12/09/2025
Women are such powerful forces of nature. I had no idea that all of this happened to Sharon Stone
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The lightning bolt hit her in the living room.
Sharon Stone was standing behind her couch when it struck — not from the sky, but from inside her own body.
One second, she was upright.
The next, she was flipped over the furniture, sprawled across the coffee table, everything scattered everywhere.
"It's a little bit like you see in the movies when Zeus hits somebody with a lightning bolt," she said years later. "And they just go flying."
It was fall 2001. Sharon Stone was 43 years old — at the absolute peak of her career, a decade past Basic Instinct, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Casino.
She was also a new mother. Her adopted son, Roan, was barely a year old.
And her brain was hemorrhaging.
Her vertebral artery — one of the critical vessels that carries blood to the brain — had ruptured. Blood was flooding into spaces it was never meant to go.
She felt wrong. Discombobulated. Her leg went numb. She couldn't think straight.
But she didn't call 911.
Instead, she stumbled to her car, trying to drive herself for help. Neighbors found her crying in the street, helped her back home. The nanny suggested she take an aspirin.
It took 72 hours before Sharon Stone made it to an emergency room.
By then, she'd been bleeding into her brain for three days.
The first CT scan showed nothing. The bleeding had stopped and started, diluted by cerebrospinal fluid, hiding from detection.
The second scan caught it.
Doctors inserted a catheter through her groin, threaded it up to the ruptured artery, and released coils to stop the bleeding. The procedure — endovascular coiling — saved her life.
But when she woke up, everything had changed.
"I lost 18 percent of my body mass in nine days," she said. "I came out of the hospital looking like teeth on a stick."
For nine days, she drifted in and out of consciousness. When she finally emerged, she couldn't walk properly. Couldn't talk without stuttering. Couldn't read. Couldn't hear out of her right ear. The left side of her face was falling.
Her body had to absorb all the internal bleeding. It took two years.
"It almost feels like my entire DNA changed," she said. "My brain isn't sitting where it used to, my body type changed, and even my food allergies are different."
This was 2001. There were no stroke recovery programs. No rehabilitation protocols for someone like her.
"My recovery period was hell, quite frankly," she said.
But hell was only beginning.
In 2003, her husband Phil Bronstein filed for divorce.
As she lay recovering, relearning how to speak and walk, her husband left her and married his girlfriend.
Then they sued her for custody of Roan.
"I had had a brain hemorrhage and was an actress who had made sexy movies," Sharon said.
The judge sided with Phil.
She lost custody of her son.
"I lost everything," she told reporters years later. "I lost all my money. I lost custody of my child. I lost my career. I lost all those things that you feel are your real identity and your life."
People had taken advantage of her while she recovered. $18 million gone. She was paying for everything on credit cards, scraping by, hoping she could cover her kids' school fees.
"I was down to nothing," she said. "I had to pay the kids' school on my credit card and hope for the best."
Her career had vanished too. Seven years to recover meant seven years out of the game.
"In seven years, you're no longer the flavor of the time," she said. "You no longer have box office heat. The same people you were working with are no longer in power anymore."
The woman who'd once commanded millions per film was broke, brain-damaged, and separated from her child.
"I had lost my marriage, lost custody of my child, lost my place in line in the business, lost all my money," she said. "I was just broken."
She got on her knees.
"I need a sign… and could you make it big because I'm in a coma here. So like, help me out."
Slowly — impossibly slowly — she began to rebuild.
She fought back in court. Eventually, she regained custody of Roan.
She adopted two more sons: Laird and Quinn. Built a family as a single mother.
She found painting. "If I didn't have painting, I don't know how I would stay standing," she said.
She became an activist, working with the World Health Organization for over 20 years.
And she learned to live with her invisible disability — the brain damage that people couldn't see but that changed everything about how she moved through the world.
"I became more emotionally intelligent," she said. "I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I'm stronger."
"And I can be abrasively direct. That scares people, but I think that's not my problem. It's like, I have brain damage; you'll just have to deal with it."
She let go of bitterness. She had to.
"If you bite into the seed of bitterness, it never leaves you," she said. "But if you hold faith, even if that faith is the size of a mustard seed, you will survive."
"So, I live for joy now. I live for purpose."
In 2019, Roan filed legal papers to add his mother's last name to his own.
Roan Joseph Bronstein became Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
He's a trained chef now. A glassblower. He has a YouTube channel called "Stone Cooking." During COVID, when his best friend lost his father to Parkinson's and was suddenly alone, Sharon took him in too.
"Now I have four boys," she said.
When people see Sharon Stone today, they don't always see the invisible scars. The medication she still takes to prevent seizures. The brain that isn't sitting quite where it used to.
But they see a woman who was struck by lightning — literally and figuratively — and somehow kept standing.
"I don't hang onto being sick or to any bitterness or anger," she said.
"I decided to stay present and let go."
"Because I know what it's like to go from the top, top, top of your field to absolutely wiped out."
"And I know what it takes to come back from nothing."
