Cher said her late ex-husband Sonny Bono ripped her off financially during their time together as she rose to fame in Hollywood.
“He took all my money,” Cher said in an interview with The New York Times, which was published on Sunday, ahead of the debut for the first volume of her two-part book, “Cher: The Memoir.” “I just thought, We’re husband and wife. Half the things are his, half the things are mine. It didn’t occur to me that there was another way.”
Cher and Bono are best known as the pop duo and television variety team Sonny & Cher. But behind closed doors, Cher says Bono was like a “parent” who at one point took advantage of her financially. The two met when Cher was 16 and Bono was 27, a relationship she wouldn’t label as a “#MeToo moment” because she “lied” to him about her age.
In an effort to avoid living with her mother at the time, she took up rooming with Bono in exchange for cleaning and cooking services. However, a couple years later, they married in 1964 and had children. And as the couple grew into their stardom, Cher says Sonny became emotionally abusive and developed a “my way or the highway” mentality, stating Bono set their business up so that Cher was his employee.
“To this day,” Cher added, “I wish to God I could just ask, ‘Son, at what point, during what day, did you go, ‘Yeah, you know what? I’m going to take her money.’”
The pair got a divorce in 1975, and Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998.
“I woke up one morning — early, like 5 — and I just thought, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to leave him,” Cher explained, adding that she told Bono that she wanted to pursue an intimate relationship with the group’s guitarist, and eventually did. “I started to put into place a plan that was so dangerous that I don’t know how I had the nerve to do it.”
It wasn’t until her relationship with film producer David Geffen that she became financially literate.
“I didn’t know how to make a check out. I didn’t have a banking account,” Cher said. Nevertheless, Cher went on to become a household name separate from the one she married into, carving out her own lane in the industry.
Her “Cher: The Memoir” comes out on Nov. 19 from HarperCollins.
