Cher says that after their fame skyrocketed, Bono became controlling. By 1972, at just 26, she felt “trapped” in a “loveless marriage” and was almost driven to harm herself.
She wrote in her memoir, she stepped onto her hotel balcony in Las Vegas and looked down.
“I was dizzy with loneliness. I saw how easy it would be to step over the edge and simply disappear. For a few crazy minutes I couldn’t imagine any other option. I did this five or six times,” she said.
But thinking about her loved ones stopped Cher. She said, “Things like this could make people who look up to me feel that it’s a viable solution.”
An empowered Cher realized: “I don’t have to jump off. I can just leave him.”
The couple separated following the incident and divorced in 1975. Cher said, “One day he came into the kitchen at my house and said, ‘Cher, I want to apologize. I realized that I hurt you in so many ways, and I was wrong.’ That went a long way for me.”
However, in her interview with the Times, she also said that she wrestles with her perception of her ex-husband because she claims he stole from her and is still fighting to earn royalties for her work he owned.
She revealed, “He took all my money. I just thought, ‘We’re husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine.’ It didn’t occur to me that there was another way . . . To this day, I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, during what day, did you go, “Yeah, you know what? I’m going to take her money.”’”