Rock Stars Who Left Their Wives For Younger Women

For as long as there have been rock stars, there have been members of the opposite sex throwing themselves right at their rocking faces. The idea that rockers can pick and choose any love interest they want is one of those cliches that is pretty much true, so when musicians settle down with just one partner, you can be sure that partner is pretty special. Well, at least until said partner starts getting a few wrinkles; then, the average rock star is fairly likely to simply head to the Groupie Store to select a newer model. (It's worth noting that this applies mainly to rock stars of the male variety; she-rockers, curiously, don't seem to share this inclination.)

Even the bonds of holy matrimony are all too often not quite as strong as the rocking urge to slip into a relationship with an uncomfortable age gap. Perhaps it's because aging musicians need validation that they're still cool, or because — often being rather juvenile sorts themselves — they need partners that won't be troublingly insistent that they grow up. Or, maybe these guys are just kind of tools. At any rate, there are tons of instances of famous musicians destroying their relationships — even really long, seemingly super-committed marriages — to take up with new partners who are, well, "new" in more than one sense of the word.

Sammy Hagar, also known as the "Red Rocker" and the guy who couldn't drive 55 if his very life depended on it, has sold a metric ton of albums as a solo artist. He was also the frontman for hard rock band Montrose, and is an ex-member of some outfit called Van Halen. He married his wife Betsy Berardi in 1968, years before he began his rocking onslaught on the music industry, and she was by his side through all the many stages of his success; the pair were married for over 25 years and had two children together. They divorced in 1994, and it was no small thing that came between them; it was, in fact, a woman named Kari Karte.

Hagar took up with the twenty-something Karte after meeting her at a friend's birthday party, and by 1995, the pair were married despite a 20-year age gap between them. They went on to have two children of their own, and as of mid-2025 they've been married for 30 years. When Hagar received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2024, he said of his wife, "Kari's been hanging out with me now for 32 years. And I mean, she's been holding on for dear life. It's like riding on a rocket ship being around me, I can't help myself" (via People). Apparently, Betsy just didn't hold on tightly enough.

In 1991, not too long before country musician Billy Ray Cyrus shot to fame singing about his achy, break-y heart, said heart was stolen by Leticia "Tish" Finley, whom he met in a club. The pair married in late 1993, and went on to have three children together, all of whom achieved varying degrees of fame as actors, musicians, or both, and their union lasted for nearly three decades. However, in the early '20's Cyrus' heart started achin' and breakin' for a much younger woman.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cyrus tracked down Johanna "Firerose" Hodges, whom he had met over a decade earlier on the set of his daughter Miley's TV series "Hannah Montana." Despite an age gap between them which was roughly the same length of Cyrus' marriage, the pair began an affair which led to Tish filing for divorce in 2022. Cyrus and Hodges were married in 2023, and this time, Cyrus opted for an economy-sized marriage, filing for divorce after only seven months. In an interview with the Australian Sunday Telegraph's Stellar magazine (via Page Six), Hodges said she wished she could tell her younger self to avoid the much older man who befriended her on the set of his daughter's kids' show, saying, "I probably should have had way better boundaries."

It may seem like Gordon "Sting" Sumner, former bassist and frontman for the Police, has been married to his wife Trudie Styler since he was just a cadet. He was, however, married once before; Irish actress Frances Tomelty was "Mrs. Sting" from 1976 to 1984, during the entirety of the time the Police was rising to become perhaps the most popular band in the world before abruptly breaking up. Sting was acquainted with Styler, who was six years younger than his wife, for nearly this whole period. The pair met in 1977, and were quite friendly on account of Styler being Tomelty's best friend.

Sting and Styler began fooling around while the musician was still married to Tomelty, and Styler became pregnant in 1983; Tomelty subsequently filed for divorce, which became final the following year. In Sting's autobiography "Broken Music" (via Mamamia), he confessed that he had been in love with Styler ever since meeting her, which implies a complex situation in the years between then and his eventual divorce from Tomelty. 

In a 2002 interview with The Guardian, Styler basically yada yada-ed those circumstances. "I don't talk about it because it's tied up with, you know, his ex-wife and I don't talk about her," she said. "Neither of us are proud of a situation that happened — it just happened. We loved each other and we lived together and then we got married and we had more kids. And that's our life story."

Pop superstars Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony became acquainted when their respective careers were really starting to heat up; Anthony appeared on the track "No Me Ames" from Lopez' blockbuster 1999 debut album "On The 6," and popped up in the video. While their careers were blowing up, they both played the field, so to speak; Anthony with a short-lived marriage to Miss Universe Dayanara Torres, and Lopez with a high-profile but ultimately doomed engagement to actor Ben Affleck. By 2004, both of those relationships had fizzled and Lopex and Anthony hooked back up; they were married that summer.

Unfortunately, Anthony seemingly failed to shake his thing for young models. He and Lopez announced their separation in 2011, and after several years of continuing to work together, they finally called it quits officially in 2014. Later that same year, though, Anthony was remarried, this time to model Shannon De Lima, who is 20 years his junior. That marriage only lasted three years, but in a 2018 sitdown with Univision's "Despierta América" (via People), De Lima steadfastly refused to pin the blame on Anthony. "We are really great friends. I care for him a lot," she said. "Things don't work out sometimes, but it's not as dramatic as people see it."

In 2012, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne shocked his band's legion of fans by announcing his separation from his common-law wife of nearly a quarter-century, J. Michelle Martin-Coyne. The pair's fairytale romance devolved into a not-so-fairytale divorce, complete with disagreements over exactly how long they could be said to have been legally married, how to divide up property, and accusations of cheating leveled at Coyne. Although it was eventually found that any claim of infidelity was moot as to the terms of the divorce (Oklahoma, where the pair lived, is a no-fault divorce state), it doesn't mean they weren't true. They were most certainly true.

Coyne had, in fact, taken up with a fan named Katy Weaver, who was a full 27 years younger. Fans and bloggers speculated that Coyne, who was 53 when his divorce was finalized in 2014, was simply having a midlife crisis — but, as with most things, it ultimately turned out to not be that simple. Coyne and Weaver married in 2019, and as of mid-2025 have had two children together.

Country star Jason Aldean is no stranger to controversy, such as wearing blackface, making remarks that could easily be construed as racist and sexist, trash-talking vaccines, and basically doing everything he can to draw attention to himself in the most negative ways possible. In 2013, he publicly made a butt of himself by snuggling up with failed American Idol contestant Brittany Kerr, despite having been married to his wife Jessica Ussery for a decade. To his credit, Aldean publicly apologized for embarrassing himself and his wife. However, just months later, he filed for divorce and carried on with Kerr, who is 13 years his junior.

The pair married in 2015, and they do seem to be peas in a pod, as Mrs. Aldean has since exhibited a "controversial" streak to match her husband's. After a series of ill-advised Instagram posts, culminating with one in which Kerr thanked her parents for "not changing [her] gender" when she was a little girl (which is not a thing that happens), Jason Aldean was dropped by his PR firm of 17 years in 2022.

Ric Ocasek was an awesomely weird man, one who kept coming at the music business from every angle until he found a way in. He and bassist-singer Benjamin Orr were behind several failed projects in the '70s, before hooking up with guitarist Elliot Easton, keyboardist Greg Hawkes, and drummer David Robinson to form the Cars. Their new band's sublime synthesis of rock, pop, and New Wave proved to be the perfect sonic accompaniment to Ocasek's geeky persona and impenetrable lyrics. In 1984, near the end of the band's hit-laden run, Ocasek met 19-year-old Czech model Paulina Porizkova on the set of the video for the smash hit "Drive." Porizkova would later tell Rolling Stone that she and Ocasek fell near-immediately in love, but there was one problem: Ocasek's wife of over a decade, Suzanne.

Ocasek and Porizkova carried on a years-long affair before the singer finally divorced his wife in 1988; he and Porizkova were married the following year. Sure, their 16-year age difference raised some eyebrows — only that wasn't quite accurate. Upon Ocasek's death in 2019, it was revealed that in a 1979 interview, he had shaved five years off his age; in the intervening years, media outlets had cited this interview when stating the singer's age, and of course he never corrected them. Ocasek was actually 21 years Porizkova's senior and was fully 40 at the time of the Cars' greatest success, a fact of which the band's fans were oblivious.

As frontman of the Rolling Stones, one of the biggest bands of the '60s and '70s, Mick Jagger probably could have employed bodyguards solely to keep his skinny frame from being crushed by all the women throwing themselves at him. But in 1970, a friend introduced him to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías after a Stones concert in Paris, and in short order she became Mrs. Jagger, with Mick's first child on the way. For most of that decade, they were a true rock 'n roll power couple, and despite her husband's occasional flings while on the road, Bianca stayed by his side. Until, that is, young model Jerry Hall entered the picture.

Jagger met Hall, 13 years his junior, one night in 1976 at Studio 54. The pair quickly began an affair that led to Bianca Jagger filing for divorce two years later, and Hall soon took her place as Mrs. Jagger until 1999, when Jagger's affair and love child with yet another young model, Luciana Gimenez, torpedoed their union. 

Ever the rolling stone, he would continue hooking up and fathering children with progressively younger women; the untold truth of Mick Jagger is that the octogenarian rocker has eight kids, the youngest of which is 8-year-old Deveraux, whom he shares with 37-year-old ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick.

 Mick Jagger wasn't the only Stone to roll on from a long marriage in favor of a younger partner. In the case of guitarist Ronnie Wood, though, the marriage was just a touch longer; he was married to Jo Wood, with whom he fathered two children, for 24 years beginning in 1985. The other woman, likewise, was ever-so-slightly younger than one might expect. Wood blew up his marriage by carrying on an affair with Ekaterina Ivanova, a Russian cocktail waitress who was over four decades his junior.

Ivanova moved in with Wood after the latter bounced on his wife in late 2009, but sadly, the relationship didn't last. By 2012, the pair had split, and Ivanova did not have fond memories of the union when she spoke with Hello! Magazine (via The Standard) that year. She compared her time with the Rolling Stone to a "dark fairytale," and Wood himself to an "evil goblin king," before professing her utmost respect and admiration for Jo. "I have a lot of respect for Jo now, because he's a handful," she said. "I don't know how she did it. I couldn't. She seems to be better off without him, way happier."

Formed in 1981, groundbreaking indie rock band Sonic Youth had a long and influential run, and its key members, guitarists and vocalists Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, were a couple even before becoming bandmates. Together, the pair forged two things: A sound and aesthetic that would have a towering influence on the likes of Beck, Nirvana, and Dinosaur Jr., and a 27-year marriage. Unfortunately, the latter came to an end thanks to Moore's dalliance with book editor Eva Prinz, who is 20 years his junior, in an affair that ended both the marriage and the band.

Never one to mince words, Gordon told Billboard in a 2015 interview that she had been acquainted with Prinz since before the affair began, and as she detailed in her memoir "The Girl in the Band," had disliked her even then. For Moore's part, he largely stayed away from the topic in his own memoir, "Sonic Life," although he didn't have an issue with Gordon's spilling of the tea. "I didn't take any umbrage with it," Moore told The New York Times in 2023. "If I got too much into that, that would be a critical focus, as it is with any memoir. I purposely decided I have no real reason to share those feelings."

Julian Casablancas, lead singer of The Strokes (and, more recently, the Voidz), enjoyed a rocketship ride to stardom after his band's debut LP, "This Is It," dropped to widespread acclaim and sales by the truckload in 2001. Well, perhaps "enjoyed" isn't the right word. Casablancas always seemed to be a little uncomfortable with his band's level of fame, and it was at the height of that fame in 2004 that he got hitched — not to a fellow pop superstar or famous actress, but to Juliet Joslin, his band's former manager. Their marital bliss lasted for about 15 years, but in 2019, Casablancas did the single most rock star-like thing he's ever done: He divorced his wife for Kaya Nichols, one of his band's young roadies.

Casablancas didn't even confirm his divorce publicly until the press started wondering why he was always in the company of this very young woman, and he confirmed the split — and his new relationship — in 2020. While Nichols has not publicly disclosed her age nor much else about herself, she is thought to be roughly two decades Casablancas' junior. None of the parties involved have had much to say about the situation, and as of mid-2025, it's not even clear whether Casablancas and Nichols are still dating.

Grammy-winning rapper and singer Anderson.Paak is another very famous artist who was known as a family man; he and his ex-wife Jaylyn Chang (aka South Korean pop songstress Jae Lin) have two children together, and were married for 13 years. Alas, their union ended when Paak filed for divorce in January 2024; he was briefly rumored to be involved with none other than Mariah Carey, 17 years his senior, after the pair were spotted together in the vacation spot of Aspen, Colorado, the month previous. It soon became apparent, though, that Paak was going in the opposite direction; to a much warmer vacation spot, with a much younger woman.

Just days after his divorce filing, Paak was snapped by paparazzi in Mexico in the company of Dutch singer Sterre Marith Tapilatu (who simply goes by the mononym Sterre). While it's unknown how long the pair have been involved, it is known that Sterre is 14 years younger than Paak, and also that they likely did not meet in the few days between his divorce filing and their sighting while on vacation together.