James Haven has come out as gay after splitting from Romi Imbelli, reading a letter on a livestream and saying he was tired of hiding. In the message, the 51-year-old said coming out was not about becoming someone new, but about letting people meet the person who had always been there.
The timing matters because the disclosure arrived only after a marriage that lasted 15 days in 2024 and ended just as quickly as it began. Haven and Imbelli had known each other for more than two decades before they married, and they stayed close after separating, which gives this public moment a very personal frame instead of a clean break.
Imbelli, who posted a compilation video of the two of them to Instagram on Thursday, responded with a line that made clear she was not trying to expose him. “I wasn’t here to out someone I love. I was here to help set someone free. There is a difference. In return he set me free,” she wrote. That response lands as both support and explanation, and it helps show why this disclosure did not come across as a rupture between exes.
Haven’s own letter pushed the point further, describing the boy he once was as joyful and unashamed, with glitter on his face and mascara on his lashes, and saying he had been gay all along. He also framed the moment as an act of recognition rather than reinvention, which is why the message reads less like a statement of change than a claim that the change had already happened long before it was spoken aloud.
The public interest around Haven has never been limited to this moment. He is Angelina Jolie’s brother and Jon Voight’s son, and he drew attention years ago when he and Jolie shared a kiss on the lips at the Academy Awards in 2000 after she won Best Supporting Actress for Girl, Interrupted. But this time the headline is not family history or old award-show gossip. It is a private truth brought into the open by someone who says he was simply done hiding.
What comes next is straightforward: Haven has now said publicly who he is, and Imbelli has said she helped him get there. The unanswered part is not whether the relationship survived the separation — it did — but why this livestream was the moment he chose to stop keeping the secret.
