Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen talk about their divorce a year later: Drama, broken dreams and gratitude

Just a year ago, at the beginning of October 2022, the media leaked that both Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady had hired divorce lawyers. After a summer in which the American media spoke of a clear distance between the couple, who had been together for almost 15 years, this last bit of news, together with the fact that they had been living in different houses for a couple of weeks, seemed like the chronicle of a death foretold. So it was. A few weeks later, at the end of October, the model and the American football player publicly announced their decision to split up in a brief joint statement through their social media accounts. A court in Florida officiated the end of the perfect couple, who separated after 13 years of marriage. Since then, both have said little about the matter. But these days they have been offering new clues about what those hard days of “drama” were like.

Brady has been the most silent on the matter. Further removed from the media (beyond the specialized sports press) than his ex-wife, the famous quarterback barely grants interviews, especially since his definitive retirement from the sport last February. He drives his own narrative through his social media accounts and the football podcast he hosts on Sirius XM, called Let’s Go. In September, this narrated series returned with a third season, and it was in the fifth episode that Brady, 46, revealed a few details about his divorce. In it, the athlete has admitted that dealing with that separation was “hard,” especially being so exposed.

As he told his teammates, he heard too often that they talked about him saying: “I love Tom Brady, but...” and that those “buts” are personal issues that he has to continue working on. ““I’m probably a little OCD with different things in my life. I like trying to have things in control and stability,” Brady said. ““I’m trying to learn more about myself every day. We should all have self-awareness, it’s a hard trait to have. We’re in a culture where it’s hard to own up to things these days.”

“For someone like me, I’m in the public eye a lot. I always try to say the right thing. I don’t want to deal with any more drama in my life. I already have a lot of drama,” he confessed, knowing that he was being watched after his high-profile separation, but without wanting to mention his ex-wife’s name or the specific situation.

In November of last year, just a few days after the world learned of their breakup, Brady was the first to talk about it during a talk on that same podcast. “I think there’s a lot of professionals in life that go through things that they deal with at work and they deal with at home,”he said. ““Obviously, the good news is it’s a very amicable situation, and I’m really focused on two things: taking care of my family, and certainly my children, and secondly doing the best job I can to win football games. That’s what professionals do.”

During these last months, and especially in the summer, he has been seen in the company of the model Irina Shayk. The two have gone out together in Los Angeles, where they were seen when he picked her up at the door of her hotel one afternoon to drop her off the next morning and return for her a few hours later. In September, they were seen together at the athlete’s apartment in New York. Sources familiar with the situation said that they are in a relationship, “at the moment, informal.”

Gisele Bündchen, 43, has been clearer about their split from the beginning. In an exclusive interview with People magazine, she opened up about the difficult time she had experienced. “It’s been very tough on my family. It’s been a lot — in every area of my life,” she says. “I feel like whenever it rains, it pours. With all the different twists and turns that life takes, all we can do is the best we can given what happens in our surroundings.” The model said that meditation, the exercise she does every day (yoga, weights and walking) and nutrition have helped her. “I think if I didn’t have all the different tools that I have to support me during these times, it would’ve been very hard,” she says. “And I think we all can relate to that, because I think we all have gone through our roller coasters of life.” She and her children have settled in Miami, where they spend a lot of time outdoors and where the children, Benjamin, 13, and Vivian, 10, have started to attend classes after a period of home schooling.

A few days after that interview, the Brazilian model gave an interview to CBS and explained how it was difficult for her to accept that her marriage broke up. “[Our split was] not what I dreamed of and what I hoped for. My parents have been married for 50 years, and I really wanted that to happen. But I think you have to accept, you know, sometimes that the way you are in your 20s, it’s sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart,” she said during an informal chat, sitting in a garden and walking on the beach. She also acknowledged that she felt very grateful for their relationship, since her two children had been born as a result of it. “He is the father of my children, so I will always wish him the best.”

Bündchen has only rarely spoken about her separation, but she has already done so more than her ex-husband. In fact, she was the first to give a long interview about it, five months after announcing the end of her marriage, in Vanity Fair magazine. In it she confessed that the divorce was “the death of a dream,” “a death and a rebirth.”

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