Halle Berry claps back at a troll who told her that she ‘can’t keep a man’

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Halle Berry has done a ton of work in recent years to rehabilitate her image after a nasty, years-long custodial and financial dispute with her ex, Gabriel Aubry. It’s still kind of wild to see Halle carrying on like normal, like nothing ever happened and everyone on her timeline yelling “you go girl” at everything she says and does. It’s bizarre, because in 2012-14, all kinds of accusations were being thrown around like it was just another day. Even back in 2015, Halle was still instigating beefs with Aubry over the court-mandated (and repeatedly reaffirmed) child support payments Halle had to make to Aubry. She just couldn’t get over the fact that she had to pay child support to her ex, and she did everything she could to halt payments, to be a deadbeat, and to even yank the joint custody away from Aubry.

I guess people either forgot about all of that messiness or they just want to forget it. By the end of that years-long debacle, Halle had thrown so much mud, I’m sure people still think Gabriel did something wrong and that Halle was somehow the wronged party, always and forever, because that’s how she always leaves relationships. Anyway, Halle is getting attention this week because she seemingly made a reference to all of this.

Halle Berry is firing back at online trolls who targeted her and her love life. The 54-year-old Oscar winner shared a quote on Instagram Saturday that read, “Women don’t owe you s—,” which received plenty of love from fellow A-listers such as Chrissy Teigen, Vivica A. Fox and Tia Mowry.

One online troll caught Berry’s attention when they commented, “With all of your accomplishments, fame, beauty, it seems, as if, you CAN’T keep a man,” to which Berry replied with, “Who said I wanted to keep them? I’m all about living your best life, if you make a wrong move, course correct and re-spin and start again!”

Another commenter wrote, “Says the women who can’t keep a man.” Berry responded with, “Who says I wanna keep the wrong man? cuz…..I don’t.”

[From People]

First of all, the Instagram post… it’s funny because the family court judge had to order Halle to pay child support like a million different times, because Halle DID owe a man some sh-t. So I feel like that was a pointed IG. But in general, yes, of course, women don’t owe men sh-t. And “keeping a man” is such a stupid concept and most men are objectively terrible and all of that. That being said… I still wonder why things went so dead-quiet between Halle and Olivier Martinez. And I do wonder if Halle has just tried to not be so toxic in relationships now or something. Maybe.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, IG.

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37 Responses to “Halle Berry claps back at a troll who told her that she ‘can’t keep a man’”

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  1. Julie says:

    I remember the public rage at this woman. It was crazed and irrational and yes, tinged with lots of misogynoir. I would hope we are now in an era where when a black woman tells us about racial microaggressions from her ex, we believe her.

    • SunRae says:

      Thank you.

      What we not gonna do is paint her as an instigator. She may have a bad picker but Gabrielle was a racist opportunist who tried to straighten his biracial daughter’s hair and refused to get a job.

      • Emm says:

        I feel like he was just in the news for being problematic again too.

      • anniefannie says:

        To be fair Gabriel wasn’t getting modeling jobs during the height of his career because Martinez beat the hell out of him ( his face in particular ) supposedly with Berrys encouragement.

      • Julie says:

        Gabriel was already fighting for that 16K a month long before he got the beat down. Please stop. And even he has never claimed permanent damage to his face. He had bruising which he happily exploited for a bit and then he was back playing “single parent” for the paparazzi when he only has Nahla half the time. In any case, it’s been ten years of him having a perfectly pretty face in public.

        Also the accusation that Halle Berry made her boyfriend fight her ex is yet another example of the shameless misogyny directed at this woman. How about maybe he was aggrevated to protect a woman he loves by things he could see for himself? How about maybe HE BELIEVES ALL WOMEN, even the ones with skin darker than his own?

        Isnt it funny how we never have to point out how a narrative that frames a white woman for 1) lying about a mentally abusive ex and 2) manipulating her boyfriend into violence is extremely dangerous?

      • ennie says:

        The fight -Olivier MTZ was/is a boxer-, was right after a judge blocked them to go live in France, Olivier Martinez home.

      • ennie says:

        could not edit:
        There was no gossip or background around Aubry being unfit to coparent. She probably tried to get all the dirt she could against him, and it just was not enough. Fighting him was counter-productive to them (Olivier and Halle), and finally they had to settle to coparent.

      • Julie says:

        So then you presumably agree that it is out of line for people to be still running around in 2021 stating that this woman manipulated her boyfriend into beating her ex? He had independent reason to hate Gabriel. Just asking because again it’s very curious to me how little protection black women actually get even from supposedly liberal Media.

    • Amy Bee says:

      Hear, Hear!

    • Elizabeth says:

      Yes and Gabriel is the one who reportedly called her a “ghetto n-word” — he is terrible!

    • Madelaine says:

      @Julie: Oh, please, this has to stop. Olivier Martinez’s hot temper and brashness are notorious here in France. Halle Berry didn’t need to talk him into any kind of violent outburst he wouldn’t have consented to on his own. And if I recall things well, Gabriel Aubry was just the pretty face and lazy ass who landed a great job being Halle Berry’s sperm donor. The guy had no ambition of his own, was not exactly the workaholic type but he successfully figured out how much cash he could get from both his daughter and partner, which from a symbolical, historical and social standpoint, boils down to exploiting women of color. Nayla needed a father, and inconsistent court decisions only served to give her a wealthy father. I do not condone violence or vigilantism, but it seems to me Olivier Martinez did a fairly nice job reminding the entitled hair-straightening parasitical exploitive gold digging white male he had to earn a living and stop expecting monthly plantation revenue. The punch in the face was just a white male teaching another white male some sense of honor. Fair game to me. How many more Kevin Federlines do you think hard-working women should be in charge of fattening up?

      • Julie says:

        @Madeleine I do hope you realize that you are repeating my points. I’m one of the few people here calling out the racist and misogynistic treatment of Halle Berry in the comments and in the culture in general.

    • Madelaine says:

      @ Julie: Right, my bad. I’m usually a sharp reader but the emotion regarding that Gabe guy got the best of me, I guess. We’ve been saying the same thing all along, sorry.

  2. teehee says:

    This whole statement– its like, men are some kind of… balloon…and you gotta be holding them down to keep them from flying away– by like, sacrificing yourself and bending yourself.

    What a crock of hooey. Maybe a woman likes many balloons and gets tired of them. Maybe balloons arent worth keeping at all. Maybe she wants someone who can tie himself down and she don’t have to exert any effort herself…. anything but this stupid implication that a woman has to somehow “work” to “keep” a man– what crap

    • MM2 says:

      Your statement reminded me of the old Japanese folktale The Crane Wife. The Paris Review has a great article on it. The idea that women needs to sacrifice who they are, like ripping out their feathers every night to please a man, keeps us from flying.

  3. LillyfromLilooet says:

    I think Halle is a handful and treated Gabriel Aubry like sh!t.

    As a biracial woman, I usually have no grounds to stand on when it comes to any hair topic, but trust, Halle’s hair + Gabe’s hair does not equal kinky hair that can be straightened–it drove me NUTS when Halle was cast opposite David Duchovny and their on-screen children had kinky hair though neither actor does.

    What Gabriel might have tried to do is to deal with the puffball that fine and curly hair turns into when brushed out, aka perhaps gave her a blowout. He is a model and would be more familiar than most straight guys.

    I have spent my life a) apologizing for my hair looking white b) being a hair student of my fellow biracials. I always, always, always knew Michael Jackson’s children were not his bio kids because of the hair.

    And Gabe is a decent Canadian who yes, did/does work tried his best with Halle and she did treat him like dirt. I’ll also say that I resent the daylights out of hearing that he was perpetrating micro-aggressions against Halle or their child–Halle pulled that out as a cheap and easy card to play, and I do not believe it’s true.

    • Tanguerita says:

      I am sorry, but what does her or your hair to do with the topic of the article above? Am I missing something?it seems do random.

      • Jaded says:

        During the spiteful break-up one of the many things Halle accused Gabriel about was allegedly wanting to straighten her long, unruly hair because he couldn’t get a brush through it. Halle went nuts.

      • ennie says:

        She actually took the issue to the courts, along with the house gate thing, the pizza cheat day thing. I think she said that he gave the girl highlights, even.
        I recall that seeing Nahla with both parents back then was common, and apparently it was summer and the little girl’s hair was seemingly very light from being poolside or at the beach, as per pictures, IIRC. It was back when I became a CBitcher.
        What was odd to me, was her/their apparent inability to work out these minor details by themselves. It was all blown up in court, in an apparent effort to take Gabriel’s custody from him, things got even worse when she got with the French actor.

    • Ashley says:

      Fellow biracial chick from BC here — and can I get an Amen for MJ’s kids’ genetic history! They are not his biological kids. And I totally get Gabriel’s challenges with his daughter’s hair.

      And I ended up with the opposite hair to you: super-curly/coarse, but I am light-skinned and have red hair. My sister had almost-straight hair when she was young but it changed to exactly like mine at puberty. Still part of a Black family though! Genetics is weird.

      • LillyfromLilooet says:

        @Ashley AMEN!

        For years I would be yelling to the TV that MJ’s kids were yes, his beloved children but he was not the biological parent.

      • Anna says:

        Well, Blanket probably is. He looks very “Jackson”.

    • Julie says:

      I’m sorry but the amount of ridiculousness in this comment is excessive.

      1) did you miss a class on genetics? Because it is quite possible for a mixed-race woman paired with a white man to have a child with tight coily hair. Not only is it possible but it happens frequently, because guess what the vast majority black Americans carry white blood in their lineage and still somehow managed to have 4B/4C hair.

      2) I don’t for one second believe that a person with black blood does not understand the politics of straightening hair, so I’m going to explain it to you as if you were a none black person. we women who sometimes grow hair that is unconventional do not want our daughter’s taught at a young age that their hair that grows out of their heads is untamable or unworthy in its natural state. We are wary of the damage to their self-image at a very young age. We are not just concerned about chemical straightening but any straightening.

      When my mother flat ironed my hair as a child she would be sure to have a discussion with me about how this was just for change of pace. Presumably Halle wanted that for her child too. I don’t care if he is a model or a hairdresser, it’s absolutely appalling that he took that step without consulting her mother. I simply cannot believe that a man would have a child with a black woman and not bother to spend time understanding the socio-political context of her hair. That was bad enough but what’s even worse is the racists refusing to engage a point and instead hiding behind the hysteria trope. “she crazy y’all”. Smdh. In 2021 we still here?

      And it’s not lost on me that people right here are ready to re-examine how the courts and the media treated Britney Spears but for some reason are not ready to examine the racist and sexist aggressions levelled at Halle Berry by that same system. Straightening hair is just as big a deal for me as a black woman as introducing our child to a new religion. Caucasian judges may not get that but that doesn’t make it less valid.

      • Jaded says:

        My god-daughter is black. She straightens her hair. I realize we white people don’t “get it” much of the time but we’re not as stupid and bumbling and insensitive as you think we are.

      • Ky says:

        THANK YOU @Julie! I appreciate you for saying that. There is a lot more going on there than a difference of opinion on hairstyles. It would have been great if it could have been worked out outside of a court of law but if they could communicate that way they probably wouldn’t have broken up.

      • Julie says:

        @Jaded Taking today’s medal for best version of “some of my best friends are black”. Assuming you didn’t just make it up, my sympathies to that little girl. Not because her mother is making that choice for her but because someone who imagines herself to be her protector doesn’t get it and is too defensive to learn. Peak white nonsense.

  4. ennie says:

    I felt like she was not all that (run away from a bad crash), could not be by herself, learn to be a single woman, and had a not so good picker.
    I don’t remember the timeline, but I bet that Olivier Martinez was poisoned vs Aubry to get into such an ugly brawl. I recall that she wanted to take the family to France and Aubry was not having it.
    Some were saying that Aubry was being improper or something, I think it was smart that he or the paps documented his outings with their daughter, a little like Holmes did when she was escaping scientology.
    So glad to see Halle so stable now, especially for her cute children, happy to see she learned to coparent, and with Olivier she did not dare pull the same antics as with Aubry.
    I still y she was complaining about some pizza to the judge.
    Girl was blessed to be able to have children later in life.

  5. Rapunzel says:

    She later bitched on this post about paying Aubry and called it extortion. So she hasn’t gotten over her beef with him.

    I don’t blame her for feeling mistreated and used by him and not wanting to give him her hard earned money. But I can’t see how this animosity is healthy for her daughter.

    She is a textbook example of why women need to be careful with choosing husbands and baby daddies. And I totally agree, the “you can’t keep a man” is gross and she’s right on to not keep the wrong man. Too bad she didn’t learn that long ago.

  6. psl says:

    But isn’t that how we measure our worth? Whether we can “keep a man” or not?

    (eyeroll)

  7. lucy2 says:

    Not really a fan of hers, but the “who says I want to keep them” cracked me up.

  8. Watson says:

    I like Halle as an actress but not paying child support whether you’re a man or a woman is low. If you decide to have a kid, that’s on both parents to provide for the child so their standard of living is equal no matter whom the child is living with. If the custody is 50/50 then finances need to be distributed.

    My problem with her is how she publicly smeared him to try and get her way in the courts. He wasn’t a big Hollywood star like her, and definitely didn’t have her popularity or her bank account so she had ALL the upper hand in the tabloids. Remember when they said that Aubrey had tried to beat Olivier (and where Aubrey’s face was rocked) on Thanksgiving? The fight over Aubrey not giving up custody so Olivier and Halle could move to France? Remember how they conveniently didn’t have any video surveillance turned on at the house? Yup. In the end no charges were filed and custody was finalized a few days after.

    I’ve loved this woman since her Eric Benet days, and i do think she picks terrible people as partners, but she is not some paragon of virtue either. She actively sought the drama, got it and participated in it. Hopefully now that she’s older she is feeling settled and isn’t like this anymore.

  9. Liz version 700 says:

    Whew. Halle Berry is a lot in relationships. Her issues with her daughter’s father were so so dramatic. But my lord, when one of the most accomplished and arguably gorgeous women on the planet is being told “ you can’t keep a man”… never tell me we aren’t a misogynistic country. No one aside from places like this blog wanted to discuss this until after Clinton got the full brunt of it during the 2016 election, but Jeez we have a lot of work to do.

    • BnLurkN4eva says:

      I wish Halle had just used a sperm donor, I know that’s what she wanted based on an appearance on Oprah in the last years of her show. I think that’s what Gabriel started out being and some how one or the other of them were persuaded to make it official – bad idea. He was obviously a sperm donor to her and that’s probably why she’s so hurt and angry. I won’t judge either because I don’t know them and one of the things I’ve learned in my life is that things are not always the way they seem. Besides, she’s obviously sucked it up and is paying what’s she has been ordered to pay and that’s all that can be asked of her. Her daughter will turn 18 soon and she will be able to walk away from any further child support to him.

      • Watson says:

        THIS! She should have used a sperm donor!!! But the idea that she’s still appalled that she has to deal with her ex is telling. Y’all chose to have a baby together! That’s what happens when you have a baby!! *slaps hand on forehead*.

  10. Realistic says:

    It’s so sad when two partners break up and arent able to co-parent amicably especially for those on the public eye. Nahla will be able to read all the horrible things her parents have said about each other and I’m sure that will way heavily on her.

  11. Mabs A'Mabbin says:

    Not really the topic to beef on with Halle. I think she’s problematic in a drama needy way, but telling a woman she can’t keep a man sounds dreadfully Victorian, and I’d be embarrassed to utter it lol. There’s something liberating about falling in love, doing the dance, living a life, getting bored then changing scenery. ;P I’ve been with the same person for 30 years. Haven’t had relations with any other than the husband for 30 years. Does that make me a better woman or does it pale my existence?