Sharon Stone claims role in Basic Instinct made her lose custody of son

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Sharon Stone claims  her role as Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct made her lose custody of her then 8-year-old son

Sharon Stone claims  her role in Basic Instinct led a judge to conclude she was an unfit parent for her son, Roan. The American actress starred alongside Michael Douglas in the 1992 erotic thriller.

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While guesting the podcast Table For Two with Bruce Bozzi on Tuesday (March 8), the Oscar nominated actress opened up about her 2004 battle over custody of her adopted son, then aged eight. She recalled the judge asking son Roan if he was aware of her mum “making sex movies”.

Stone said: “This kind of abuse by the system, that it was considered what kind of parent I was because I made that movie. People are walking around with no clothes on at all on regular TV now and you saw maybe like a sixteenth of a second of possible nudity of me — and I lost custody of my child.”

Sharon adopted Roan in 2000 with then husband Phil Bronstein, whom she married two years prior. After the couple divorced in 2004, a long legal battle ensued after Stone sought primary custody, which ended with Bronstein deemed the more fit parent in a Los Angeles court in 2008.

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“I ended up in the Mayo Clinic with extra heartbeats in the upper and lower chambers of my heart,” Stone said on the podcast. “It broke my heart.”

“I went in to get a mammogram and they were like ‘something’s wrong’ we need you to do a treadmill test. All the doctors came running in.”

Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 thriller Basic Instinct sees Stone play Catherine Tramell, a mysterious writer and main suspect in the murder of a rock star. Stone uses her sexual wit to enter a passionate relationship with Douglas’ Nick Curran, a police detective investigating the case.

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The film attracted controversy for its explicit sexual content, mostly from Stone’s performance. The actress told Bruce Bozzi that the film would prove the end of her own lovelife.

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“Men didn’t want to date a woman that other men thought of like that and that’s also a failure of male reality,” she said.

“Now people walk around showing their penises on Netflix but, in the olden days, what we were doing was very new,”Stone added. “This was a feature film for a major studio and we had nudity, sex, homosexuality — all these things that in my era were breaking norms.”

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