Sean Penn denies abusing Madonna with baseball bat as he reflects on divorce, says she's 'someone I love'

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Sean Penn has opened up about his relationship with Madonna denying that he ever hit his ex-wife with a baseball bat during their four-year marriage.

Penn, 63, and Madonna, 65, were married from 1985 to 1989.

What did Sean Penn say? 

"I had a freaking SWAT team come into my house,” Penn told The New York Times in an interview published on Saturday, June 22, adding that Madonna had told police she was worried about guns in the house. “I said: ‘I’m not coming out. I’m going to finish my breakfast'. The next thing I knew, windows were being broken all around the house and they came in.”

Despite the rough relationship he had with the singer, it seems Penn still has a soft corner for Madonna. He told The New York Times, “She’s someone I love."

“It turns out it’s a lot quicker to repair a friendship after divorce if there are no kids involved. It took [ex-wife Robin Wright] and I quite a while. There was a lot of drama. Much more important to repair it if there are kids involved, but no easy swing, right?”

Madonna first filed for divorce from Sean Penn

'Like a Virgin' singer first filed for divorce from Penn in 1987, though she withdrew the papers before filing again two years later.

Both times Madonna filed the paperwork, reports circulated alleging that Penn had not only physically assaulted the pop star, including beating her with a baseball bat, but tied her to a chair for hours.

Madonna, however, denied that there was ever physical abuse in her marriage to Penn.

"While we certainly had more than one heated argument during our marriage, Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up', or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless, and false,” she wrote in a 2015 statement while testifying on Penn’s behalf in a defamation lawsuit against Lee Daniels per US Magazine. 

Penn has three ex-wives, the latest being his divorce from Leila Goerge in April 2022.

"I’m just free,” he said. “If I’m going to be in a relationship, I’m still going to be free, or I’m not going to be in it, and I’m not going to be hurting. I don’t sense I’ll have my heart broken by romance again.”