Reminder: Your Celebrity Folk Hero Bill Murray Was Once Accused of Spousal Abuse
LatestOn Friday, Netflix released A Very Murray Christmas, a Bill Murray-crafted holiday special featuring a star-studded roster of guests that include outspoken celebrity humanitarians like George Clooney, Miley Cyrus, and Amy Poehler. The production (directed by Sofia Coppola) is cranky, morose, lonely, and somewhat charming—much like Murray’s public persona. In it, he scrambles to put together a Christmas variety show with a limited roster of friends and guests, many of whom don’t seem to like him very much.
This is something like a deadpan acknowledgment of a Hollywood fact: despite his cultivated image—a true PR triumph, even if it doesn’t always look intentional—Murray’s professional reputation is that of a man whose artistic abilities have rendered his notoriously bad temperament just this side of worthwhile. Harold Ramis once said, about his longtime collaborator: “You’d do a movie with Bill, a big comedy in those early days, just knowing he could save the day no matter how bad the script was, that we’d find something through improvisation.” Now, 35 years after Caddyshack, Murray’s instincts for both comedy and drama have made him one of the most revered actors working in film today.
But the mythologizing of his off-camera hijinks and on-camera genius have done a lot to erase the fact that the actor is known by those closest to him to be a cruel, difficult, and allegedly abusive human being.
You’ve probably heard the anecdote about Bill Murray charmingly crashing a couple’s engagement photos. Or when he confidently climbed behind the bar and started bartending at SXSW. But have you heard the one from 2007 about how he allegedly hit his (now ex-) wife in the face and “told her she was ‘lucky he didn’t kill her’”?
Classic Bill, right?
Via the Smoking Gun:
Bill Murray is a drug-addicted spousal abuser and serial adulterer who has abandoned his family, according to a scathing divorce filing by his estranged wife.
Jennifer [Butler] Murray alleges that the Academy Award-nominated actor’s ‘”adultery, addiction to marijuana and alcohol, abusive behavior, physical abuse, sexual addictions and frequent abandonment” led her in 2006 to move into a separate South Carolina home with the couple’s four children. A copy of Jennifer Murray’s court complaint, which was first reported by Charleston’s The Post & Courier, can be found here.
Murray contends that the comedian physically abused her on several occasions during their marriage (they were wed in 1997) and that the star hit her in the face during a November 2007 confrontation in her home. During that incident, the May 12 complaint alleges, the 57-year-old performer “told her she was ‘lucky he didn’t kill her.’”
Jennifer Murray charges that the actor would often leave town without telling her, and sometimes “travels overseas where he engages in public and private altercations and sexual liaisons.” She also claims that he “repeatedly…left threatening voice messages on the home telephone which the minor children have heard.”
(Along with her divorce filings, Jennifer Butler also requested a restraining order against the actor.)
At the time of the allegations, Murray’s lawyer stated, “I can say that Bill Murray is deeply saddened by the break-up of his marriage to Jennifer. They remain loving parents, committed to the best interest of their children.”
The pair finalized their divorce in 2008 and, according to the Telegraph, Butler withdrew her abuse allegation. In the court proceedings, she was awarded primary custody of the couple’s children and a lump sum of $7 million. Later, during a press conference for his film City of Ember, Murray commented that the divorce “was the worst thing that ever happened to me in my entire life” and “when you’re really in love with someone and this happens—I never had anything like this happen. It’s like your faith in people is destroyed because the person you trusted the most you can no longer trust at all… The person you know isn’t there anymore.”