her breasts. Stone did not name the husband, but we do know that she was married to Phil Bronstein from 1998 to 2004.
Stone told host David Begnaud that her doctor made a house call sometime around 2001 to recommend a bilateral mastectomy, telling her that the tumors looked “really bad” and were likely cancerous. Even though Stone was personally convinced she did not have cancer, she decided she should go ahead with the surgery because she was “not fucking around.” But her husband felt otherwise.
“My husband said, ‘This is ridiculous!’ and got up and left the room,” Stone recalled. When Begnaud asked Stone to clarify which part her husband found ridiculous — the surgery or the possibility that she might have cancer that could kill her — Stone replied that the husband was upset “that I would have a bilateral.”
Stone remembered the doctor telling her husband, “If I had more patients like her, we’d have more women alive today. You need to sit down.” That, she said, was the end of the marriage. “That was it. He was done with me then,” she continued. She said “you could just tell” that their marriage was over, because “he thought I was ridiculous. He thought it was foolish. He thought I was making too many decisions myself.”
In the end, Stone’s tumors turned out to be benign, and she didn’t end up getting the mastectomy. She did, however, get a valuable lesson about her then-husband’s priorities. In 2020, Stone (understandably) told Drew Barrymore that she’s done with dating altogether. “I just find people to be insincere and not worth my time,” she said. “And I enjoy my alone time and my time with my kids and my friends more.” They would probably support her getting a life-saving surgery, too.
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