Valerie Bertinelli Just Clapped Back at Her Haters for Loving Eddie Van Halen, and Her Final Line Is Pure Defiance

Six years. That is how long Valerie Bertinelli has been posting tributes to Eddie Van Halen on the anniversary of his death, and six years of watching the same thing happen every single time. This Tuesday, the day the rock legend would have been gone six years, she shared a throwback photo of the two of them in a car, laughing the way only people with real history laugh. Her caption said it all: “Photos may fade, like old photos do, but not the memories and never the love.”

And then, predictably, the comments arrived. So this time, Bertinelli did something she has never quite done before. She looked straight into her phone camera and went to war for her right to grieve the man she never stopped loving.

The Tribute That Started It All

On October 6, Bertinelli posted the car photo to her Instagram. Eddie is turned toward the camera with a grin; she is mid-laugh, facing forward. It is the kind of picture you keep in a frame on a bookshelf, the kind that makes strangers smile because it looks like a private joke caught on film. For Bertinelli, it was a quiet way to mark the day Eddie died, October 6, 2020, at just 65, after years of battling cancer.

The photo itself could not have been more innocent. But as she would explain hours later, nothing she posts about Ed stays innocent for long.

“Strap In Haters, Let’s Go for a Little Ride”

That was the title Bertinelli gave the follow-up video she recorded, and she meant every word of it. In the clip, the 66-year-old actress explained that she always gets pushback when she posts a picture with the Van Halen guitarist. Not from friends. Not from family. From strangers on the internet who seem personally offended that she still loves her ex-husband.

“It used to really bother me,” she said. “It does not, not anymore. Not any longer, because I learned a lot.”

What Really Happens When She Posts About Ed

This is where Bertinelli got specific, and honestly, it is the part worth paying attention to. She described the pattern her critics follow with unsettling precision. They never come out and say it directly. They never write the sentence, “You are not allowed to love your ex-husband.” Instead, she said, they berate her and berate her for months, they try to make her feel like she is crazy, they call her obsessed, until eventually she used to cave and type the words, “OK, fine, I don’t love him.”

She also shared something deeper. Bertinelli said that anyone who has been through coercive control would understand exactly what happens inside her when she hits post on a photo of Ed. She did not elaborate much, but she did not need to. The point landed: this is not about a celebrity being thin-skinned. It is about a woman who has learned to name the pressure tactics used against her and refuses to fold under them anymore.

She gave one more example to show how absurd it gets. Her detractors, she said, would never suggest she should not attend her own son’s concert. But they would make her entire night awful if she went.

A Love That Survived Divorce, Grief, and the Internet

Here is the thing that makes the criticism so strange: Bertinelli has never hidden this. She and Eddie were married for 26 years, from 1981 to 2007, and they raised their son Wolfgang together. Wolfgang, now 35 and a musician in his own right, is living proof of what they built. When Eddie died, Bertinelli was one of the people holding him in his final moments, and she wrote at the time that she would see him in their next life.

Their divorce did not erase the love. Eddie went on to marry actress and stuntwoman Janie Liszewski in 2009. Bertinelli married Tom Vitale in 2011 and divorced him in 2022. Through all of it, she has said openly that Eddie held a big piece of her heart. She put it beautifully in the video: the heart can open wider, she said. It can hold a lot of love at once. Loving Ed never stopped her from loving anyone else, and loving anyone else never touched the love she has for him.

Then came the closing line, the one fans are already quoting everywhere: she told her detractors that she loves Ed, that she never stopped loving Ed, that her heart loves a lot, and she asked them, point blank, whether they wished their own hearts could hold that much too.

She Was Not the Only One Remembering Him

Bertinelli was not alone in marking the sixth anniversary. Glenn Scarpelli, her old One Day at a Time co-star who played Alex Handris from 1980 to 1983, shared his own tribute on Facebook on October 6. His photo shows a young Eddie playfully holding Scarpelli up by the legs while Bertinelli wraps her arms around them, all three laughing on what looks like the sitcom set.

“6 years ago Ed went home to Rock God Heaven,” Scarpelli wrote. “My thoughts are with Val and Wolfie today. I loved Eddie very much.” He described Eddie as down to earth, like a brother-in-law, and treasured the picture because Eddie picked him up and played him like a guitar.

It is a small detail, but it tells you something about the Eddie the world never got to know outside the arenas. The guitar god who could make a nervous young sitcom actor feel honored instead of embarrassed.

Why This One Hit Different

Bertinelli has been famous since she was a teenager playing Barbara Cooper on One Day at a Time. She headlined Hot in Cleveland, became a Food Network star, and wrote bestselling memoirs about food, family, and self-worth. She has dealt with tabloids for four decades. So when she says something “used to really bother” her and no longer does, that is not a throwaway line. That is a woman who has done the work.

Her message was really for anyone who has ever been told their grief has an expiration date, or that their love story belongs to someone else’s timeline. The marriage ended in 2007. The man died in 2020. Neither of those things canceled the love, and Bertinelli just told six years of critics that no amount of berating ever will.

For everyone navigating loss in their own way, stories like Michael Flatley’s heartbreaking tribute to his wife Niamh remind us how different grief looks for everyone. And like Naomi Campbell’s fight to clear her name, sometimes standing your ground is the whole story. Or, as FKA Twigs proved when she refused to be silenced, refusing to back down can change everything.

The full story was first reported by Page Six and Entertainment Weekly.