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Valerie Bertinelli says she missed narcissistic red flags in relationships: ‘Made me question my self-worth’
Making it clear she’s in no rush to get back onto the dating scene, Valerie Bertinelli explained this week that she now actively looks for narcissism “red flags” when meeting men.
In her “Getting Naked” podcast on Wednesday titled “Know Your Narcissist,” Bertinelli revealed that she didn’t even realize she was dealing with narcissism in her own romantic relationships until several years ago after first recognizing it in the fraught political climate.
“I don’t want to throw anybody that’s been in my life under a bus, I just want to talk about experiences that have been challenging and made me question my self-worth,” the “One Day at a Time” star told her guest Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a psychologist and author.
“When we know who we are, Valerie, when someone is coming at us like the way that narcissistic people do, we can be a lot more steadfast,” the doctor advised. “The only way a narcissistic relationship works is if we abandon ourselves.”
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Bertinelli agreed with her assessment, admitting that in the narcissistic relationships she’d been involved in, “I totally abandoned myself to a point where my family was like ‘Where are you? We need you? Come back to us.’”
She said while she was in the relationships, she didn’t feel that way.
“You feel truly like you’re just going to make this person happy,” the 66-year-old explained. “You know you can do it. ‘I know I can make them happy. I know if I work hard enough, I can make them happy. I know that I don’t want to be selfish. I don’t want to hurt them, so if they’re telling me that I’m doing these things. I can make myself better.’”
When Durvasula noted that it’s human to want “intimate relationships,” Bertinelli joked: “Well, I did. I’m not so much want[ing] that right now.”
Durvasula revealed that “a lot of the core of narcissism is this insecurity, this fragility.”
Bertinelli interjected to say that the narcissists she’s known, though, “seem like they’re not insecure. They’re so like — it’s magnetizing to see someone that sure of themselves,” and Durvasula explained that narcissists “are good at what we call expressed self-confidence,” essentially being know-it-alls.
The doctor further explained that the traits of a narcissist encompass low empathy, arrogance, entitlement, grandiosity and pathological selfishness.
“They can only center [around] themselves,” she added. “They’re status seeking. So, they want whatever is going to make them look powerful to the world. They are not able to tolerate things like frustration, disappointment, stress, or anything that doesn’t sort of prop up that grandiose sort of fantasy of them. They’re driven very much by power, domination, control. They need to be the ones on top.”
And those traits, she explained, show up as “manipulation, invalidation, dismissiveness, gaslighting, rage, silent treatment, competitiveness, making us small so they can feel big, betrayal, promising things that they never follow through on.”
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Prefacing her analysis of her own past relationships with “I can only speak about my own experience and being very careful not to,” Bertinelli said: “I would never ever think that that person had any of those traits, but the way that they showed up was, oh boy, all of the things you said.”
She added that she wanted her podcast to help people from “falling into that trap.”
“I have a little joke that it’s just like, ‘OK, somebody’s got to tell me every single different kind of narcissist there is out there because I need to know what to not fall into.’” she said. “Again, I even talked to my therapist. I said, ‘Please tell me what red flags are exactly so I can keep an eye out for them.'”
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She noted that in a past relationship someone she didn’t name had repeatedly told her she was a narcissist and that she was hurting them.
“And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to be hurting people. I don’t want to be selfish. I don’t want to do all these things. Please, God, tell me.’ And I’m like, at a certain point, I said: ‘I don’t understand why you’re with me. Like I can’t do anything right,’” she said.
But the doctor explained to her that person was manipulating her.
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“‘You will be lovable if you do the things I’m telling you to do,’” she said a narcissist would tell her. “That’s the twist.”
Bertinelli also suggested the person had told her she prioritizes her son, Wolfgang Van Halen, too much, which Durvasula described as a great example of low empathy, when a romantic partner can’t understand that a relationship with your child is a different kind of love.
She added that when Bertinelli thought she was building intimacy with the person by opening up, “you were basically filling an armory with weapons that they were going to use against you.”
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Bertinelli said now if she sees any sign of “love bombing,” where people flatter the other person to manipulate them, she can’t tell if it’s genuine affection or not.
“Because there is a point where like getting love notes or being spoken beautifully to and telling — like there’s a point of letting someone know how you feel about them, and then there’s the love bombing and the like it get moving fast,” she said.
The doctor replied: “Idealization is not a place for a relationship to start. And to all you romantics out there, suck it because I’m going to tell you right now, it is just not.”
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Bertinelli also specified the “insidious” isolation she had experienced in a relationship.
“It starts — it’s not ‘Don’t see your family.’ It’s when you are with your family, they’ll be constantly texting and constantly and starting an argument through texts and calling. And I’m like, ‘I can’t talk right now,’” which she said left her feeling like she couldn’t see her family because it upset her significant other.
After breaking up with her boyfriend of 10 months in late 2024, following her divorce from her second husband in 2022, Bertinelli explained at the Los Angeles Time Festival of Books last weekend that she was “really scared of dating right now.”
She continued, “I’ve had, you know, two — I’m just scared.”
Bertinelli told Fox News Digital at the panel that she realized for the first time through writing her memoir, “Getting Naked,” “I didn’t give myself enough credit for the strength I already had inside me. And that I’m — that I don’t have to listen to people be negative to me.”
The star said that she was “surprised that I was able to learn that. Finally! That I don’t have to listen to people be horrible to me. I don’t have to tolerate intolerable behavior.”
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She added to Fox News Digital that when she wrote her 2022 book “Enough Already” she thought she had learned that lesson, “but I still put up with intolerable behavior after that.”
“It wasn’t until I really dug down and got to the root of my shame and the dark side that I made friends with it,” she said. “Then I thought, ‘Now I’m done. Now I can just say, f— you. That’s it, I’m done. I’m out,’ you know?”
After divorcing her first husband, Eddie Van Halen, in 2007, she married businessman Tom Vitale in 2010. At the end of their marriage, Bertinelli began to refer to Vitale as “the narcissist,” saying that he emotionally abused her, calling her “fat and lazy.”
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She also called being officially divorced from Vitale the “second-best day of my life.”
Bertinelli began dating writer Mike Goodnough in 2024 and said she was in love, but by year’s end, the relationship had fizzled.
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A year ago, Goodnough claimed Bertinelli was “playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net” after their breakup, accusing her of falsely making his social media posts about herself and “lashes out angrily” at him.
He also accused her of “hostile, dishonest, and uncalled for backhanded swipes.”
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“Valerie is in a war with her ghosts. I’m just the guy who catches the bullets. And that isn’t new,” he added.
After their breakup, Bertinelli said in an Instagram post she had been “irreversibly changed by him for the better” and said that she had “fumbled the last true good man I met.”
The Strait of Hormuz crisis is driving nations’ efforts to develop alternative Gulf-to-Europe trade routes, with Iraq’s $24 billion “Development Road” project at the forefront, analyst says.
The route from Iraq’s Grand Faw Port to Turkey and on to Europe, is advancing “with discipline,” Middle East Council on Global Affairs analyst Muhanad Seloom told Fox News Digital, calling it a “permanent” and “transformative” wartime shift.
Seloom’s comments came as President Donald Trump warned Tehran against further escalation in the Gulf and signaled the U.S. is prepared to act to keep the strait open.
Iranian forces have laid mines and threatened commercial traffic in the narrow waterway. As of Sunday, the shipping route remains effectively closed.
“Iraq’s Development Road means every container moving through Basra instead of Iranian-controlled waters is a reduction in Tehran’s leverage over Iraq,” said Seloom.
“The real scale, independent estimates put the Development Road closer to $24 billion, and the project is now moving with discipline,” he said.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani inaugurated the first 63-kilometer stretch of the Development Road in 2025. Phase 1 is due for completion by 2028.
“What was described by the Iraqi government as a flagship of Iraqi statecraft now has a regional rationale that governments and financiers treat as essential rather than aspirational,” Seloom, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, explained.
“Sudani seems to be positioning Iraq exactly where he thinks its geography always suggested, as a connecting state between the Gulf, Turkey and Europe,” he said.
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But other regional infrastructure, Seloom says, is also being pushed forward in parallel.
Saudi Arabia’s East-West Petroline pipeline is operating near its 7 million-barrel-per-day capacity, with expansion plans under review.
The UAE’s ADCOP pipeline to Fujairah is also at maximum use, with a second line under discussion, he said. “Turkey’s Zangezur and Middle Corridors bypass Iran via the Caucasus and are four to five years out.”
He added: “Six Gulf-backed overland fiber projects are also underway through Syria, Iraq and the Horn of Africa.”
Iran reimposed closure measures on the Strait of Hormuz on April 18, reducing traffic to just a handful of vessels per day compared with a pre-war average of roughly 130 to 140.
The restrictions, including on ships, have come under fire in recent days, and interceptions trace back to the start of the war on Feb. 28, when Tehran first moved to block transit following U.S.-Israeli strikes.
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“Hormuz remains indispensable for energy, but it is no longer treated as a default. That shift is permanent given the war,” Seloom said.
For Iraq’s corridor, it is “potentially transformative,” Seloom said, with $4 billion per year in projected transit revenue and a repositioning from an oil rentier state to a logistics state.
“Turkey will be the single largest beneficiary. Combined with the Zangezur and Middle Corridors, Ankara becomes the overland bridge between Asia and Europe,” he said. “Europe will have an additional overland option on a 2028-plus timeline, but nothing for the current crisis. It marginally reduces structural dependence on the unreliable Suez–Red Sea axis.”
President Donald Trump conceded that he may have complicated the Secret Service’s evacuation process after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night.
In a preview for a “60 Minutes” interview airing Sunday night, Trump described to CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell what was going on in his head during the quick process of Secret Service agents flanking him and ushering him and other administration officials out of the event after shots were fired.
O’Donnell pointed out that it took 10 seconds for an agent to reach him and another 20 seconds before he was taken out of the building. Trump admitted that some of the hesitation came from his desire to know what was happening.
“Well, what happened is it was a little bit me,” Trump said. “I wanted to see what was happening, and I wasn’t making it that easy for them. I wanted to see what was going on. And by that time, we started to realize maybe it was a bad problem, different kind of a problem, bad one, and different than what would be normal noise from a ballroom, which you hear all the time. And I was surrounded by great people. And I probably made them act a little bit more slow. They said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me see. Wait a minute.'”
Trump said that he and first lady Melania Trump were eventually told to get down and “pretty much” began crawling out of the room.
“I was standing up and then turned around the opposite direction and started pretty much walking out pretty tall, a little bent over because I, you know, I’m not looking to be standing too tall but I was walking out, was pretty about halfway there. And they said, ‘Please go down to the floor. Please go down to the floor.’ So I dropped to the floor. So did the first lady,” Trump said.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Secret Service for comment.
Trump, his wife and several administration officials were quickly evacuated out of the dinner, abruptly ending the event. In a press conference shortly after the shooting, Trump confirmed that the shooter was in custody and that he has requested the White House Correspondents’ Association to reschedule the dinner some time within the next 30 days.
Cole Allen, a 31-year-old computer scientist from Torrance, California, was identified as the suspect accused of opening fire at the Washington Hilton Hotel.
During a news conference Saturday night, authorities said Allen was armed with multiple weapons when he rushed a Secret Service checkpoint. He then allegedly opened fire on a Secret Service officer, who was taken to the hospital after being shot in his ballistic vest. The officer was then released from the hospital on Sunday.
Fox News confirmed with law enforcement sources with knowledge of the investigation that the suspect was targeting Trump administration officials.
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Wayne Gretzky’s 1988 Stanley Cup Final jersey sells for $2.8M, setting an all-time hockey record
The most expensive hockey jersey ever sold now belongs to Wayne Gretzky. And that’s probably how it should be.
The jersey Gretzky wore during Game 4 of the 1988 Stanley Cup Final just sold for a staggering $2,806,000, setting a new all-time record for a hockey jersey.
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That same jersey — worn during his final championship run with the Edmonton Oilers — had previously held the record, selling for $1.452 million back in 2022.
Not anymore.
This isn’t just any game-worn sweater, either. It was worn during Gretzky’s final Stanley Cup run in 1988. Photo-matching later confirmed he wore it in multiple games, including Games 1 and 4 of the Final. It’s tied to one of the strangest moments in NHL history.
Game 4 against the Boston Bruins was famously canceled mid-game due to a power outage at Boston Garden with the score tied 3-3.
Two days later, the teams replayed the game, and the Oilers closed it out with a 6-3 win to complete the sweep and secure Gretzky’s fourth and final Stanley Cup.
He finished that postseason with 43 points in 19 games and took home the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
But wait, there’s more.
This jersey is also connected to another milestone. Gretzky wore it in a March 1, 1988, game where he recorded his 1,050th career assist, passing Gordie Howe for the NHL record at the time.
By the time he retired in 1999, Gretzky had piled up 1,963 assists — still 700+ more than any player in NHL history.
Shortly after that 1988 Cup run, Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings. He went on to play 20 seasons in the NHL before retiring in 1999, when he was immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame with the waiting period waived.
And now, nearly three decades later, he’s still setting records.
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