Feature writing

Celebrity

Sharon Osbourne: I’ve left Ozzy, and don’t know if we’ll reunite

Website:
The Daily Beast

Date:
May 10, 2016

When Sharon Osbourne returned to the round-table of CBS chat show The Talk on Tuesday, it was to the wild cheers, whooping, and chants of “Sharon, Sharon” on the part of the audience.

Having missed the show on Monday, she clasped hands with co-hosts Aisha Tyler and Cheryl Underwood.

“Mrs. O” was also armed with a glass of lemonade—a not-so oblique reference to Beyoncé’s latest album of the same title, which touches on the upset and consequences of infidelity.

As lead host Julie Chen noted welcoming her back, Osbourne had been the subject of three days of headlines about the state of her 33-year marriage, after it was reported that she had caught husband Ozzy cheating with hair stylist Michelle Pugh.

Pugh is a colorist at Meche Salon, Los Angeles, where Sharon and the couple’s daughters Kelly and Aimee get their hair done.

“It was known in the salon they were a little too close,” a source told Entertainment Tonight of Ozzy and Pugh.

On Tuesday, Osbourne did not address, or was asked, directly about the rumored affair.

She said she had avoided “looking at any pictures or reading anything…It’s like putting salt in a wound. I’m doing great, I really, really am. I honestly cannot thank people enough for backing me, for saying they love me. Everybody here at my home supporting me, sending me messages of love,” she said. “I honestly, honestly am empowered and have found this inner strength. Okay—what’s next? I can handle this.”

Chen asked Osbourne if it was “made up” that she had kicked Ozzy out of their $10 million Beverly Hills mansion.

“No, it’s true,” replied Sharon, to applause and whoops. She then revealed he had now returned home, “and I’m out of the house.”

Osbourne said moving out felt “right for me because I honestly at this point, today, have no idea what I’m going to be doing with the rest of my life. I don’t know where I’m going, who I’m going with, and I just need time to think and really think about myself and ‘What do I really want for the rest of my life?’ because this is like getting to the last chapter of this book. I really want to think about it very carefully about where I want to go, what I really want, and at this point honestly I have no idea.”

The couple have split, and reunited before—most recently after Ozzy relapsed into taking drugs and drinking in 2013.

In 2012, Osbourne told me, in an interview for The London Times, why she stayed in the marriage through his various addictions, and even though he had hit her.

“Nobody enjoys that, it’s a very easy trap to get caught in,” she said. “But I’m too proud to show vulnerability. I wasn’t the kind of person to call a girlfriend and say, ‘Can I stay at yours with my kids?’ I hit him back—with pans, pots, everything. I didn’t just take it.”

Ozzy liked to have sex while watching Late Show With David Letterman, she told me. “We lie in bed and watch it and he says, ‘Oh we’ve got time before Letterman’s monologue’. I lie back and think of the Queen.”

Osbourne told The Talk today that she had initiated this most recent split because, now aged 63 (Ozzy is 67), she could not “keep living like this.”

Asked if there was a chance the couple would stay married, Osbourne said, “I honestly don’t know. At this point I can’t answer that, ‘cause I don’t know what I want.”

Sharon and Ozzy are still talking—they had most recently spoken last night, she revealed.

Sometimes friendship can survive a split, another co-host suggested. “Of course,” Osbourne responded, “and I love Ozzy dearly. He’s given me an unbelievable life. He’s given me three gorgeous children, and I love him.”

In a message to her fans and supporters, Osbourne said, “I just want to say that when I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, who I’m going to be spending my life with and what I want to do with it, you’ll be first to know. I’ve got to follow my heart and I don’t know what my heart is telling me right now. I’m just trying to take it all in…process it calmly in a timely fashion.”

To yet more wild applause, Osbourne said, “I just have to say it is amazing—the support, and how it has honestly given me strength to sit here. I’m not going to cry about anything because there’s nothing to cry about. Nothing.”