filing

Halle Berry is speaking out against her ex-husband Olivier Martinez, after he accused the actor of physically abusing their 12-year-old son and was granted a restraining order against the Oscar winner.

Marina Beck, an attorney for the 60-year-old “Catwoman” and “John Wick: Chapter 3” star, in a statement downplayed Martinez’s protective order, granted Thursday by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

“To say this filing is entirely meritless and deliberately misleading would be an understatement,” Beck said, later accusing Martinez of repeatedly violating court orders and interfering with “necessary therapeutic and educational interventions to the detriment” of his son with Berry.

The attorney added: “In a way, today’s filing is not entirely unexpected from an individual with a well-documented history of erratic, possessive and violent behavior. Fortunately, Halle is used to this kind of outrageous conduct from Mr. Martinez and, while she is deeply saddened, she will not allow it to deter her from fighting for Maceo’s best interests and providing him with the love and support he needs.”

Patrick Baghdaserians, an attorney for Martinez, did not comment on the statement from Berry’s legal team, but said the welfare and safety of Berry and Martinez’s child remains paramount.

According to the order reviewed by The Times, Berry is prohibited from contacting Martinez, 60, and their son Maceo beyond the terms of her August 2023 split-custody agreement. The judge also modified the actor’s visitation time, limiting her hours with her son to Mondays, Tuesdays and weekends between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Berry and Martinez wed in France in July 2013, shortly after confirming they were expecting a baby together. They welcomed their son in October. Berry shares a daughter with ex-boyfriend Gabriel Aubry. The actor was also previously married to ex-MLB pro David Justice and singer-actor Eric Benét and is currently engaged to musician Van Hunt.

Berry filed to divorce Martinez in October 2015. Their divorce finally came to an end after eight years in August 2023, when they agreed to joint custody of their son and Berry agreed to pay Martinez $8,000 a month in child support. The “Monster’s Ball” actor was also ordered at the time to also pay Martinez 4.3% of any income she receives above $2 million.

Martinez’s request for a domestic violence restraining order centered on an alleged Sept. 26 incident involving Berry and their son. Martinez alleged the actor “physically abused our son, Maceo, by jumping on him, putting her hands around his neck, and choking him.”

The financial terms of their divorce also appeared to be central to another alleged incident in 2023, when Berry allegedly told Maceo, then 9, that his father is “ ‘a white b— trying to rob a Black woman’ due to child support issues,” the request said. Martinez’s filing included a declaration of Berry’s alleged history of abuse, screenshots of his text conversation with Berry following the alleged September incident in which she appears to have written, “I feel terrible about what happened last night.”

Martinez requested sole legal and physical custody of Maceo. He also asked that Berry refrain from drinking or partaking in other substances during her visitation time and asked that she complete sobriety testing “before, during and after” her visitation, according to court documents. The judge denied those sobriety testing requests until a further hearing for the order on Oct. 16.

Berry has been a vocal supporter for victims of domestic violence and a volunteer at the Jenesse Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to domestic violence intervention and prevention. The actor has also spoken about her own experience with domestic violence growing up. She recalled her father’s abusive treatment of her mother during a gala in 2015.

“She stayed for too long and her children, my sister and I, saw far too much and I’ve suffered the damage of being a child of domestic violence,” Berry said at the time.

Former Times staff writer Jonah Valdez contributed to this report.

New Orleans Pelicans star Zion Williamson had a “friendly and casual ‘friends with benefits’ sexual relationship” with the woman who is accusing him of raping and abusing her multiple times between 2018 and 2023, according to a court filing by the former Duke standout’s legal team.

A document submitted to Los Angeles County Superior Court on Monday states that Williamson denies “each and every allegation” made against him by a Jane Doe in a second amended complaint filed in June.

Williamson’s filing describes the interaction between the former No. 1 overall draft pick and his accuser as “infrequent and sporadic.”

“All interaction among and between the Plaintiff and Defendant was pleasant and entirely consensual, with the Plaintiff initiating and communicating her desire to be intimate with the Defendant,” the document states, “and the Plaintiff herself decided to end the relationship because she became upset when she realized that the Defendant was focusing his time and energy on professional basketball and on being a father, and did not have sufficient time or interest to maintain a relationship with the Plaintiff.”

The second amended complaint lists the causes of action as assault, battery, sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, domestic violence and stalking. The response from Williamson’s team states that the statute of limitations has expired on each cause of action.

The initial complaint, filed in May 2025, also included false imprisonment and conversion as causes of action, which are not included in the latest complaint.

The lawsuit provides details of two instances in 2020 during which Williamson allegedly raped his accuser in a Beverly Hills apartment he was renting at the time.

“These two incidents were not isolated,” the lawsuit states. “Defendant continued to abuse, rape, assault, and batter Plaintiff in California and other states, including Louisiana and Texas, until the relationship ended in 2023.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Williamson committed many other acts of violence against his accuser, including strangling her multiple times to the point that she lost consciousness, suffocating or smothering her, striking and kicking her “with great force,” threatening to kill her and her family members, and pointing a loaded firearm to her head.

Williamson “was either drunk or on cocaine” while allegedly committing many of those acts, the lawsuit states.

A jury trial has been scheduled for April 2028.

Crypto traders are assigning Anthropic an implied valuation more than $1 trillion (€866bn) above its last funding-round price, before public investors have even seen its accounts.

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The company behind Claude has filed its IPO paperwork confidentially and chosen Nasdaq for its initial public offering.

What remains is the public release of its S-1 filing, the official registration package that a US company submits to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Until it arrives, the only live price on Anthropic comes from a corner of the crypto market where pre-IPO speculation runs rampant, and it currently sits far above anything the company has ever agreed with an investor.

The last agreed valuation was $965 billion (€836bn), set when a $65 billion (€56bn) Series H round closed at the end of May, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia.

That was already an extraordinary figure for a company founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, and it followed a valuation of $61.5 billion (€53.3bn) barely a year earlier, representing a nearly sixteenfold increase in roughly 12 months.

Revenue has moved almost as fast.

Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate passed $65 billion (€56bn) by the end of July, driven by enterprise adoption of Claude.

The losses are also enormous, reportedly reaching close to $42 billion (€36.4bn) in 2025, reflecting the cost of training frontier models. Amazon has committed to investing as much as $33 billion (€28.6bn) in the company, while Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion (€86.6bn) on AWS technologies over the coming decade.

Given these figures, investors are already aiming considerably higher than the valuation in the last round.

Reports have put the target IPO valuation at $2 trillion (€1.73tn), with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley leading an offering expected to raise more than $60 billion (€52bn).

The market that is already trading

Perpetual futures contracts tracking Anthropic’s pre-IPO valuation are currently trading on Hyperliquid, the largest decentralised derivatives venue, where the implied market capitalisation reached an all-time high of roughly $2.36 trillion (€2.05tn) and sits near $2.15 trillion (€1.86tn) at the time of writing.

That is about 2.2 times the Series H valuation.

Heng Yu Lee, partner at market maker DWF Labs, which is active in these instruments, rejects the suggestion that leverage rather than conviction is driving the premium.

“Whether it’s leveraged or not, everyone trading the pre-IPO market is genuine demand at the price that’s reflected,” he told Euronews, adding that “the premium is pricing in public information that’s available, such as expected revenue numbers and expected market demand for the stock.”

These contracts will also be the first instruments to react when the filing lands, trading around the clock while equity markets are shut.

“At a moment like the S-1 dropping, you typically see volume spike and prices fluctuate heavily as the market digests the information,” Lee explained.

However, the market remains small relative to what it is valuing.

“Currently, the market isn’t super deep, with just $6M in 24-hour volume and $31M in open interest on Hyperliquid,” Lee said, adding that liquidity should improve as the listing approaches, given that more investors are likely to pile in.

Lee is also candid about how much weight the number deserves.

“As of now, I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the absolute pricing as we have yet to have a public S-1,” he stated while clarifying that “the direction of how the prices move typically still accurately reflects the shifting sentiment towards the company as things develop.”

A crowded year for AI listings

Once Anthropic files publicly, it will cement 2026 as the year of AI IPOs.

It started with chipmaker Cerebras Systems, which designs wafer-scale processors pitched as an alternative to Nvidia’s. The firm listed on Nasdaq in May after two false starts, raising $5.55 billion (€4.76bn) at $185 a share, above its revised price range.

The stock opened 89% higher and closed its first day near $311, valuing the company at roughly $67 billion (€58bn) compared with the $23 billion (€20bn) it had been worth three months earlier.

Investor appetite for a credible Nvidia challenger proved fierce, though the enthusiasm cooled quickly after a disappointing first earnings report. Cerebras is currently trading at a valuation of around $43.7 billion (€37.8bn).

Then came SpaceX, which listed in June, raising more than $85 billion (€73.6bn) at a valuation that briefly touched $2.8 trillion (€2.4tn) before falling back to around $1.95 trillion (€1.69tn).

OpenAI was also slated to hold an IPO this year and had already filed confidentially, but has now stepped back entirely. The company has a private valuation of $852 billion (€738bn), set during a $122 billion (€105bn) round in March.

CEO Sam Altman told Fortune on Saturday that listing this year would be “ill-advised”, ruling out 2026 and declining to commit to 2027. He said the company had “a lot of stuff to do” on safety and alignment and that being private made that easier.

Altman’s comments arrived the same day that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier”, arguing that AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they improve their most capable models.

Amodei proposed three steps: independent evaluators with employee-level access to frontier systems, coordination on safety standards among labs in democratic countries, and international agreements on the most dangerous categories of use.

Anthropic has already committed unilaterally to the first, and the endorsements came quickly, with Sam Altman saying he agreed on the need to pace the frontier and Elon Musk replying simply: “Dario is right”.

However, US President Donald Trump did not.

In his first public response to the three CEOs, Trump, speaking in Ireland on Sunday, dismissed the argument.

“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said, describing some warnings as things “that won’t happen”.

Trump has since reiterated that argument in several social media posts.

Likewise, China’s foreign ministry called the warnings “fearmongering”.

Markets registered the exchange, with shares in SoftBank, Kioxia and SK Hynix falling sharply on Monday. Shares in the Japanese and South Korean companies fell more than 6% and 4.3%, respectively.

This leaves Anthropic in an awkward position as it approaches what could be the largest listing ever attempted in public markets.

The company is asking public investors to fund frontier AI development while its founder argues publicly that such development should proceed more slowly.

That is not necessarily a contradiction, since pacing is not stopping, and Anthropic has always argued that safety-focused labs should be at the frontier rather than ceding it.

However, it is a story the S-1 filing will have to tell convincingly, and the risk factors section will be read unusually closely.