Mekishana Pierre is a news writer at Entertainment Weekly. She has been working at EW since 2025. Her work has previously appeared on Entertainment Tonight and Popsugar.
Almost a year after the death of her younger brother, Christopher Ciccone, Madonna has opened up about their years-long estrangement and how she forgave him right before he died.
The 67-year-old Queen of Pop made her podcast debut with in Monday’s episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty, during which she recalled how forgiveness factors into her spiritual journey. Madonna spoke specifically about how hard it was to forgive Ciccone after believing she would “never” be able to get past his “betrayal.”
“There’s things that have happened to me in my life that I just thought, ‘I will never I will never forgive this person,'” Madonna told Shetty. “Now I just don’t want to have those feelings anymore ’cause it’s a prison and it’s poison to not be able to forgive and to live in a state of like holding a grudge or hating someone or wanting them to suffer.”
The “Live a Virgin” singer admitted she perceived her brother as one of her “biggest enemies,” sharing that she believes “the hardest ones” to forgive “are the people that you feel like you [are] the closest to. They’re your greatest ally and they turn on you. The people that hurt you the most are the people that you love the most.”
She added: “This pain is unbearable and you think what’s going to save you is to think vengeful thoughts or to never forgive. Like that’s going to give you some kind of power, magical power. It doesn’t, it just weighs you down and eats away at you and is poisonous.”
Ciccone served as a dresser and later an art director for the singer, providing artwork for her smash single “Like a Prayer” and 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. He also became an interior designer, working for his sister.
In 2008, Ciccone released his autobiography, Life With My Sister Madonna, which debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Critics panned the tell-all memoir for its harsh nature, and it reportedly caused tension between Ciccone and Madonna, who did not approve of the book’s release.
Following the memoir’s release, Madonna’s longtime representative Liz Rosenberg told the Associated Press (per Billboard) that the singer didn’t read it but found it “very upsetting” that Ciccone “decided to sell a book based on his sister.”
“I would have to assume she has come to terms with the fact that they do not have a close and loving relationship,” Rosenberg said. “And with the book coming out, I assume that will remove the chances of that ever happening.”
Looking back, Madonna revealed that she knew she had to forgive Ciccone but her ego “dance[d] around it. But that changed when Ciccone reached out to her during his illness.
“It was him being ill and reaching out to me and saying, ‘I need your help,'” she recalled. “And me having that moment like, ‘Am I going to help my enemy?’ And I just did. And I felt so relieved. And it was such a load off my back, such a weight that was removed, baggage that I could put down, to finally be able to be in a room with him and holding his hand even if he was dying and saying, ‘I love you and I forgive you.’ That was really important.”
Madonna revealed to Shetty that as she’s been working on new music and has written a song about her brother called “Fragile” and another song called “Forgive Yourself” that are connected.
“The chorus of the song is, ‘If you can’t forgive me forgive yourself,’ which is something we all have to do,” Madonna explained. “We have to forgive others but we also have to forgive ourselves and stop beating up on ourselves about things, choices we’ve made in the past that haven’t worked out for ourselves or other people.”
The idea of taking on that responsibility is a concept intrinsic to the lessons she learned while studying Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition focused on understanding the hidden divine nature of the universe and the esoteric meanings within the Torah.
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She said that her hospitalization in 2023 due to a bacterial infection also inspired her feelings of forgiveness.
“That was another thing I realized, when I woke up in the hospital, forgiveness. That word came to my mind. I have to forgive people,” she told Shetty. “Because I was there, I was almost there on the other side. I had a conscious moment and my mother appeared to me and she said, ‘Do you want to come with me?’ and I said no.”
Claiming her assistant actually heard her say “no” while unconscious, Madonna said she later realized “that the ‘no’ was about me needing to forgive and make good with people that I still held grudges against.”
Watch Madonna’s full appearance with Jay Shetty above.
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