Madonna Says She Contemplated Suicide During Custody Battle With Ex-Husband Guy Ritchie: “I Just Couldn’t Take It”

Madonna has admitted she contemplated suicide while navigating a tumultuous custody battle over her son.

The Queen of Pop sat down with British podcaster Jay Shetty in an episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, released this week, and across a two-hour conversation discussed her storied life. Among other things, she explains turning to spirituality in her darkest times amid strained relationships with friends and family.

The superstar singer even said that, after splitting from filmmaker Guy Ritchie in 2008, the pair were caught in a tricky custody battle when their son, Rocco, turned 16 in 2016. He reportedly left his mother during her Rebel Heart Tour to relocate to his father’s home in London.

Madonna told Shetty: “There were moments in my life I wanted to cut my arms off… I actually contemplated suicide.” When probed on what, in particular, prompted these thoughts, she continued: “I would say probably one of the most painful moments in my life where I honestly couldn’t see the forest for the trees was when I went through a custody battle [over] my son.”

“Even though my marriage didn’t work out —I mean, a lot of people’s marriages don’t work out,” she said. “They marry the wrong people. They’re not aligned. They’re not meant for each other. [But] someone trying to take my child away from me was like, they might as well just kill me. That’s really how I was thinking.”

On tour at the time, Madonna revealed she would often be “lying on the floor of my dressing room sobbing.” She added: “I had to go on stage every night… I really thought it was like it was the end of the world. I couldn’t take it. I just couldn’t take it.”

The mother-of-six said she is now “really good friends” with Rocco and, though she couldn’t see it then, her faith helped her through. “Thank God I had a spiritual life,” Madonna said.

At another point in the podcast interview, her first in nine years, Madonna opened up about reconnecting with her estranged brother, Christopher Ciccone, before his death last year from throat cancer. She described the importance of finding a way to “forgive people who you perceive as your biggest enemies.” For a really long time, she added, “it was my brother.”

“I didn’t speak to him for three years. Years and years,” she said. “And it was him being ill and reaching out to me and saying, ‘I need your help’, that means having that moment, like, ‘Am I gonna help my enemy?’ And I just did… It was such a load off my back, such a weight that was removed, baggage that was put down to finally be able to be in a room with him and holding his hand, even if he was dying, saying, ‘I love you and I forgive you’. That was really important.”

She told Shetty she’s written a tribute song to Ciccone. “Holding a grudge, hating someone or wanting them to suffer… it’s a kind of poison, a kind of cancer,” confessed Madonna.

The star also credited her spirituality for her success while discussing her recently-launched The Mystical Studies of the Zohar, a course with Kabbalah teacher, Eitan Yardeni. “You need to be spiritual to be successful,” she said about discovering Kabbalah, a school of thought rooted in Jewish mysticism. “Success is having a spiritual life, period. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have one.”