Björk's Ex-Partner, Matthew Barney, Suing to Get More Time With Their Daughter, Blames Singer's ''Selfish Desires''

Artist-filmmaker states in court documents that their 12-year-old has expressed that she wants equal time with mom and dad

By Natalie Finn Apr 02, 2015 9:10 PMTags
Bjork, Matthew Barney Daniele Venturelli/WireImage

Long after Drawing Restraint 9, it appears that Björk and Matthew Barney are still eating away at each other.

The couple split up in 2013, providing the emotional foundation for Bjork's latest album, Vulnicura, and now Barney is taking his ex to court in hopes of getting to spend more time with their 12-year-old daughter, Isadora.

Björk "is effectively sacrificing Doa's emotional well-being in favor of her own selfish desires," Barney's filing states, according to Page Six. The singer's "self-focused mindset...flows, in part, from her belief that as Doa's mother, she has far greater rights than I do as Doa's father; and, in part, from her insistence that I am solely to blame for the breakdown of our relationship and the end of our intact family."

The artist-filmmaker further states in his petition, filed this week in Brooklyn Supreme Court, that Isadora has expressed her wish "on her own initiative" to spend equal amounts of time with her dad and mom. Björk splits her time mainly between New York and her native Iceland.

One Little Indian Records

The Dancer in the Dark star didn't talk in depth about her breakup with Barney after 13 years together until recently, while out promoting Vulnicura, which includes lyrics such as "You fear my limitless emotions/ I'm bored of your apocalyptic obsessions/ Did I love you too much?/ Devotion bent me broken."

She told The Guardian last month that she went through "the classic process of grief. Apparently it's pretty similar if, if... a person dies, or you lose your job, or get a divorce. Obviously they are differently—what do you say—devastating. I'm not going to compare divorce to the death of a child. There are other things that are far worse. But the stages that you go through are the same, almost like chapters in a book. At first I fought it, because I thought it was so normcore. Predictable.

"But then it was like, what are you gonna do? And I think something in me, like a survival instinct as a songwriter, knew that I would never get to the end bit if I didn't go through the other bits, musically. There was nothing in my subconscious that would let me fast-forward and just write a disco song."

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