Patrick Dempsey’s first marriage was to a woman who was over two decades his senior, and the aftermath of the relationship was ‘rocky’ at best.
You might be familiar with Dempsey’s current marriage to Jillian Fink over 20 years ago, but Rocky Parker probably slipped your radar.
Parker, who was 26 years older than 18-year-old Dempsey when they met, was a widowed mother-of-three, with a son who was one year older than the young actor.
The pair met while working on a play together in 1984, called Brighton Beach Memoirs.
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In it, they played aunt and nephew, but their feelings turned less than familial.
The pair began dating, and she moved on to become his manager.
But in light of their situation, the pair married in 1987 when Dempsey was 21 and kept it hush hush for two years due to the controversy it would cause, per Spock and Christine.
However, it would all fall apart in 1994, despite coming out into the public view, because Parker filed for divorce.
The pair, who reportedly went to classes at the NYU film school together, officially split on 26 April, 1994, when Parker filed for divorce, citing ‘irreconcilable differences.’
Shockingly, Parker also accused him of assaulting her on the set of the 1987 film Can’t Buy Me Love.
According to The Sun, she claimed he had left her for another woman, but had previously harmed her, recalling details of the incident: “While we were on the set of his (1987) movie Can’t Buy Me Love, he beat me up because he claimed he ‘wanted to see what it was like to beat up a woman!’ I now suffer from arthritis in my hand from where Respondent injured me.”
She added: “The physical abuse included Respondent breaking my finger when he rushed me to a van and closed the door on my finger.”
However, she later took her words back, claiming she was ‘advised’ to accuse her ex of assault.
She said, per the outlet: “In the heat of a divorce, sometimes people say things they normally wouldn’t. But the statements of physical and mental abuse, as well as alcoholism and drug use, are false.”
Dempsey later addressed his first marriage in a 2006 interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, calling it a ‘Freudian nightmare that is public knowledge.’
"I think I needed a mother," he said. "There were a lot of negative things that I'm still undoing from it. She had a son one year older than me."
Parker died in 2014 of throat cancer at the age of 74.
Topics: Celebrity, Weddings, Sex and Relationships
Britt Jones