A tearful Sharon Osbourne said Thursday that she would have shot her husband, rocker Ozzy Osbourne, when he tried to strangle her in 1989 if she had had a gun in their English home.
While interviewing women who have served time in prison for killing abusive boyfriends or husbands, Osbourne told guests on her U.S. daytime talk show that she had been a victim of domestic violence.
“He (Ozzy) was drinking and he was taking drugs and it got to the point where he got violent with me, and he nearly choked me to death and I called the police on him,” Osbourne said, on the verge of tears.
“He’s a gift from God, but if I’d have had a gun I would have used it,” she said.
Ozzy Osbourne was arrested in 1989 at the couple’s home in Buckinghamshire, northwest of London, on charges of threatening to kill his wife, and for a time he was barred from the family home or from contacting Sharon, then 37.
The couple, married in 1982, and two of their three children star in MTV’s popular reality show “The Osbournes.”
Sharon Osbourne said Thursday that after his arrest, the frontman for heavy metal band Black Sabbath “turned his life around.”
“Thank God I didn’t have a gun, that’s why I’m so against guns or knives or anything like that, because I know if I’d have had one I’d have probably tried to defend myself,” she said.