Halle Berry celebrated her 59th birthday on Thursday in enviable fashion: lounging on the beach, sipping wine with her loved ones, and trolling her ex.
“Phew…! cooking, cleaning and mothering,” she captioned a carousel of photos posted to her Instagram featuring the Oscar winner at total peace with beau Van Hunt, showing off a personalized envelope from one of her kids, and sipping out of a coconut, head thrown back in laughter.
The caption seemed incongruous with the images, none of which depicted Berry cooking or cleaning. That’s because it’s likely a sly shot back across the bow at her ex David Justice, who made a series of comments about his relationship with the actress last week, which had her fans outraged.
“My knowledge and my understanding, my wisdom around relationships just wasn’t vast. So I’m looking at my mom — and I’m a Midwest guy — so, in my mind, I’m thinking a wife at that time should cook, clean, [be] traditional, you know?” Justice said on the Aug. 7 episode of the All the Smoke podcast.
Berry and Justice met in 1993, and got engaged less than half a year after their first date. The rising star proposed to the athlete, who was at the peak of his fame playing with the Atlanta Braves. The couple separated in 1996, and were divorced the year after. Berry has kept mum over the years on the subject of their split, telling PEOPLE in 1996 that she was “still struggling to understand” the reasons, because while “every day wasn’t bliss, [I] didn’t see that our problems were so great we’d be divorcing.”
But Justice was clear about his own reasons on All the Smoke, characterizing his thought process at the time: “Okay, if we have kids, is this the woman I want to have kids with and build a family with? At that time, as a young guy — she don’t cook, don’t clean, don’t really seem motherly, and then we started having issues.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to reps for Berry and Justice.
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Berry previously opened up about a harrowing incident in which a past partner struck her hard enough during a dispute to puncture her eardrum. But she has not specified the identity of the partner, or responded to Justice’s claims that her fans have linked him to the claim, an association he denies.
Still, without any comment from Berry, Justice thanked her in a 2015 social media post for “finally squashing all of the rumors in the past, that I had physically abused her.”
Steve Granitz/WireImage
Berry is mother to two children — Nahla whom she shares with ex Gabriel Aubry, and Maceo-Robert, whom she shares with ex Olivier Martinez.
The Monster’s Ball and X-Men star rang in this past Mother’s Day by sharing a saucy video taken from bed beside Hunt.
“We’re about to give it a spin,” Berry said of a new intimacy gel sold by her women’s health brand, Respin. “Happy Mother’s Day once again, everybody, I hope all of you are somewhere spinning.”
You can listen to Justice’s full comments on All the Smoke above.
