Lori McCommas is best known as the first wife of actor Terrence Howard and the mother of his three older children, Aubrey Howard, Hunter Howard and Heaven Howard. The best-supported reporting places their first marriage in 1989, their first divorce in 2003, their remarriage in 2005, and their final divorce in 2007. A 2024 PEOPLE profile of Howard’s children continues to identify McCommas as his first wife and the mother of those three children.
Unlike Howard, McCommas has not maintained a well-documented public career. Reliable reporting is strongest on their marriage and family history, while frequently repeated claims about her birth date, education, occupation, finances and present-day life do not have comparably strong support.
Need to know
- Lori McCommas was Terrence Howard’s first wife, and they married twice.
- They have three children together: Aubrey, Hunter and Heaven Howard.
- The strongest reporting supports a marriage chronology of 1989–2003, followed by a remarriage in 2005 and a final divorce in 2007.
- McCommas appeared publicly as Lori Howard with Terrence Howard during their 2005 remarriage period.
- No reliable public record establishes an independent career, credible net-worth figure, present residence or current relationship status for McCommas.
Lori McCommas profile summary
| Detail | Verified information |
|---|---|
| Full name | Lori McCommas |
| Public married-name variant | Lori Howard |
| Known for | First wife of actor Terrence Howard |
| Former spouse | Terrence Howard |
| Children with Howard | Aubrey Howard, Hunter Howard and Heaven Howard |
| Marriage chronology | First married in 1989; divorced in 2003; remarried in 2005; final divorce reported in 2007 |
Her marriage to Terrence Howard
McCommas became publicly known through her relationship with Howard before the actor reached some of the most visible stages of his film and television career.
The strongest contemporary account comes from a 2008 Los Angeles Times profile, which reported that Howard married McCommas in 1989, that they divorced in 2003, and that they remarried two years later.
That chronology is important because conflicting dates circulate elsewhere online. Some tertiary databases give different years for the first marriage or first divorce, but the 1989 and 2003 dates are supported by multiple stronger profiles published closer to the events.
A separate 2008 interview with The Independent described the first marriage as lasting 14 years and ending in 2003. Howard told the publication that he spent several years trying to reconcile with McCommas before they married again.
That account explains Howard’s role in pursuing the reconciliation, but it does not establish McCommas’s reasons for remarrying. Her own perspective on the decision has not been documented in a verified public interview.
The couple remarried in 2005. Reporting from Rolling Stone and other established outlets places their final divorce in 2007. Exact day-and-month dates found on entertainment databases remain disputed, so the year-level chronology is the more responsible account.
Their three children
McCommas and Howard have three children together: Aubrey, Hunter and Heaven Howard.
The family connection is reaffirmed in PEOPLE’s 2024 profile, which identifies Aubrey and Heaven as Howard’s daughters with McCommas and Hunter as their son.
Those three children were born during the couple’s long first-marriage period. Their existence is one of the clearest independently corroborated facts about McCommas’s personal life, while many more specific biographical details circulated about her online have not been established to the same standard.
A documented public appearance in 2005
Although McCommas has not had a sustained public profile of her own, there is contemporaneous evidence of at least one public appearance during the couple’s second marriage.
Getty/Patrick McMullan event metadata reproduced in a Cox Media/WPXI gallery identifies “Lori Howard” alongside Terrence Howard at a June 18, 2005 special screening of Hustle & Flow in Southampton, New York.
That appearance came during the same year McCommas and Howard remarried and while Howard was receiving major attention for Hustle & Flow, the film that later earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
The caption is useful because it provides contemporaneous evidence connecting the name “Lori Howard” to McCommas during that period. It should not be taken as evidence of an acting, entertainment or other professional career.
The 2001 incident involving Terrence Howard
A serious part of the couple’s history occurred in September 2001, when McCommas and Howard were estranged.
The Smoking Gun’s account of police and court records reports that Howard went to McCommas’s residence following an argument, forced his way inside and struck her. He was initially charged with several offenses. The reported legal disposition was a 2002 guilty plea to disorderly conduct.
That distinction matters: it would be inaccurate to describe the outcome as an assault conviction simply because assault-related allegations appeared among the original charges.
Howard later discussed the incident himself. In a Rolling Stone profile, he acknowledged striking McCommas while disputing aspects of the police account about how the assault occurred. He also acknowledged that striking her was wrong.
McCommas’s own public account of the incident has not been located in the reliable reporting available for this profile.
What is known about her background and career?
There is no well-supported public record establishing an independent professional career for McCommas.
That means she should not be described as an actress, entrepreneur, real-estate professional, homemaker or any other occupation unless stronger evidence emerges. Search results and biography sites assign various labels to her, but those claims have not been tied to authoritative records or a verified first-person profile.
The same caution applies to reports that McCommas attended Pratt Institute or met Howard there. Howard’s own connection to Pratt is documented, but that does not prove McCommas was enrolled at the school. The frequently repeated “college sweetheart” narrative therefore remains unconfirmed.
Because McCommas does not have a documented body of public professional work, there are no responsibly verified awards, major projects, companies or career milestones to present as part of her biography.
What is known about Lori McCommas today?
As of September 15, 2026, the reliable public record does not establish McCommas’s current profession, residence, romantic relationship status or a verified public social-media account.
That does not prove she deliberately “left the spotlight,” chose a particular lifestyle or made a conscious decision to avoid publicity. Those characterizations appear frequently in low-quality biographies, but they assign a motive where the record establishes only one thing: little reliable current information about her personal life is public.
Her continuing public relevance comes primarily from her place in Terrence Howard’s family history and from being the mother of his three oldest children.
Frequently repeated claims that remain unverified
Several details about Lori McCommas are repeated across celebrity-biography pages without strong underlying documentation.
One is a claimed birth date of June 22, 1969, often paired with New York City as her birthplace. Those details were not traced to a sufficiently authoritative source, so they should not be treated as established facts.
The same applies to claims that she attended Pratt Institute, that she and Howard met there, or that she has a particular profession. Repetition across multiple biography sites does not independently verify a claim when those pages appear to be drawing from the same unsourced material.
There is also no credible basis for a specific Lori McCommas net worth figure. No reliable financial disclosure, asset record or detailed financial investigation supports the estimates circulated by celebrity-finance websites.
Even the exact legal dates of the two marriages and divorces remain less certain than the years. Stronger reporting supports 1989, 2003, 2005 and 2007, while entertainment databases publish conflicting day-and-month dates. Without primary marriage certificates or divorce decrees, those precise dates should not be presented as settled.
Conclusion
Lori McCommas occupies an unusual place in Terrence Howard’s public story: she was his first wife, the couple married twice, and they raised three children together, yet comparatively little of her life outside that relationship has been reliably documented.
The strongest record supports a clear family chronology—first marriage in 1989, divorce in 2003, remarriage in 2005 and final divorce in 2007—while leaving many commonly repeated details about McCommas herself unconfirmed. A responsible profile is therefore most accurate when it distinguishes that documented history from the biography that later websites have attempted to build around it.
