A Judge Limits Halle Berry’s Visits After a Choking Claim

A Los Angeles County judge on Oct. 1 granted Olivier Martinez a temporary restraining order against Halle Berry after he alleged she choked their 12-year-old son. The order covers Martinez and the boy, Maceo, and cuts her time with him to set daytime hours until a hearing on Oct. 16.

The petition asks for sole legal custody. The judge did not hand Martinez that prize on the papers alone, and did not bar Berry from contacting the child.

A Los Angeles Judge Granted Less Than Martinez Asked

Martinez, 60, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court on Oct. 1. He sought a domestic violence restraining order, sole legal custody, sobriety checks, a psychological evaluation, and a 52-week batterer intervention program. Berry, also 60, shares 50-50 custody with him under their 2023 judgment.

California lets a judge issue a temporary order the same day or by the next business day, before anyone testifies. That is what happened here. It is protection on paper, not a finding that the choking claim is true.

ASKED VERSUS GRANTED ON OCT. 1

The written order keeps partial custody “continued to maintain communication” between Berry and Maceo. Martinez’s lawyer, Patrick Baghdaserians, said the filing’s first aim was the boy’s safety, and the second was to push Berry toward anger and impulse-control help. He said his client was not trying to “eliminate mom.”

What Martinez Says Happened on Sept. 26

The declaration puts the fight on Saturday, Sept. 26, at Berry’s home. Maceo was in his room on a VR game, Martinez wrote, with Berry and her fiancé, the musician Van Hunt, in the house. Berry came in and started pushing him. Martinez wrote that the first contact “appeared to be intended to be in a joking manner.”

Maceo told her, “Stop. Let me finish the game first.” Martinez wrote that this “sent [Berry] into a rage.” He said she told the boy he looked “so stupid” and was “such an idiot” for playing in the goggles, then jumped on him and fought him.

She grabbed Maceo by the neck and started choking him while shouting, ‘Who is dominant now?! Who is dominant?’

Olivier Martinez, declaration in Los Angeles Superior Court

Maceo called his father in a panic and asked to be picked up, the papers say. Martinez wrote that he could hear Berry still yelling. He texted to ask if he could get the child. Berry replied, “No I’m not ok with it. He wants to fight his mother?? What kind of kid are we raising.” In another text in the filing she wrote, “I’m his mother and this is wrong! He had no respect for his mother and this should not be ok for you as his father!!!”

On a later call, Martinez wrote, he heard Maceo say he wanted to “leave forever,” and heard Berry answer, “Good. Good. I don’t want to see anymore.” When Martinez arrived, he said Berry stayed inside and Hunt helped carry the boy’s bags to the car.

The next morning Berry texted, “I feel terrible about what happened last night as I know he does as well.” Martinez treated that note as an admission and as a pattern. “This is not the first time [Berry] has physically attacked our son,” he wrote. He said both Maceo and Berry had told him she had put the boy in choke holds, and that she would hold him until he tapped out. He also listed older claims: that she struck Maceo in the face five years ago, and that she threw a plate, knife, and fork toward where he sat at Thanksgiving 10 years ago.

He further alleged she caused the child “great emotional and mental distress” in 2023 by “racially charged statements,” including calling Martinez “a white bitch trying to rob a black woman” over child support, and by talking about having him deported to France. He wrote that he has “significant concerns” about her mental health and “alcohol abuse.” The judge still refused sobriety monitoring on the showing he made that day.

Berry’s Lawyer Cites Sanctions and a Violent Record

Berry has not filed a public point-by-point answer to the September night. Her lawyer, Marina Beck, went at the messenger instead of the VR goggles.

To say this filing is entirely meritless and deliberately misleading would be an understatement. There is voluminous evidence, including numerous judicial rulings, that Olivier Martinez repeatedly violated court orders and interfered with necessary therapeutic and educational interventions to the detriment of his and Halle Berry’s minor son Maceo, misconduct for which Mr. Martinez has already been legally sanctioned.

Marina Beck, attorney for Halle Berry, in a statement

Beck added that the papers were “not entirely unexpected from an individual with a well-documented history of erratic, possessive and violent behavior.” She said Berry was “deeply saddened” and would keep “fighting for Maceo’s best interests.”

That “violent behavior” line points back to Thanksgiving 2012, before Maceo was born, when Martinez and Gabriel Aubry, the father of Berry’s daughter Nahla, fought in Berry’s driveway after a custody drop-off. Aubry was booked on suspicion of misdemeanor battery after a private person’s arrest. In a sworn statement he said Martinez jumped him, punched him, and slammed his head on the concrete, and that Martinez had threatened him the day before at school over a failed bid to move Nahla to France. Aubry obtained his own emergency restraining order. Police at the time treated Aubry as the person who swung first. The episode is the last time this family system put a restraining order on Martinez rather than on Berry.

Baghdaserians, answering for Martinez, said the “paramount concern” was “the health, welfare, and safety of the minor child,” and that if Berry addressed “anger management and her impulse control” it would help the boy and “foster a healthy relationship.”

Eleven Years of Filings Before This Restraining Order

Berry and Martinez met on the film Dark Tide, married in July 2013, and welcomed Maceo that October. They filed for divorce in October 2015 after two years of marriage. The marital status ended soon after. The money and the parenting plan did not. In August 2023 they agreed to joint legal and physical custody, a split week, and alternating weekends. Berry was ordered to pay Martinez $8,000 a month in child support, plus 4.3 percent of any income she receives above $2,000,000, and to cover private school, activities, insurance, and therapy.

Joint custody did not end the fighting. It moved the fighting into coaching sessions and new requests for sole control, each parent telling a judge the other was harming the same child.

THE CUSTODY DOCKET

1. July 2013: Berry and Martinez marry; Maceo is born that October.
2. October 2015: They file for divorce and pledge to put the boy first.
3. August 2023: A judgment locks in 50-50 custody and the $8,000 support term.
4. May 2024: They agree to two individual coaching sessions and six joint co-parenting sessions; Van Hunt is allowed in the joint meetings.
5. August 16, 2024: Berry asks for sole legal custody, or tie-breaking power over school, health, and therapy, saying Martinez “refuses to co-parent or communicate in a child-centered way.”
6. September 26, 2026: Martinez’s declaration dates the alleged choking to this Saturday at Berry’s home.
7. October 1, 2026: He files; a judge grants a temporary restraining order and resets her visit hours.
8. October 16, 2026: A hearing is set on whether the order should last.

In the 2024 papers, Berry said she had “fought for tutoring, an educational assessment and finding an environment that was suitable to Maceo’s needs,” and that Martinez had been “oppositional, unmoving and withheld his consent for years.” She alleged he ignored school recommendations, pulled soccer into the bargaining, involved the boy in adult fights, and “unilaterally terminated” the coaching. A judge declined her emergency bid to force him back into sessions for lack of urgency, then later found he could have kept the summer appointments going by Zoom after traveling abroad, and that Berry’s extra legal fees “could have been avoided.”

Martinez is now using the same court, and the same child, to ask for the sole legal custody Berry could not get two years ago. The vehicle changed. The ask did not.

Martinez Ties the Choke Holds to MMA Training

The most specific allegation in the new papers is not a slap. It is a trained hold. Martinez wrote that Berry “has put him in choke holds that she learned while training in mixed martial arts,” that Maceo “hates this,” and that she called it joking or play. Over the last year and a half, he wrote, she had wrestled the boy to the ground and made him tap out.

Berry has been public about that training. For her 2021 film Bruised, which she also directed, she played an MMA fighter and said she was doing four to five hours a day across six disciplines. Valentina Shevchenko, then the UFC women’s flyweight champion, who trained and fought on camera with her, said Berry had already been working muay Thai and jiu-jitsu for three or four years, then five hours a day with no rest during two months of New York filming. Berry has said she broke three ribs in MMA-style workouts for John Wick. Choke holds are basic to that gym language. The petition treats the gym as the source of a hold used on a child. Berry’s camp has not publicly walked through that claim.

If you are worried a child is being hurt, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline takes calls and texts at 1-800-4-A-CHILD (1-800-422-4453). It is confidential and staffed around the clock.

A Fiancé at the Door and a Son in the Middle

Hunt has been with Berry since 2020 and is her fiancé. The petition places him in the house on Sept. 26 and at the car when Maceo left. It does not accuse him of joining the fight. It does make him the adult who physically moved the child out of the home while Berry, in Martinez’s telling, would not come outside.

Maceo is the person every filing claims to protect. He turns through this docket as a 12-year-old with a VR headset, a soccer schedule, school trouble his mother says went unaddressed, and, if his father is believed, a tap-out code he never wanted. He also has an 18-year-old half-sister, Nahla, whose own custody fight with Aubry ran through a 19-day trial over a move to France and that 2012 driveway brawl. The adults in this family have been writing declarations about children for a long time.

Martinez’s papers said he did not give Berry advance notice of the emergency request. In California that is how many of these applications arrive: one parent’s declaration, same-day orders, then a short calendar to put both sides in a room.

The Temporary Order Runs Until Oct. 16

Until that date, Berry’s time with Maceo is the four daytime windows the judge wrote down. Martinez still wants more than the temporary paper gives him.

WHAT MARTINEZ STILL WANTS

• Sole legal custody: He asked the court to end the 50-50 judgment and give him decision-making power.
• A 52-week program: He wants Berry ordered into batterer intervention before unsupervised parenting resumes as before.
• A psychological evaluation: He asked that she be examined before visits.
• Drug and alcohol testing: He asked for sobriety checks around visits; the judge already said the file lacked enough to monitor her.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The order: A temporary restraining order issued Oct. 1 covers Martinez and Maceo and resets Berry’s visit hours.
• The texts: The filing includes Berry’s refusals on the night of Sept. 26 and her next-morning note that she felt “terrible.”
• The money judgment: The 2023 deal still has her paying $8,000 a month plus a share of high income.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The choke: No court has taken testimony on whether Berry put her hands on Maceo’s neck that Saturday.
• Hunt’s view: The fiancé has not issued a public account of what he saw inside the house.
• A lasting order: After a later hearing of up to five years of possible restraint, a judge can drop the stay-away, keep it, or rewrite custody.

On Oct. 16 both parents can put on evidence. Until then the Oscar winner is under a restraining order her lawyer calls a stunt, and her ex has the stay-away he wanted without the sole custody he listed on the same forms.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on court filings and public statements. It is for information only and is not a finding that any person committed child abuse or domestic violence. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a report to police or child-protection officials. Readers with a custody or restraining-order problem should consult a licensed family-law attorney in their state before acting. Figures, visit hours, and case status reflect the court papers and statements described here as of Oct. 1, 2026, and can change at the Oct. 16 hearing or in later orders.