As Bruce Willis battles dementia, his wife, Emma Heming Willis, 45, is speaking out about the idea that his life has “no more joy.”
After reading what she called a “clickbait article” about her husband’s condition, Emma took to social media to clap back.
“The headline basically says there is no more joy in my husband,” Emma, who has been opening up about her emotions on social media, said in a video posted via her Instagram on Sunday.
“Now, I can just tell you, that is far from the truth. Stop scaring people to think that once they get a diagnosis of some kind of neurocognitive disease that, ‘That’s it. It’s over. Let’s pack it up. Nothing else to see here. We’re done.’ No, it’s the complete opposite of that.”
The “Die Hard” actor, 68, took a step back from public life when his family announced that he was diagnosed with aphasia. He was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in February 2023.
“While this is painful, it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis,” his loved ones said in a joint statement at the time. “FTD is a cruel disease that many of us have never heard of and can strike anyone.”
In a caption next to her Instagram video on Sunday, Emma wrote, “My experience is that two things can be true and exist at the same time. Grief and deep love. Sadness and deep connection. Trauma and resilience. I had to get out of my own way to get here but once I arrived, life really started to come together with meaning and I had a true sense of purpose. There is so much beauty and soulfulness in this story.”
“I see headline after headline and blurbs of misinformation. I’m not even talking about my family, I’m used to the craziness of these farfetched headlines and stories. I’m just talking about baseline dementia awareness and what’s being fed to the public. You wonder why anxiety and depression is up in our society,” she continued. “I honestly think part of it has to do with this kind of clickbait, how things are framed and pushed out to us and how we have a split second to take that information in. Man, it’ll do a number on my psyche.”
She concluded: “To whom it may concern, please be mindful how you frame your story’s to the public about dementia and dig deeper.”
Emma reportedly met Bruce at their mutual trainer’s gym in 2007, and they got married in 2009. They have two daughters together — Mabel, 11, and Evelyn, 9 — and she’s also the stepmother to Willis’ three daughters with his ex-wife, Demi Moore, 61: Rumer, 35, Scout, 32, and Tallulah, 29. Willis and Moore were married from 1987 to 2000.
“Moonlighting” creator Glenn Gordon Caron, who is still friends with Willis, told The Post in October that the actor is not “totally verbal.”
Rumer, for her part, told The Post in February that they’ve always been a happy blended family, including her mother and stepmom.
“I think the groundwork that my parents really laid was that no matter what shape our family took, we were still family. So whether they were together or whether they were not, whether my mom had a partner or my dad had a partner, we were always a family,” she said.
“So that when my stepmom came in, when my two little sisters came in, it just meant that our family was growing. There wasn’t like, ‘Oh, here’s this family and here’s that family now.’ It’s just that our family got bigger,” she went on. “[A] collective harmony and not ever having us have to split holidays or go on different vacations. We were always together.”
As Emma defends her husband for still having a sense of “joy,” Rumer also told The Post that Bruce has enjoyed being a first-time grandfather to her baby daughter, Louetta, that she had with her partner, Dereck Richard Thomas.
“His face lights up when he sees Louetta,” Rumer said of her famous dad. “And I’m just so grateful to have that kind of spark of mischief and fun and and play no matter what age I am.”
On Instagram, Emma said about Bruce’s dementia, “One hundred percent, there is grief and sadness. There is all of that. But you start a new chapter and…filled with love. It’s filled with connection. It’s filled with joy. It’s filled with happiness. That’s where we are.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
