Dennis Hopper's Deathbed Divorce Pits His Daughter against His Wife
Victoria Hopper, trophy wife of actor and conservative curmudgeon Dennis filed her response to his deathbed divorce petition, and it contains many shocks. He was mean! He owned guns! He smokes pot and watches a lot of television!
Dennis started dating Victoria Duffy 20 years ago and they were married in 1996. Dennis was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and, according to Victoria's recent filing, he was diagnosed with metastized cancer in 2008 and several reports (including the Daily Beast's posting of the divorce filing) have said he is currently near death. He filed for divorce earlier this month, presumably from keeping her, a reliable Hollywood Democratic fundraiser, from contesting his will and getting her left-leaning claws all over his money.
Of course, it's not really news that Hopper is a pot-smoking, gun-toting, Fox-News addict. (One little bit of new info in the filing is that he had been undergoing experimental medicine for his cancer which, apparently, proved ineffective.) But the juiciest parts of Victoria's response to his divorce petition is that the trophy wife and Dennis's eldest daughter Marin (who, at 47, is five years older than Victoria) are apparently feuding. Victoria has asked that Marin be kept away from her daughter when she is not around and that she be barred from her house on the Frank Gehry-designed Hopper compound in gritty Venice. No such stipulation was made about Henry, Hopper's 19-year-old son who also lives on the compound. She also alleges that Hopper doesn't want a divorce at all, but Marin is pressuring him into it because she wants a bigger piece of the pie when her father inevitably kicks the bucket.
Other highlights from Victoria's response include claims that Hopper is using "medical marijuana" frequently, including in the presence of their 6-year-old daughter; that he threatened his wife's life more than once; that he keeps loaded guns in the house; and that he has ironically flown into fits of rage when he expected that his wife was going to try to leave him.
Victoria is seeking what she was promised in their pre-nup, a quarter of his sizeable estate (he made upwards of $1 million last year) and a house for herself and daughter in Hopper's Venice compound. Sadly, now we just have wait to see what comes first, the divorce ruling, or his death.
Her full filing is posted below. To see it on one page, click here.