Denise Richards in Tears Recalling Marriage to Charlie Sheen: “I Had to Hold It Together”
“I Don’t Know How I’m Here”
In the series, Richards, 54, shares raw details of the emotional toll her relationship with Sheen took on her, admitting she sometimes doesn’t understand how she survived it.
“What he put me through, I don’t know how I’m here, to be honest,” Richards says through tears. The actress, who shares two daughters — Sami, 21, and Lola, 20 — with Sheen, revealed that humor was often the only way she coped with the chaos. “The only way through tragedy was having a f—ing sense of humor, because it was so bad.”
She even recalled moments that outsiders would find shocking. “I know people thought we were crazy, laughing about things like, ‘Remember when you took a baseball bat to all the TVs?’ But if I wasn’t strong, I would have gone down a very dark road.”
Three Stages of a Marriage
Breaking down on camera, Richards described her life with Sheen in three parts: “The time I met him and married him, then my divorce, and then the aftermath.” She admitted holding it together often felt impossible, but she did it for the sake of her children.
The cracks in their relationship became more visible during Sheen’s run on Two and a Half Men. Richards claims the show’s success put pressure on him, and his growing substance abuse quickly escalated into “irrational anger.”
“As soon as the show started getting really successful, it was like he was sabotaging everything — the show, our family, us,” Richards explains.
She says she reached out to his sponsor, worried about his drug use, but others around him dismissed her concerns as postpartum hormones. “I knew something was f—ing wrong,” she recalled.
Conflict Behind Closed Doors
Richards also accused people in Sheen’s inner circle of stoking conflict between them. “I felt like people around him were trying to pit us against each other, even though we were married, had one child, and another baby on the way. That was very difficult for me. And I’m not just this quiet wife. I’m a strong woman, and I’ll say when something isn’t right.”
By 2006, their marriage collapsed in a highly publicized divorce battle, which included a temporary restraining order after Sheen allegedly threatened her life. During that time, Richards says her focus shifted solely to protecting their daughters.
“It’s not their fault we got divorced,” she explained. “They didn’t ask to be born into a broken family, or a family that was so public. I just wanted them to feel safe.”
Sheen Reflects With Regret
For his part, Sheen, now 60, admits in the docuseries that he made life harder than it needed to be. “I made it a lot more difficult than it needed to be, and I feel awful about that to this day,” he says.
A Story of Pain, Survival, and Resilience
Despite the chaos of their past, both Richards and Sheen now appear to be in a better place, working to co-parent their daughters. Still, Richards’ emotional testimony in aka Charlie Sheen sheds light on the painful reality behind the Hollywood headlines.
The docuseries is now available to stream on Netflix, offering a raw glimpse into one of Hollywood’s most infamous marriages.
