Michelle Ghent is best known as the second ex-wife of actor Terrence Howard, and for the divorce fight that kept both their names in court for close to ten years. The two married in 2010 and finalized their split by 2013. The money behind that divorce was not settled until 2019, when a Los Angeles judge ordered Howard to pay her about $1.3 million.
The $1.3 million drew most of the headlines. The stranger part of the case was legal. Two California courts weighed the same evidence about the marriage and reached opposite conclusions about it.
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Who is Michelle Ghent?
Michelle Ghent is an American woman who came to public attention through her marriage to Terrence Howard. They married in 2010 and finalized their divorce in 2013. Almost everything on the record about her comes from the spousal support and abuse case that followed, which ended with a $1.3 million judgment in her favor in 2019.
There is no confirmed account of her age, hometown, education, or net worth in any reliable report. The sites listing precise figures for those details are not drawing them from a verified source. The account below is built from court records and reporting published at the time.
A marriage almost no one saw coming
Howard and Ghent married in a private Los Angeles ceremony in January 2010. The public did not find out until that May, when Howard mentioned it in an interview. Few people knew the two were even together.
The marriage did not last long. Ghent filed for divorce in early 2011, days before what would have been their first anniversary, citing irreconcilable differences. She asked for spousal support and for Howard to cover her legal fees.
The first abuse allegations and a restraining order
Later in 2011, the breakup turned bitter. That December, Ghent went to court seeking a restraining order, telling a judge that Howard had abused her during the marriage and had threatened to kill her. Howard denied it and filed his own response, accusing her of blackmail. He said she was threatening to release private recordings and videos unless he paid her.
The Costa Rica trip that ended with a black eye
Two months after the divorce was finalized in May 2013, Howard and Ghent traveled together on a family trip to Costa Rica. It ended in another court fight.
In a civil complaint filed afterward, Ghent described what she said happened on the night of July 29, 2013. According to the filing, Howard followed her into a bathroom, punched the left side of her face, grabbed her by the neck, and pushed her against the wall. The complaint says one of Howard’s sons stepped in to pull him away.
Days later, Ghent appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom with a visible black eye and was granted a temporary restraining order that required Howard to stay 100 yards away and barred him from contacting her. His own request for a restraining order against her was denied.
The hearing came with a twist. The black eye itself never came up in court. What did was a text message Ghent had reportedly sent Howard that May, threatening to harm him and his family. In police reports, Howard said the argument turned physical only after Ghent threatened him and sprayed him and several relatives with pepper spray. He has consistently denied hitting her. No criminal charges were filed over the incident, and Ghent dropped the related assault and defamation lawsuit in January 2017.
Why Terrence Howard tried to undo the divorce settlement
In 2012, Howard had signed a settlement that gave Ghent roughly $5,800 a month plus a share of his future earnings. A few years later, he tried to get it thrown out.
At a four-day hearing in August 2015, Howard testified, at times breaking down, about what he had feared would become public. He named phone sex recordings with other women and a video of himself dancing naked in a bathroom. He said he had paid Ghent $40,000 after a 2011 phone call in which she threatened to release the material. When his attorney asked whether he saw the payment as hush money, Howard rejected the word and called it blood money instead.
From the bench, Superior Court Judge Thomas Trent Lewis sided with Howard and set the settlement aside. “The evidence of extortion or duress was unrebutted,” he said.
Lewis was not easy on Howard either. In his written ruling, the judge called the actor a bully, found him not credible on several points, and cited an unrelated episode on a Continental Airlines flight as an example of how Howard downplays his own conduct. The hearing also brought out that Howard had cheated on Ghent during their engagement and had a record of violence involving his first wife.
The ruling an appeals court overturned
In 2017, a California appeals court reversed Lewis. The judges reviewed the same 2011 phone call and read it the other way.
They found it did not meet the legal bar for duress. Too much time had passed between Ghent’s 2011 threat and Howard’s 2012 signature, they reasoned, and the situation looked closer to buyer’s remorse. Howard, they noted, had other options, including going to the police, rather than signing. The settlement was put back in place.
So within two years, one court found Howard had been coerced into signing and another found he had not, without either disputing what actually happened between them. What separated the two rulings was how each judge read the time that had passed.
The $1.3 million spousal support judgment
With the settlement reinstated, the bill came due. In August 2019, Judge Helen Zukin ordered Howard to pay Ghent about $1.3 million. The amount broke down into $263,137 in back spousal support and another $1,055,970 tied to his sharp jump in income after “Empire” turned into a hit. Zukin said from the bench that the case had gone on long enough and that the appeals court had already upheld the judgment.
The order led to an odd standoff in 2020. 20th Century Fox ended up in the middle and sued Howard, Ghent, and Howard’s company over who was actually owed his “Empire” paychecks. Howard argued his pending appeal had paused the debt. No outlet reported how that part of the fight was resolved.
Where is Michelle Ghent now?
No one in the press seems to know. There has been no credible reporting on her since the 2020 Fox case, and she has stayed out of public view entirely.
Howard, by contrast, has stayed in the news. As of 2026 he is back with Miranda Pak, whom he married, divorced, and later became engaged to again. His ex-wife plays no part in any of his current headlines.
The court battle is the reason her name is known at all, and it is also the last place that name appears on the public record. After years of hearings and a seven-figure judgment, the documentation stops in 2020. There has been no statement from her and no sign of where she went since.
