by Stephen Thomas ErlewineEric Benet spent the better part of a decade carving out a niche for his laid-back loverman R&B, notching a minor hit in 1999 with "Spend My Life with You," before he hooked up with actress Halle Berry. The couple married in 2001 and things almost immediately started to unravel for the singer. He started to pursue an acting career in earnest by appearing in Mariah Carey's legendary bomb Glitter, released the very year Berry starred in the gritty Monster's Ball, a career-making role that landed her the Academy Award for Best Actress. That soul-baring performance, combined with her chest-baring performance in Swordfish, made Berry a superstar and a sex symbol, which overshadowed Benet's perfectly respectable career as a quiet storm crooner and C-level actor, resulting in a downward spiral of jealousy manifesting itself in a lot of sleeping around. All this came to light in 2003, when Berry filed for divorce from Benet. Not long afterward, Benet's serial infidelities were revealed, and while he claimed to suffer from sex addiction, he was quickly pegged as the idiot who cheated on Halle Berry by both tabloids and the public, and nothing he did, including a gloriously weepy interview on Primetime Live in the summer of 2004, erased that perception. Hurricane -- his long-gestating third album, delivered in the summer of 2005, delivered well over six years after his second, A Day in the Life -- won't rehabilitate his image, either. ... Read More...