Sharon Stone Says She Lost Child Custody Because Of Basic Instinct Nudity
Basic Instinct made Sharon Stone a household name — but she says it also devastated her own household.
The actor said on Tuesday’s episode of Table For Two wWith Bruce Bozzi that the 1992 Paul Verhoeven film, an erotic thriller quite risqué for its time, became so infamous that she wound up losing custody of her son more than 10 years after its release.
“I lost custody of my child,” Sharon revealed. “The judge asked my child, my tiny little, tiny boy, ‘Do you know your mother makes sex movies?’ This kind of abuse by the system ― this kind of abuse, that I was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie.”
“People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now,” she added. “You saw maybe like a 16th of a second of possible nudity of me, and I lost custody of my child ... I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in my upper and lower chamber of my heart.”
Th Oscar-nominated star married investigative journalist Phil Bronstein in 1998 and adopted their son Roan in 2000, according to Page Six. Bronstein filed for divorce in 2003, however, leading the actor to request full custody — only to be denied in 2004, she now says, because of the Verhoeven film.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “It literally broke.”
At the time, it was reported that the judge merely denied her request to move her son from San Francisco, where Roan lived with her ex-husband, back to Los Angeles with her. The judge reportedly found that she had a tendency to “overreact” to Roan’s various health issues, and that Bronstein was better able to provide consistent care.
“It also ended my dating world,” Sharon remarked on this week’s podcast, when Bozzi asked if her role in Basic Instinct scared suitors away. “And I also think that men didn’t want to date a woman that other men thought of like that. And that’s also a failure of the male reality. I can’t wade through that.”
Sharon previously reflected on the custody loss in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, per Entertainment Tonight.
She wrote that she was “punished for changing the rules of how we see women,” and that she “slept every afternoon” and “couldn’t function” for years.
“Now people walk around showing their penises on Netflix, but, in the olden days, what we were doing was very new,” she told The New Yorker in 2021. “This was a feature film for a major studio, and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality, all these things that, in my era, were breaking norms.”
On Tuesday’s podcast, Sharon also talked about what happens when actors are unfairly conflated with the people they portray.
“The guy that played Jeffrey Dahmer, no one thinks that he’s a [person] who eats people,” she said, referring to Evan Peters in a recent Netflix series. “It doesn’t turn him into a serial killer who eats people, or make him an antisocial person. It makes him a very complex person who took an incredibly difficult part.”
Sharon’s son, for his part, reportedly changed his name in 2019 — from Roan Bronstein to Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
Listen to the full interview on iHeart. (Stone’s remarks about losing custody begin at about the 25:27 mark.)