Here’s what my love life is like. I always have this mother ship I call home. That ship is surrounded by lifeboats, which I call “Rodman’s Navy.” Sometimes I will visit a lifeboat, but I always come back to the mother ship. If the mother ship springs a leak, I hop on a lifeboat to keep me afloat until the mother ship is patched up or another ship comes along. Then I start all over—been doing that all my adult life. Everybody tells me if I want a lasting relationship, I’m going to have to give up those lifeboats, go solo on the mother ship. If I go down, I go down. To me that feels like betting all your money on one roll of the dice.
Did I mention the mother ship sometimes fires on the lifeboats? Swivels her 16-inch guns and fires away, trying to blow them out of the water. A few salvos here, a few salvos there, then the people on the lifeboats break out the UZIs, everybody’s blazing away, and boats start going down. The mother ship catches fire. There are secondary explosions. Then the lifeboats start firing on each other, fighter planes appear out of nowhere, and suddenly it’s the Battle of fucking Midway—total chaos—or what I like to call, “Just another evening with Michelle.”
I don’t know exactly when Michelle’s jealousy thing became a full-blown, put-it-in-capital-letters PROBLEM. When we first got together, I was fooling around, she was fooling around, not to mention married, and everything was more or less cool. Maybe it became an issue after the kids came along or after we got married. Whatever. A couple of years into our relationship, Michelle became a living, breathing example of “crazy jealous.” Sometimes there was good reason.
“I’ve had women right in front of me come up to Dennis and say, ‘I want to fuck you,’” Michelle told a reporter. “Right in front of me. I’m like, ‘Excuse me?’”
Other times, Michelle’s jealousy made no sense at all, like in September of 2003, when we were at the Vision Expo West eyewear convention in LasVegas. I was there to help the Revolution Eyewear company sell frames, sunglasses, whatever. The night before I was to do my “personal appearance,” Michelle, Darren, bodyguard William Castleberry and I were at a strip club. I cozied up to one of the strippers and gave her a couple hundred bucks for lap dances.
Suddenly, Michelle goes ape shit. She was like, “What are you doing with your money? You stupid son of a bitch! We have kids. How could you throw away that money?” She grabbed the money from the stripper and put it in her pocketbook. Then she started smacking me—right there in the middle of the club. William hustled our asses out of there before club security got involved.
So we piled in the limo, and Michelle was still ripping me up one side and down the other. She started throwing beer bottles at me, glasses. We’re talking really close quarters inside the limo, so it was hard for her to miss. I was dodging, trying to talk her down. No luck. Finally, William got between the two of us. He was like, “Michelle, if you don’t stop it, I’m gonna knock your ass out. I’m getting paid to protect this guy.” So she backed off, and the first thing I did when we got to Olympic Gardens was buy her a lap dance. That calmed her down. But Michelle wasn’t done.
At about 7:00 a.m., we headed back to the Palm, and everybody went to bed except me. I decided to go to the Crazy Horse strip club to meet some friends. Michelle woke up about three hours later and started pounding on Darren’s door, freaking out. “Where the fuck is Dennis?” she screamed. Darren was clueless, but after she tore out of there, he called William’s cell and told us to get our asses back to the hotel before Michelle had a meltdown. Meanwhile Michelle went downstairs and lit into the hotel security people. “Where’s my husband?” this, that. Finally, the president of the Palm called Darren and said, “This woman’s out of control. If you don’t get her to chill out, we’re going to kick her out of here.”
There’s more.
In December of 2004, I went to Houston to finish shooting the “Diana Pearl” Super Bowl commercial. I stayed over an extra night, and when I got home, Michelle was waiting for me. Darren and his fiancé Symone were there, and they watched as Michelle, as Darren recalled it, “Just winds up and hits him in the face—like as hard as you’ve ever seen anybody hit somebody.”
“You lying son of a bitch,” Michelle screamed. “Where the fuck were you last night?”
I lost it.
“If I wasn’t who I was, I would knock your fucking teeth out right now,” I yelled. “You beat the shit out of me all fuckin’ day long. If I lay a hand on you, I go to jail.”
Later I asked Darren if he thought Michelle had a jealousy problem. “Oh, a psychotic jealousy problem,” he answered.
I’ve got as many examples of this shit as you’d like. There was the time Michelle was following me and a couple of friends in broad daylight, including this woman I wasn’t sleeping with. Michelle jumps out and starts screaming and yelling at her, “Who the hell are you? This is my husband.”
“This is my husband .”
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Michelle say that when some woman gets within five yards of my ass—that, and “We have babies.” It was like somebody waving a cross in front of Dracula, y’know? Ward off them bitches. She then added another weapon to her arsenal.
We were out drinking one night at this bar, got drunk, naturally, and ended up in the tattoo parlor next door. Michelle started joking around about getting “Rodman” tattooed on her back. And I was like, “Why don’t you add a ‘Mrs.?’” So the tattoo guy did the drawing, we took a look at it, and said “What the fuck?” Shortly thereafter, Michelle had a “Mrs. Rodman” tattoo on the small of her back, which she would soon begin flashing whenever some threatening “chick” was in my vicinity, as if her saying, “This is my husband. We have babies,” wasn’t enough. She needed more evidence. Like anybody gave a shit. I know it wouldn’t have stopped Michelle. Not even locked doors stopped her ass.
I was upstairs in the beach house one time with some girl. Michelle broke down the first door and then outdid herself on the second one, breaking it in half. By the time she got through the second door, the girl was dressed, and I was hiding behind the door naked. She slapped the shit out of me and screamed, “I’m fucking through with you!” She ran outside. I chased her, and I ended up naked in the street talking to the cops. (These days, Michelle giggles when she tells this story.) By then, the cops were tired of being called to my house in the middle of the night. “One more call,” they said, “and we’ll haul both of you in. We’re sick of this shit with you two.”
Then there was the time we were on the way to this Super Bowl party in San Diego. This black girl walks up and wants to get her picture taken with me—standard operating procedure, y’know?
Michelle went nuts. “That’s my husband! We have babies,” she screamed. She created a fucking scene in the middle of the street— and for what?
“She wants to be part of his life, but every time he makes her part of his life, she goes crazy,”Thaer said. “She does something stupid.”
“She’s so bad that we don’t bring her out,” Darren told a reporter. “She wants to know why she isn’t invited to events— because she would fucking ruin him if we took her.
“It’s the truth,” Darren continued. “Thaer knows it. Dennis knows it. One girl just walks up to Dennis the wrong way, kisses him on the lips, grabs him or hugs him, and she’ll lose her mind.”
“Whenever she went on a trip, I wouldn’t go,” Thaer said. “’Cause I knew there was gonna be drama. So I wouldn’t even go. And Darren was like, ‘You gotta go.’ I’m like, ‘I ain’t going. Michelle’s going with him. I’ll get ’em to the airport, and they’re on their own.’”
So you’ve got Michelle, this crazy jealous woman with a bad temper, married to Dennis Rodman, this man who fucks everything that moves.
Gasoline and matches.
No wonder Darren has called it “a psychotic relationship.”
“That’s the match made in hell, those two,” Thaer said. “Mr. and Mrs. Rodman.”