CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses domestic violence.
Dax Shepard has broken his silence on Kristen Bell’s anniversary post from last year, claiming he “actually didn’t know” about the mounting controversy until she alerted him to it.
ICYMI, the Hollywood couple were swept up in a scandal in October, when Bell shared an Instagram post celebrating her 12-year anniversary to Shepard with a caption recalling how he once joked that he’d “never kill [her]” even though “a lot of men have killed their wives”.
The joke was widely criticised, including by domestic violence advocacy groups, but the couple never responded to the backlash until the latest episode of Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, where he reflected on exactly what went down.
“I was alerted by someone that this whole thing was happening,” Shepard told his podcast guest Nikki Glaser. “Kristen knew through her publicist, but didn’t tell me.”
Shepard claimed it wasn’t until days after Bell’s post that he knew of the controversy. “Someone comforted me, and I had to go to Kristen, like, ‘What are they talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, that post I had’,” Shepard recalled.
Glaser mentioned the situation while informing Shepard that she was planning on joking about Bell’s post during her 2026 Golden Globes monologue, but backed out because she didn’t want to make his “life harder” and because it was “old news by then”.
Glaser went on to tell Shepard the scrapped joke, which was a riff on the titles of nominated movies. “Die, My Love, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Sorry, Baby — these are not just Dax Shepard captions for his anniversary post, these are movies nominated tonight,” Glaser said.
Shepard laughed at Glaser’s joke before she reiterated she didn’t go through with it because she’s “friends with [him]”.
It marks the first public comments Shepard has made about the situation, though insiders claimed at the time that both him and Bell “didn’t realise the backlash that was coming” after sharing the post.
Washington-based advocacy group, National Network to End Domestic Violence, was among those to respond to the controversy, saying “there’s nothing funny about domestic violence jokes”.
Shepard and Bell tied the knot in 2013 and share two children, Lincoln and Delta.
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