Travis Barker Was Married Before Shanna Moakler and Kourtney Kardashian, and He’s Finally Talking About the Wife Nobody Knew About
Let’s go way back, to the early Blink-182 days.
Before Shanna Moakler and long before Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker married Melissa Kennedy. The marriage lasted less than a year, and he says nonstop touring in his mid-20s is what pulled it apart.
Travis Barker married Melissa Kennedy on September 22, 2001 at the Mission Inn in Riverside. He was 25. She was 19, from Fontana, and had already been in Blink-182’s “Urethra Chronicles” videos and running his clothing brand Famous Stars and Straps as its vice president. He had her name tattooed in script on the right side of his neck. He later covered it with a rose.
In his 2015 memoir “Can I Say,” he wrote that he felt like he was making a mistake walking down the aisle. Two days before the wedding, his friend Brett Vann threw him a bachelor party at a California bar that Vann later described, on the record, as one of the dirtiest nights he’d ever been part of, with roughly 20 strippers and far more women than men. Barker says he resolved to be faithful once they were actually married, and stuck to it.
The marriage lasted less than a year. Divorce was filed in August 2002.
“I was touring with Blink non-stop. It was tough, especially since I was married at the time,” he says in his new Hulu documentary “Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear.” “I kind of realized that the relationship wasn’t working out for either of us anymore.”
He says it ended in a “huge blowout.” She told him to go back to L.A. and do his thing. “Life just kept getting crazier and crazier.” By that summer he was already linked to Shanna Moakler.
Kennedy never cashed in. She moved into real estate in Orange County, where she runs Lifestyle Estates Realty and Funding. Barker has said they’re still on friendly terms.
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