Basic Instinct scene cost me custody of my son, says Stone
Actress says negative perceptions of her after infamous leg-uncrossing factored in her divorce
SHARON STONE says she lost custody of her son because of the famous scene in Basic Instinct in which she uncrosses her legs.
The Oscar-nominated actress, now 64, said she was a victim of “abuse by the system” as a judge asked her young son, Roan, if he knew “that your mother makes sex movies?”
Stone and her ex-husband Phil Bronstein adopted Roan in 2000 after the pair had difficulties conceiving. She revealed last year that she had “lost nine children” through miscarriages.
But when the couple divorced in 2004, a judge decided that Roan should reside with Mr Bronstein, a Pulitzer prize-nominated war correspondent.
Opening up on the custody battle on iheart’s Table for Two With Bruce Bozzi podcast, she said: “I lost custody of my child. When the judge asked my child – my tiny little, tiny boy – “Do you know your mother makes sex movies?”’
The reference was to the 1992 erotic thriller Basic Instinct, in which Stone played a calculating killer and Michael Douglas the investigating murder detective who became obsessed with her.
In the famous scene, Stone’s character Catherine Tramell is being interrogated by police when she slowly uncrosses her legs, revealing that she isn’t wearing underwear, before crossing them again.
The scene caused a stir at the time, and Stone said it has negatively affected perceptions of her in later life.
“This kind of abuse by the system, that it 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 and you saw maybe like a 16th of a second of possible nudity of me – and I lost custody of my child,” she added.
However, it has been noted that the judge found different faults with Stone as a parent — including that she so overreacted to her eight-year-old son’s health issues that she suggested he get a Botox treatment for his pungent feet. She denied this allegation.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Anne-christine Massullo also said Stone “delegates many of her parenting responsibilities to third parties” and has “simply refused” to participate in counselling unless her “schedule is accommodated and her demands are met”.
The effects of the custody battle were so traumatic that Stone was admitted to hospital.
“I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart… it broke my heart,” she said.
She also said her role in the film made life difficult in the “dating world”.
“Men didn’t want to date a woman that other men thought of like that and that’s a failure of male reality,” she said.
Following her divorce, Stone adopted her second son, Laird Vonne, in 2005 and her third son, Quinn Kelly Stone, in 2006.
Stone has a good relationship with all three of her sons. Roan is now 22, Laird is 17 and Quinn is 16. She has been open about her struggles to conceive, and previously revealed in a 2017 interview with EXTRATV that a genetic blood condition prevented her from carrying a child to term.
An estimated 23 million miscarriages occur globally every year, with one in 10 women suffering a pregnancy loss in their life, according to medical journal The Lancet.