From sleeping with John Cusack to ‘emotionally distant' Matthew Perry: The four biggest revelations from Ione Skye's new memoir

Independent

05-03-2025

Actor Ione Skye just spilled all the juicy details about her former flames and disastrous flings in her new memoir, Say Everything — which is officially released on March 4 — including the affairs she had with the late Matthew Perry and her popular co-star John Cusack.
The 54-year-old Hollywood star is best known for her roles in the 1986 crime thriller River's Edge, the 1989 romance film Say Anything, and the 2000s television series Good Girls.
A self-described 'serial cheater,' Skye takes readers through her not-so-glamorous life in the city of angels, starting from the moment she landed her first role in Say Anything at 16, navigating fame without a father and dealing with the harsh reality of her heart's desires.
From sleeping with the ultra-famous John Cusack to spending too much time with the 'emotionally distant' Matthew Perry, here are four of the biggest revelations about Skye's tumultuous love life, as shared in her memoir.
Dating Anthony Kiedis
At 16, Skye had already landed her big break, starring as John Cusack's love interest, Diane Court, in the movie Say Anything. She was also beginning her first serious relationship with her then-boyfriend, Red Hot Chilli Peppers lead Anthony Kiedis, who was 24 years old at the time and just out of rehab for his heroin addiction.
According to Skye, she and the rockstar were 'instantly full-blown, instantly emeshed.' But the honeymoon period didn't last long at all.
'Right away, he started disappearing on binges – slow-motion heroin rampages that lasted for three days or so … the binges terrified me,' she recalled in her memoir.
Skye went on to admit she would spend all hours of the night looking for Kiedis during his drug episodes.
'I thought I had to save him,' she wrote.
'I'm happy I knew Anthony Kiedis,' she said. 'And [Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist] Flea, but I wish I'd met them ten years later and never dated them.'
Her relationship with the music icon ended by the time she was 18.
Cheating on Adam Horovitz
Skye met her first husband, Adam Horovitz, at 18. In her memoir, she described the Beastie Boys rapper, nicknamed Ad-Rock, as her 'first great love.'
Skye's brother Donovan Leitch introduced her to Horovitz, and before long, the two were married. The duo officially tied the knot in 1992 when Skye was 21 and Horovitz was 25, spending seven rocky years together before ultimately splitting up in 1999.
In her book, Skye confessed she cheated on Horovitz multiple times throughout their marriage.
'I was a serial cheater,' Skye wrote, noting how she'd hoped her relationship with Horovitz would change her habit of infidelity. Indeed, it didn't.
Skye became involved in several affairs, specifically with women. She dated Alice Temple, Jenny Shimizu, and Madonna's ex-partner, Ingrid Casares, all while she was with Horovitz.
The actor remembered a major turning point in her marriage when Horovitz caught her with a woman named Mai Lei.
Skye met Lei while Horovitz was on tour. 'Within minutes, I could tell we'd get together and it would be different with her,' she said of Lei, describing their affair as 'the true beginning of the end of my marriage.'
'If you've never cheated, I admire you, but I really don't expect you to understand why I would do what I was doing to the love of my life. I still don't truly understand it myself,' she continued.
'I wasn't loyal to her,' she confessed. '(There were other girls too).'
'I loved her, thought her smile lit up the world. From the inside, I liked the life-within-a-life I had with her,' Skye continued.
However, everything came to a head in January 1996.
'I heated the pool and Mai Lei and I spent several decadent hours splashing and playing, floating and talking,' she remembered. '[Mai Lei] swam to me in the shallow end and I took her in my arms, holding her like a bride — the way Adam had held me in the pool at Le Parc the night he asked me to move in with him. Then I saw a figure in the house. The water went cold. Adam.
'He stood just inside the glass doors that opened from our bedroom to the back patio and the pool. Mai Lei hadn't seen him yet. She was still prone in my arms, black hair fanned in the water, talking in the fast, excited voice of a twenty-three-year-old girl telling a good story,' she continued.
'I waved to Adam. He didn't wave back, just turned and walked into the next room. I felt like throwing up in the pool… I couldn't speak. I felt as if I'd just witnessed a car crash, and Adam had been in the car. As if the world were ending. I was so, so afraid,' she wrote.
Once Lei left, Skye 'finally got the courage to go inside.'
'Adam said nothing,' she recalled. 'Just held me as I sobbed and dripped onto his shoulder.'
After her divorce from Horovitz, Skye reconnected with her former co-star, John Cusack, who she'd had a crush on.
The two maintained a friendly relationship on set but never pursued anything romantic until years after the film premiered. That said, Skye said she and Cusack always knew they had a crush on each other.
'I had to get it out of my system,' she said of sleeping with Cusack.
Skye shared what she'd written about their intimate escapades with Cusack, who wasn't so pleased with the portrayal of it.
In fact, Skye revealed to People that Cusack texted her and said: 'You made the experience sound so meh! It wasn't 'meh' for me.'
Before Skye eventually married Ben Lee in 2008, she spent time in a secret relationship with the late Matthew Perry, who died at the age of 54 due to 'acute effects of ketamine' and subsequently drowning in his hottub in 2023.
Skye had worked with the Friends lead on A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon years before she received a late-night booty call from him.
Perry had asked her if she wanted to meet him for a 'sober drink.'
'​​I was curious, and he was adorable and handsome and rich and presumably sober, so I said yes,' Skye wrote. 'Somehow I didn't see Chandler from Friends, I saw the boy I knew when we were 16 and 17.'
It didn't take long for the two to end the night in bed together. 'The sex was perfectly pleasant,' Skye remembered. 'Though the silent talking heads on the flat-screen distracted me and Matthew seemed far away. Neither of us gave it our all.'
The pair slept together a second, and final, time the next week, but she didn't see him again after that.