Morgan Freeman has been fighting rumours he had an affair with his step-granddaughter for years, and now the gossip is getting a prime-time hearing in a gruesome murder trial, putting the acclaimed actor back in an uncomfortable spotlight.
The National Enquirer first claimed in 2009 that Freeman had a secret, long-term affair with his step-granddaughter E’Dena Hines. In the years following, there were multiple reports that Freeman and Hines were in love and planning to marry.
In 2012, however, both Freeman and Hines reportedly released statements completely denying the claims, with Hines referring to Freeman as her “grandfather” and saying that the rumours were hurtful to her family.
But 33-year-old Hines just three years later, and now the trial of her alleged killer has brought the accusations back into the headlines again.
Lamar Davenport, her on-off boyfriend, is accused of stabbing Hines to death in a drug-induced rage in 2015 and is currently on trial in New York. This week his defence team introduced into the trial text messages between the couple in which Hines allegedly refers to “men who equal grandpa feelings don’t need to be in my life at all”. Without naming the man, she had said that the man was bothering her by calling her and that she had blocked his calls.
Davenport’s replies indicated that he was aware of who she was referring to by the texts and that he spoke directly about the man as Hines’ “grandfather”.
According to reports from the trial, Davenport’s lawyer claimed in court that Hines had told her killer and multiple others that she had been in a “sexually inappropriate” relationship with her grandfather – meaning Freeman – and that that was the cause of the arguments between the couple.
The defence argues that Davenport was delusional when he stabbed Hines 25 times in the street outside her apartment building in New York, although it is not clear what part the text messages play in that argument.
Freeman had so far not addressed the claims made during the case, which have topped celebrity and entertainment sites in the US for the past five or more days. But confronted by a photographer in a car park on Monday, the actor looked bemused rather than angry when questioned about them.
Asked by the photographer about the texts that appeared to “corroborate” a relationship between himself and Hines, a video published by The Sun in the UK shows Freeman smiling and shaking his head before saying, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about”.
Freeman and Hines aren’t blood relations, with Freeman having adopted Hines’ mother Deena Adair when he was married to her mother, Jeanette Adair-Bradshaw. He later helped raise Hines with his second wife, Myrna Colley-Lee. In his 2012 statement, Freeman reportedly said that any reports of a romantic relationship between himself and Hines were “defamatory fabrications from tabloid media designed to sell papers”.
While gossip magazine reports are usually easily dismissed, the National Enquirer has at least once ‘outed’ a clandestine couple far earlier than other US press outlets.
The magazine reported in 2007 that high-profile US senator John Edwards had an affair with a film-maker working on his US presidential campaign, and had a child with the woman, blowing apart his family-friendly image. Edwards initially denied the National Enquirer‘s report but after the issue was picked up by more mainstream media outlets, he admitted it was correct – putting paid to his presidential hopes.