Terrence Howard Explains New Math — and His Penchant for Hitting Women — in Rolling Stone
In its latest issue, Rolling Stone profiles Terrence Howard. However, nearly 5,000 words later, the piece leaves you with far more questions than answers. Questions like: Why does Terrence Howard insist that one times one equals two? Or: What the hell are these 3D plastic shapes he spends all his time building? Lastly: Is Terrence Howard OK?
The piece gets off to an ominous start, describing a young Terrence witnessing his father stab a man to death as they waited in line to see a department store Santa Claus. It then jumps to now, where the 46-year-old spends “every minute he has free” making three-dimensional shapes made of plastic, tied together with copper wire. Why is he doing this? See if you can figure it out:
“This is the last century that our children will ever have been taught that one times one is one,” he says. “They won’t have to grow up in ignorance. Twenty years from now, they’ll know that one times one equals two. We’re about to show a new truth. The true universal math. And the proof is in these pieces. I have created the pieces that make up the motion of the universe. We work on them about 17 hours a day. [Ex-wife Mira Pak] cuts and puts on the crystals. I do the main work of soldering them together. They tell the truth from within.”
On the subject of his and Pak’s relationship, Howard is joined by her during the interview and the two refer to one another throughout it as “husband” and “wife.” Writer Erik Hedegaard reveals that just a few weeks after the interview was conducted, it came out that Howard and Pak had been separated since 2014 and had divorced sometime before their son, Qirin, was born in May. In a court document, Pak stated that the two hadn’t lived together since August 2014. But then Howard tells Rolling Stone that Pak is paying for the penthouse in Chicago he’s currently renting, as all his Empire wages are being held for garnishment because of an ongoing suit with his second ex-wife, Michelle Ghent.
On the subject of Howard and women? Here he is on his first wife Lori McCommas, who accused him of hitting her in 2001, which led to a guilty plea for disorderly conduct:
About that one, he is contrite. “She was talking to me real strong, and I lost my mind and slapped her in front of the kids,” he says. “Her lawyer said it was a closed fist, but even slapping her was wrong.”
He also explains why his second wife was photographed with a black eye in 2013 after a trip to Costa Rica:
And what happened in Costa Rica with Ghent? “She was trying to Mace me,” he says, “and you can’t see anything so all you can do is try to bat somebody away, and I think that something caught her. But I wasn’t trying to hit her.”
As for a 2005 altercation, when he pleaded guilty again to disorderly conduct after punching two strangers in a restaurant:
And the 2005 incident in the restaurant? When Howard and a couple were waiting in line to be seated, they got into an argument that didn’t end until Howard knocked the man to the ground and hit the woman.
Howard says he wasn’t even in any line. He’d just gone to check out the wait time for a table. The woman accused him of cutting in front of her and one thing led to another, with him acting in self-defense.
Hmmmm… what else? Well, during the interview, Howard plays a recording of a 13-minute phone call with Ghent that he calls “the blackmail CD” in which she threatens to release tapes of him having phone sex and dancing naked. Oh and he talks about teaching himself to mirror write after an attack of Bell’s palsy.
What a strange, strange man.
