Rock Stars That Destroyed Their Relationships

Some aspects of the human condition become cliches because they've been proven to be sadly and obnoxiously true one too many times. Case in point: How rock stars, particularly male rock stars, just can't seem to stay faithful to their wives and girlfriends. Perhaps they're too weak to resist the adulation and attention of millions of their fans, or the excitement of playing frenetic music each night gets them too riled up, or maybe the notion of reckless abandon and being a libertine who rejects the structure of monogamy is all just part of the rebellious spirit of rock n' roll.

Whatever the case may be, it's a story told time and again, across more than seven decades of rock music history — singers, guitarists, and drummers can't help but cheat on their partners back home. And those dalliances, whether brief or repeated, have catastrophic effects on their personal lives, as infidelity (or other acts of emotional or physical violence) tends to kill a relationship. Here are some of the most famous rock stars who cheated and ruined their off-stage partnerships.

Infamous for being a rocker who partied way too hard and for his womanizing ways, Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger seemingly decided to settle down with just one partner a mere nine months after he met her after a concert in Paris. But hours after his 1971 wedding in Saint-Tropez to actor Bianca Perez-Mora Macias — four months pregnant with Jagger's daughter at the time — it became clear that the rock star had no intention of changing his lifestyle. "My wedding was over on the wedding day," Bianca Jagger told the New York Daily News in 1986 (via Entertainment Weekly), referring to how she spent the night alone in the honeymoon suite while her husband palled around with celebrity wedding guests into the wee hours.

Both Jaggers carried on affairs throughout the marriage, but when Jagger started a relationship with American model Jerry Hall in 1977, that was the last straw. The couple lived in a Paris apartment together and were frequently photographed out and about. Bianca Jagger filed for divorce later that year. "It's probably the most male-chauvinistic-oriented society," she told Vanity Fair in 1986 of the musical industrial complex. "A rock star is the worst husband a woman could have."

In the early 1960s, the Beatles solidified as a group and honed its sound with a residency at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, performing at the venue nearly 300 times. One early fan who attended numerous shows was local teenager Maureen Cox, who struck up a romance with the band's drummer, Ringo Starr. "Here I was a silly 16-year-old hairdresser dating the most popular drummer in Liverpool," Cox later told "Le Chroniqueur" (via The Daily Beatle).

In February 1965, well after "Beatlemania" took hold, Starr and Cox quickly got married on account of how she was pregnant. While the couple would eventually have three children together, the marriage suffered from Starr's day-long drinking binges with other rock stars and multiple instances of philandering. After his relationship with Nancy Lee Andrews came to light in 1974, the Beatle's marriage was officially over. The breakup left Cox so distraught that she almost died by suicide.

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There's frequently been intense drama within the ranks of Blink-182. Guitarist Tom DeLonge left the group for years after arguments with the other band members, bassist Mark Hoppus was diagnosed with cancer, and drummer Travis Barker survived a 2008 small plane crash that killed four people. The extraordinarily traumatic and painful event in the tragic real-life story of Travis Barker led to a fatefully brief reconciliation with the musician's estranged wife, model Shanna Moakler.

While he convalesced from his substantial injuries in a hospital, Moakler used Barker's laptop computer, where she found numerous messages and scantily clad images from other women Barker had been intimate with during the marriage. "She saw all my emails from the previous three or four years, including messages from about 13 different girls I had been messing around with in the year before the plane crash," Barker wrote in his memoir "Can I Say?" (via Newsweek). "We had been on and off in that time, but that didn't mean she wanted to know about it. We both did our own thing when we were split up, but I never would have told her."

Sonny and Cher scored a bunch of countercultural-adjacent massive pop-rock hits in the 1960s and 1970s, including "I Got You Babe," "The Beat Goes On," and "Bang Bang," and the pair also starred on the variety program "The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour." Sonny Bono found success behind the scenes as a songwriter but struggled to get much attention as a performer until he started working with his then-18-year-old wife, Cher, in 1964. While she became a superstar singer and actor, Bono parlayed the celebrity his wife helped bring him into habitual cheating. "Stardom made Sonny a huge womanizer. One woman, or even five, was not enough for him," Cher told Parade in 2010. "I was trusting and faithful with him. The truth is, I'm not so sure we should've ever been husband and wife."

By the time Cher grew wise to Bono's behavior, the couple were entrenched in their symbiotic careers and to split would run the risk of professional ruin. It left Cher with thoughts of suicidal ideation. She said, "When I told Sonny, he said, 'If you leave me, America will hate you and you won't have a job.' I went, 'You know what, Sonny? I just don't care!'" Bono and Cher broke up in 1974; Sonny and Cher as an entertainment duo ended in 1976.

Iconic experimental noise rock band Sonic Youth formed in New York in the early '80s, and it thrived on the interplay between its two primary creative singers and songwriters, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, who got married in 1984. The band and marriage functioned well for more than 20 years, until Moore's ongoing other romantic relationship led to a split from Gordon and then the end of Sonic Youth.

Eva Prinz joined the band's orbit when she dated and nearly married a member of the extended Sonic Youth family. A book editor by profession, Prinz also asked Gordon to collaborate on a book about the history of mix tapes. She declined the chance, and figured Moore would, too, but he accepted. Prinz and Moore set up offices in a disused apartment in the band's possession, which Gordon noted they converted into an intimate living space. 

Any notion of a personal relationship between Prinz and Moore was confirmed when Gordon saw texts on her husband's phone referring to a romantic weekend trip. When Gordon asked Moore about the affair, he said it wasn't happening, but after she said she saw the text exchange, he confessed and said he planned to break things off with Prinz. Gordon then found a great deal of texts, emails, and videos exchanged between her husband and the book editor. But Moore didn't end the extramarital pairing, and in late 2011, Gordon and Moore announced that their marriage and Sonic Youth were over.

The Police blended punk with reggae to become one of the biggest new bands of the late 1970s. Fame would come for lead singer and main songwriter Gordon Sumner, who went by the stage name Sting, who was in his late twenties by the time the Police broke through in 1978, and had already been married for two years to Frances Tomelty, the mother of his first child, Joe.

Back in 1977, Sting and his family lived down the street from actor Trudie Styler. Tomelty and Styler forged a friendship, which lasted through the Police's first blush with commercial success. In 1981, Styler and Sting struck up a relationship, and the latter publicly identified the former as his partner at a press conference. The extramarital romance resulted in a pregnancy in 1983. By that point, the Police was one of the biggest bands in the world, Tomelty had given birth to another of Sting's children, and Styler toured with Sting until her pregnancy was too far along to safely allow extensive travel. All the while, Sting remained wed to Tomelty. Divorce proceedings were filed in 1984, and after what Sting told Spin was an "awful separation," he married Styler in 1992.

Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl is an enduring musical force. He's also been unfaithful to both women he's married and multiple romantic partners in between. In 1997, Grohl's three-year marriage to photographer Jennifer Youngblood ended, reportedly over his professed extramarital dalliances. That destroyed one of Grohl's most important professional relationships, too — Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear is a friend of Youngblood, and the split prompted Smear to leave the band for several years.

In the '90s, Grohl dated another rock star, Louise Post of Veruca Salt, ultimately breaking things off with her to get together with actor Winona Ryder. Grohl also ruined a two-year romance with professional snowboarder Tina Bastich because he took up with another woman. In August 2024, Grohl abruptly announced via his seldom-updated Instagram account that he'd put his 21-year marriage to Jordyn Blum in serious jeopardy. "I've recently become the father of a new baby daughter, born outside of my marriage. I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her," Grohl wrote. "I love my wife and my children, and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness." That became another chapter in the tragic real-life story of the Foo Fighters when the band canceled some tour dates and announced they'd take a break of an unknown length while Grohl dealt with his personal issues. 

"Born in the U.S.A." sold 17 million copies and generated seven top 10 hit singles, elevating Bruce Springsteen from popular rock star into global superstardom. It caused a media frenzy when in May 1985, he made plans to marry Julianne Phillips, having met the model and actor at his own Los Angeles concert seven months prior. The whirlwind romance peaked with a wedding conducted in secret in Phillips' hometown of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Springsteen entered the marriage knowing it had an expiration date — he'd never had a relationship last much longer than two or three years. No longer able to put aside his anxiety or "paranoid delusions" (per his memoir, "Born to Run") about the otherwise idyllic marriage, Springsteen says he talked himself out of loving Phillips. "A part of me tried to convince myself that she was simply using me to further her career or get... something. Nothing could've been further from the truth," Springsteen wrote.

Simultaneously, Springsteen felt a connection with Patti Scialfa, a member of his E Street Band. "Patti was a musician, was close to my age, had seen me on the road in all of my many guises and viewed me with a knowing eye," he wrote. In 1989, he divorced Phillips and two years later, married Scialfa.

Many of the moments that destroyed Motley Crue's reputation also helped solidify the Los Angeles hard rock band's legend as one of the most destructively self-indulgent collectives of all time when it comes to sex and drugs. Drummer Tommy Lee became a breakout star of the band in the 1980s in part due to his high-profile relationships with female celebrities. After his year-long marriage to model Elaine Starchuk ended in 1986, Lee immediately married Heather Locklear, at the time best known for her roles on "Dynasty" and "T.J. Hooker." That union ended after seven years, which Lee blames solely on his rampant infidelity. "Yeah, f***ing with porno stars ruined my marriage," he told "Blender" (via Stylecaster). And how many women did he intimately connect with? "I don't know. Two... hundred?" Lee theorized.

The drummer's next marriage, to "Baywatch" star Pamela Anderson, spanned from 1995 to 1998, during which time a homemade sex tape was stolen from the couple and widely distributed. That put a strain on the marriage, but Lee's physical abuse would directly lead to divorce. After striking Anderson while she held their baby, Lee was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison on a battery charge.

Eric Clapton is loathed by other musicians for many reasons — he once lured away a friend's wife. Pattie Boyd met the Beatles' George Harrison on the set of the 1964 movie "A Hard Day's Night," and in 1966, they married. After a 1967 concert by his band Cream in London, Harrison's dear friend Clapton met Boyd and fell in love. "I was overwhelmed. I realized that I would have to stop seeing her and George, or give in to my emotions and tell her how I felt, he wrote in "Clapton: The Autobiography." Instead, Clapton allowed his two-year-long romance with model Charlotte Martin to end, and he also wrote a bunch of songs for his band Derek and the Dominos about Boyd, including "Bell Bottom Blues" and "Layla."

Because of Harrison's extramarital affairs, Boyd left the Beatle in 1974 and within a few weeks, connected with Clapton, and they married in 1979. Throughout the 1970s, Clapton dealt with a heroin addiction and then alcoholism. "He began in the morning and drank all day until four o'clock when Roger Forrester, his minder and later his manager, made him stop," Boyd wrote in "Wonderful Tonight" (via The Daily Mail). Clapton was admitted to a rehab facility in 1982, but the sobriety period lasted for just six months. "At night I went to bed before him and cried, hoping I would be asleep before he came up," Boyd recalled. After he drank to the point of unconsciousness one day in 1984, Boyd left Clapton.

Guitarist Neal Schon, an original part of the Santana jazz-rock collective before he moved on to make arena pop, may be the only original member that never quit Journey, but he hasn't been able to be so steadfast in his personal life. Schon has been married five times, and his relationship with wife number five began while he was still in the midst of a legally murky union with wife number four.

Schon married former "Playboy" model Ava Fabian in July 2011, but two months later, the musician made the news when "The Real Housewives of D.C." star Michelle Salahi was reported missing by her husband, and she was located in the company of the Journey star. Fabian quickly filed for divorce, reporting in court documents that Schon's romantic relationship with Salahi stretched back months to well before the wedding, a rekindling of an earlier relationship.

Fabian then filed a lawsuit against her soon-to-be ex-husband, requesting monetary support and accusing the musician of leaving her with physical injuries and sharing false rumors about her sexual orientation. The sum in question was technically presented as palimony, or support for an unmarried partner, because Schon argued that because their wedding had occurred in Paris, it wasn't legally binding in the U.S.

As the lead guitarist in the band Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, Ike Turner was largely responsible for 1951's "Rocket '88'," heralded as the very first true rock n' roll song. He would only become a star when he met and later married Tennessee singer Anna Mae Bullock, renamed her Tina, and formed the rock-soul act Ike and Tina Turner. They'd become one of the biggest musical groups around in the early '70s with hits like "Nutbush City Limits," "Proud Mary," and "I Want to Take You Higher."

Violence, trauma, and a horrendous power dynamic characterized the Turners' personal relationship. Ike Turner brought his wife to a brothel in Mexico hours after their 1962 wedding, and then routinely and severely physically abused Tina Turner. "He used my nose as a punching bag so many times that I could taste blood running down my throat when I sang," she wrote in "I, Tina: My Life Story" (via The Cut). She categorized intimate relations with her husband, who was addicted to cocaine, as sexual assault. "Sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility," she wrote, "especially when it began or ended with a beating." Among the other acts of domestic abuse allegedly committed were a broken jaw, numerous black eyes, and third-degree facial burns caused by a tossed cup of coffee. Tina Turner left Ike Turner in 1976.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, may be the victim of child abuse, or has experienced a hate crime, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).