Halle Berry to court: I would never hurt our child
The actress submitted messages and recordings to the court, and Olivier Martinez wants full custody. On October 1, a judge temporarily granted a restraining order.
Halle Berry filed a written response on October 5 to allegations by her ex-husband Olivier Martinez that she physically attacked their son. Parts of the filing have become public, and the actress rejects every claim in it. A hearing is set for October 16, 2026.
What does Martinez claim happened on September 26?
Martinez asked a Los Angeles court for a temporary restraining order and full custody of their son. According to Serbian media the boy is 13, while foreign sources say he is 12. Martinez claims that on September 26 Berry jumped on the boy and began choking him while he was using virtual reality equipment.
On October 1, the court partly granted the request and temporarily approved the restraining order. That suspended the previous equal parenting arrangement, set when the divorce was finalized in August 2023. Until the hearing, Berry sees her son two days a week and every other weekend. A foreign source mentions a distance of about 100 yards, but ties it to Martinez in one place and to the boy in another, so it remains unclear whom the measure actually applies to.
What does Halle Berry tell the court?
In the filing, the actress writes that she has never abused her son, physically or emotionally. She then adds:
“I am a victim of domestic violence and I help victims of domestic violence. I am not a perpetrator of violence. I would never hurt our child.”
She attached recordings and correspondence that, in her words, prove the opposite of what Martinez claims. In her version, she walked into the room to stop the boy’s gaming and took out her phone to film him. The boy reached out to snatch the device, which at first looked like playful scuffling. Berry says there was no choking, no grabbing of the neck and no knocking him down.
Then, she says, the situation changed: the boy suddenly shifted mood and lunged at her, and her partner Van Hunt separated them. After the boy threatened to go to his father, she let him spend the rest of the weekend with Martinez, and before that she sent him a message asking for help with setting boundaries in parenting. She also states that the boy had no injuries when he left.
The messages she sent Martinez at the time, she explains, reflect her distress that the boy had become physically aggressive toward her, not any attack by her on him. The expression of regret in those messages referred to the evening ending in a quarrel:
“I told Olivier I felt ‘terrible about what happened,’ which was true.”
The filing also says Martinez mentioned no incident in the following days, neither at a parent meeting at school in late September nor at the celebration of their son’s birthday.
What does her attorney say?
Marina Bek, Halle Berry’s attorney, assessed Martinez’s request in a statement with this line:
“To say this filing is entirely meritless and deliberately misleading would be an understatement.”
In the same statement she speaks of a “well-documented history” of violent behavior and of sanctions Martinez has already faced. She did not name the incident. Media link it to the 2012 attack on Gabriel Aubry, Berry’s partner at the time. That link is a media assumption, not a statement by the attorney.
Berry and Martinez married in 2013. The divorce was finalized in August 2023. In the sources available to us there is no response from Martinez to Berry’s filing.
We are not publishing the name of the minor child.
