Celebs Who Milked Their Own Divorce For Fame

Fame is a drug that pushes some people to do anything for attention, even if that means capitalizing on a love gone wrong. From strategically timed divorce announcements to tell-all memoirs, these celebs may have potentially milked the end of their marriages for publicity gold. 

Kevin Hart's divorce from his first wife, Torrei Hart, was finalized in 2011, after eight years of marriage. Since then, both Kevin and Torrei have milked their breakup for laughs and attention. 

According to People, Kevin made fun of his infidelity on stage during Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain in 2013. "I cheated. Am I ashamed of it? No, I'm not," he joked. "Do I wish I could take it back? No, I don't. Let me tell you why. You can't evolve as a man if you don't make a mistake. The only way that you can be perfect is to not f**k up. I did it, I f**ked up. Don't cheat!"

Torrei also made lemonade out of lemons with her 2014 appearance on the reality show Atlanta Exes. 

In the summer of 2017, Kevin became entangled in an alleged extortion scandal after he was caught reportedly cheating on his second wife, Eniko Parrish, who was pregnant at the time. Once again, Hart tried to transform his troubles into a laugh to promote his Irresponsible stand-up tour, and like a third wheel on that tour bus, Torrei made herself readily available for interviews, too.  

Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas were a hot married couple in Hollywood for 18 years, so when their union soured in 2014, it sent shock waves through Tinseltown. 

After splitting, Griffith went on a mini-media tour of sorts. She stepped out before the paparazzi with her right arm exposed, letting all the world take note that she had covered up her "Antonio" tattoo with a bandage that simply read, "Mel." Of course, her sassy move caught everyone's attention and instantly raised her diminished profile.

Over time, Griffith has injected comments about her marriage into high-profile forums. At the Women's Brain Health Initiative in 2017, she overshadowed the event with a headline-making divorce joke. During a panel discussion, the actress claimed her epileptic seizures stopped after divorcing Banderas. "I've been on a drug for four years... I haven't had a seizure, which is amazing—but I also got divorced, which I think is the real healer for me," she quipped.

Weeks before their ninth wedding anniversary, Tamar Braxton and Vincent Herbert called it quits. Braxton filed for divorce in October 2017, on the heels of the release of her fifth studio album, Bluebird of Happiness. Right before dropping the album, Braxton made a point to tell Entertainment Tonight that this record would be her last, insisting she was retiring from the music biz "to eliminate all of the stress and problems off of my relationship." The timing of all this conveniently drummed up a lot of publicity. But wait, there's more.

What tied all the drama into a neat bow was the couple's reality show, Tamar & Vince. Its fifth season debuted in November 2017. Previews depicted Braxton and Herbert fighting and (gasp) not wearing their wedding bands. 

That same month, Braxton hit the Soul Train Music Awards red carpet sans wedding ring. She also discussed her relationship on Instagram: "I decided I didn't want to be married for the sake of saying so. I wanted to have a relationship. Someone to share my/our dreams, our successes, our failures, our past, present & future with." 

Will she share the publicity, too?

Could fame and fortune be more important than marriage? That's what Frasier star Kelsey Grammer may have inferred about his ex-wife, Camille Grammer, a star on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The pair was married from 1997 to 2011 and welcomed two kids. When it all went up in smoke, the fallout became a plotline on her reality show.

"She always wanted to be famous," Kelsey told Oprah Winfrey (via Hollywood Life.) "I did believe that I owed something to this person because she'd given up so much to endure this life with me," he said, referring to his appearances on the her show. (We can't tell if Kelsey is bashing her, bashing himself, or maybe knocking both of them at the same time.)

According to People, the marriage just so happened to crumble while Bravo cameras were following Camille and while Kelsey was starring in Broadway's La Cage aux Folles. "I feel completely abandoned," Camille told People. By her husband? Perhaps. But she still had the attention of millions tuning in to the Housewives franchise.

There is perhaps no greater uncoupling captured for reality TV than Caitlyn and Kris Jenner's high-profile split. Their divorce was finalized in 2015 after 23 years together, and the exes (and their big broods) had plenty to say about it in public.

In her 2015 Vanity Fair profile, Caitlyn revealed her identity as a woman and blamed the demise of their marriage on Kris, not gender issues. "A lot of times she wasn't very nice," Caitlyn said. "People would see how I got mistreated. She controlled the money...all that kind of stuff... Twenty percent was gender and 80 percent was the way I was treated."

Of course, the divorce drama became a plot line on Keeping up with the Kardashians. Kris captains that publicity ship, and TV footage showed her crying about Caitlyn's portrayal of her. 

Caitlyn made headlines again when she dished about marital drama in her 2017 autobiography, The Secrets of My Life. She writes (via Hollywood Life) that the relationship "began to implode" when the reality show "became a runaway success and Kris [Jenner] was at the helm of a multimillion-dollar franchise in which she controlled all the purse strings. Including mine." That may be so, but Caitlyn's post-divorce publicity certainly helped fill her purse. 

Gwyneth Paltrow and her ex-husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, became known as Hollywood's most friendly exes when they used the term "conscious uncoupling" to describe their divorce.

"I wanted to turn my divorce into a positive," Paltrow told The Edit (via Today). "What if I didn't blame the other person for anything, and held myself 100 percent accountable? What if I checked my own sh*t at the door and put my children first? And reminded myself about the things about my ex-husband that I love, and fostered the friendship?"

That's admirable, indeed, but we can't help but note that Paltrow also stood to profit from the split when she famously announced the divorce on her shopping site, Goop.

It's been a long, long road for Khloé Kardashian and Lamar Odom. The pair married in 2009 after only knowing each other for a matter of days, but their on-again-off-again divorce dragged on for years, before officially concluding in 2016.

It certainly sounds like Khloé is capitalizing on her single status with her own spin-off reality show on E!. The series is called Revenge Body, so it's fair to assume that's a message directed at Odom, but Khloé has played coy: "People always say 'revenge' like you have to be getting it on somebody else," she told Today. "For me, 'revenge' is like maybe getting it on my old self." Sure, maybe, but we suspect Khloé and the folks at E! knew exactly how most folks would interpret that title.

Mama June and Sugar Bear's rocky romance was well documented on the TLC reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and then on WE tv's Marriage Bootcamp. Between the two programs, Mama June reportedly hooked up with a convicted child molester that had allegedly victimized her daughter, and Sugar Bear confessed to falling for men.

At the time of this writing, the pair is no longer a pair, but Mama June is back on reality TV ala Khloé Kardashian, dropping 300 pounds to sculpt her revenge body on a show called Mama June: From Not to Hot. Sugar Bear "really made me feel like sh*t [and] I wanted to show him, 'Hey, I can do [whatever] I want to do,'" she told Entertainment Tonight. "I am actually worth it." (And all that publicity is worth something too.)

Could Yolanda Hadid be a mastermind at gaining attention? The end of her four-year marriage to music producer David Foster was announced on the premiere date of Season Six of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. However, the ex-couple's divorce wasn't finalized until October 2017. 

The divorce news also coincided closely with the release of Hadid's memoir, Believe Me: My Battle with the Invisible Disability of Lyme Disease. Inside, Hadid took a closer look at her marriage and claimed Foster grew tired of her sickness, which contributed to their split:

"All of a sudden all of the things we shared, all of the things we used to love to do together, go for walks in the morning, having a studio in the house and blasting music all day, having dinner parties, that all shut down. I couldn't participate in that life anymore," she wrote (via People.) "...A chronic condition like mine, one that has consumed years of our lives, poses enormous challenges."

Fergie and Josh Duhamel were #couplegoals, or so everyone thought. When the pair split in September 2017, after more than eight years of marriage, it suddenly felt like Fergie was controlling the narrative. 

The week after they called it quits, she released her long-anticipated album, Double Dutchess, which benefited from a lot of second-hand publicity stirred up by her breakup. In other words, after the divorce got everyone's attention, Fergie got a chance to talk about her music:

"I've just opened my heart on this album," she told Entertainment Weekly. "I'm not holding anything back. There's the pretty and the ugly; there's the rage, the sad. All of the things that I've experienced in my life, this is the place to put them." And apparently, this was the time.