In October 2025, Kristen Bell posted a photo on Instagram to celebrate her 12th wedding anniversary with Dax Shepard.
The photo was sweet, the two embracing, her arms and legs wrapped around him, and the caption was anything but.
She quoted something Shepard had said to her after they watched an episode of Dateline together, “I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.”
The response was immediate and divided. Some found it funny. Many did not.
The e went up on October 17, the third week of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.
A comment reading “Domestic violence isn’t a joke” received more than 55,000 likes.
Bell limited comments on the post and said nothing publicly. She skipped a scheduled appearance on the Today show in the days that followed. She never addressed the controversy directly.
Six months later, on April 6, Shepard finally weighed in, and his take was roughly what you would expect from someone who found out about the backlash more than a week after it happened because a friend tried to comfort him about it.
What Did Dax Say?
Shepard addressed the post on the April 6 episode of his Armchair Expert podcast while speaking with guest Nikki Glaser and co-host Monica Padman.
The conversation started because Glaser, who hosted this year’s Golden Globes in January, mentioned she had written a joke about the post for her monologue and decided not to use it to avoid making Shepard’s life harder.
Curious, Shepard asked to hear the unused joke. Glaser obliged, “Die My Love. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Sorry, Baby.
These are not just Dax Shepard captions for his anniversary post. These are movies nominated tonight.”
Shepard laughed. Then he explained that he had no idea any of this had happened when it was happening. “I was alerted by someone that this whole thing was happening. I didn’t know, and Kristen knew through her publicist but didn’t tell me. So I actually didn’t know, and this was brought to my attention.”
He found out a week and a half after the post went live when someone tried to comfort him. “Someone comforted me, and I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then I had to go to Kristen, ‘What are they talking about?’ She’s like, ‘Oh, that post I had.'”
His response to the critics themselves was considerably less gentle. Addressing “all these people that are convinced I’m beating Kristen,” he said anyone who took the post seriously has “never been in a relationship.”
He went further:
“We both grew up with domestic violence, so if you tell me how domestic violence works, I can tell you those guys who beat my mom’s ass never went online to find out if it was acceptable from someone. That’s not actually how it works. So you want to be really mad about a hypothetical scenario that’s never happened.”
He also pushed back on the framing that people were defending his wife. “Don’t insult my wife. She doesn’t need your protection. You don’t need to diminish her. That’s what pisses me off.”
He added, with some restraint, that the whole situation “feels beneath me to even defend myself.”
Glaser was more blunt about the critics, “That’s the thing that bothers me is, like, this is what you’re talking about right now of all things? You f—ing losers. You’re wasting your time getting angry about this. Go read some files.”
Why Did The Post Get Such A Strong Reaction?
The caption in full, “Happy 12th wedding anniversary to the man who, after an episode of Dateline, once said to me: ‘I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I’m heavily incentivized to kill you, I never would.'”
The joke being made is obvious enough, that watching true crime together prompted an unprompted reassurance, which is funny specifically because the reassurance is unnecessary and somewhat unhinged and a thing that only a couple who watches a lot of true crime and has a dark sense of humor would say to each other.
That reading is supported by the fact that Dateline’s own Instagram account commented “Screenshotted,” comedian Howie Mandel wrote “He should write for Hallmark,” and actor Terry Crews replied “This is LOVE.”
The reading that generated 55,000 likes on a critical comment is that posting a joke about a husband saying he won’t murder his wife, during Domestic Violence Awareness Month, invites people who have actually experienced or survived domestic violence to encounter it in a context that treats it as a punchline.
Those are not the same reading, and both exist simultaneously in the comment section of a post that Bell stopped taking new comments on rather than deleted.
Bell did not apologize. A PR expert quoted by The Blast at the time called her silence “brutally ugly” and recommended she take accountability.
Bell appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to promote her work and said nothing about the post.
In February, she gave People a warm profile about her marriage in which she described Dax as a man who is “never allergic to me shining more and more,” no reference to the anniversary controversy.
A 2012 video of Shepard resurfaced during the backlash in which he joked about “hitting” his wife after she commented on a car he had fixed.
That clip added context for those who were already critical and was dismissed as an old joke by those who were not.
Who Are Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard?
Kristen Bell was born July 18, 1980, in Huntington Woods, Michigan. She is 45 years old.
She broke through as the title character in Veronica Mars and built a career that spans Frozen, The Good Place, Nobody Wants This, and a long run of projects that have consistently demonstrated range across comedy and drama.
She has a well-documented public persona that centers on transparency, directness, and an unwillingness to perform a sanitized version of herself.
Dax Shepard was born January 2, 1975, in Milford, Michigan.
He is 51. He is an actor, director, and podcast host, Armchair Expert has been running since 2018 and is one of the more popular long-form interview podcasts in the country.
He has been openly public about his history with drug and alcohol dependency and his ongoing recovery, and he and Bell have jointly built a public image based on radical honesty about the real texture of marriage, including couples counseling and arguments.
They met at a friend’s birthday dinner in 2007, ran into each other again at a hockey game two weeks later, and started dating.
They got engaged in 2009. They married on October 17, 2013, the same date Bell’s anniversary post went up last October, in a simple ceremony at a Beverly Hills courthouse.
They have two daughters: Lincoln, born March 2013, and Delta, born December 2014. Both Shepard and Bell have said publicly that they grew up in households where domestic violence was present, which is the context Shepard invoked when responding to the critics on his podcast.
Bell has not addressed the controversy publicly. The post is still up.
