Denise Richards revealed she did not come to terms with her divorce from Charlie Sheen very easily.
Richards, 51, spoke about her divorce from Sheen, 56, on Wednesday’s episode of Caroline Stanbury’s "Divorced Not Dead" podcast. Richards, who filed for divorce in 2005, said she "felt guilty" for splitting up their family.
"I struggled with that for years," Richards told the "Real Housewives of Dubai" star. Although the guilt ate at her, Richards noted when she knew it was time to separate from Sheen.
"I said to myself, ‘Would I want my daughters married to this man?’ No offense to him, but I think he would take that and understand what I’m saying, and that’s when I was like, ‘Well, why am I accepting this?'"
Richards filed for divorce while she was six months pregnant with their daughter, Lola. The couple briefly tried to reconcile their marriage shortly after her birth but decided to part ways due to their "very toxic" marriage.
Sheen and Richards wed in 2002 and officially divorced four years later. Richards adopted her daughter Eloise.
During her podcast appearance, Richards shared that she tried to shield her children from Sheen’s very public battle with substance abuse.
"I did shelter them a lot, and then they started to get to an age where ‘so and so said this,’ and I lied my ass off and covered for him," she told Stanbury.
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"Now, as they’re starting to get older, they’re more aware of more things. That’s why I say I don’t know if I did them a disservice when they were younger."
Sheen and Richards recently did not see eye to eye when it came to their daughter Sami creating an OnlyFans account.
Sheen was outspoken in his disapproval of his daughter being on the platform. Richards was supportive and even launched her own account.
"My daughter got a lot of backlash for opening the account," Richards told KTLA. "I had heard of OnlyFans, but I wasn’t educated on what OnlyFans was. And once I started to learn about it, I really think that the creators of the site really took the best of every platform of social media and put it into one site. You own your content. The other sites, they can sell your content.
"We all post pictures with ourselves with bathing suits on Instagram and some of the other sites that there’s no difference other than you actually own the content."
