Bruce Willis’s wife has fought back at online critics after revealing that her husband is living in a separate home while he deals with the effects of frontotemporal dementia.
Emma Heming Willis said in an Instagram video on Friday that the blowback she has received has been “so loud and so noisy.”
“But if they don’t have the experience with this,” she said. “They don’t get a say, and they definitely don’t get a vote.”
On Tuesday, Willis appeared on an ABC special and discussed the difficulty of caring for Bruce, who was diagnosed with the progressive brain disease in 2023.
She described the choice to move Bruce, 70, to a separate home as “one of the hardest decisions” she’s had to make, but one that he would have wanted.
“Bruce would want that for our daughters,” she said, speaking of their 11-year-old and 13-year-old children. “He would want them to be in a home that was more tailored to their needs, not his needs.”
The former model told Diane Sawyer that Bruce now lives in a house with a full-time team of caregivers and that she brings their children over for breakfast and dinner “a lot.”
Willis said on Friday that she expected to receive criticism after the special, which she said did a “beautiful job” of highlighting caregivers.
“I knew that by sharing some of our intimate information, we would see these two camps,” she said. “It would be people with an opinion. And people with experience.”
She then read a passage from her book, The Unexpected Journey, which is due to come out in September.
“Everyone will have an opinion, but you have to remind yourself that most won’t have the experience to back it up. And if that’s the case, they shouldn’t offer their two cents about it.”
Heming Willis, 47, married the Die Hard star in 2009 in Turks and Caicos. She has become an advocate for dementia awareness since her husband’s diagnosis, writing an op-ed documenting her experience in 2023 and speaking at various events.
FTD is the most common form of dementia affecting people under age 60, with most cases occurring between the ages of 45 and 64.
It is characterized by personality changes, difficulty speaking, and motor impairment, with most people living between seven and 13 years after their diagnosis.
Willis was 67 when he was diagnosed with the condition in February 2023, less than a year after he retired from acting due to difficulty speaking.
He also has three children with his ex-wife, Demi Moore, who announced his aphasia diagnosis in March 2022, which preceded his ultimate diagnosis with dementia.
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