Real Breakup Stories From Celebrity Ex-Partners

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3 days ago

Model Gigi Paris broke up with Glen Powell after three years together, during which his profile skyrocketed due to dating rumors between the actor and his Anyone But You co-star, Sydney Sweeney. Gigi said that Glen agreed to lean into the speculation for PR purposes, despite her discomfort, saying, "It was just, 'This is what I have to do for my job.' I had two options. I could either pretend like I was going along with everything and have everyone wonder, like, 'Are they hooking up? Are they not hooking up? Is she okay with this? What the fuck?' Or stand up for myself."
"I just wanted respect, especially if it's gonna be public. Like, don't make an ass out of me. Like, just don't make a fool out of someone you've been with for over three years, talking about forever with. Just have some decency," she continued. "And at the end of the day, it was like, 'Well, work comes first.' And if that's the case, power to you, that's your priority. I gotta walk away. What sucked was how it was handled. I felt like I was just fed to the dogs."
Before he dated his Wicked costar Ariana Grande, Ethan Slater was in a relationship with his high school sweetheart, psychologist Lily Jay. After their divorce, she wrote an essay for the Cut where she said, "I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband's new relationship with a celebrity. In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women's mental health."
"It was a tenuous balance — my profession, which requires privacy, and his, which is measured in applause — but it worked well while life was unfolding according to our plans," she continued, adding, "Days when I can't escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker."
Chelsea Winstanley is a successful Māori film producer, writer, and director in her own right. However, when her ex-husband Taika Waititi began hitting the Marvel big-time, things changed in their relationship. "I didn't want to be the dutiful wife and race over to the Gold Coast [in Australia], where he was making Thor, and sit in an apartment all day long, fucking twiddling my thumbs, and bring the kids out," she previously explained in 2024.
"That probably was the beginning of the unraveling because I wasn't that pandering, dutiful, get on my knees and whatever you want.' Someone else was, though," she added, seemingly confirming cheating speculation. "I didn't know that until many years later."
There's been ample speculation that Chris Pratt's sudden rise to mega-fame played a part in his 2017 split from Anna Faris, who was previously the more well-known one in the relationship. In her memoir, Unqualified, she wrote about the strain of his success in a segment addressed to Chris: "I'm thrilled and grateful that you are doing the things you are, and I have crazy pride in the fact that your talents are recognized, but it can be hard not to have a moment of self-doubt when my husband is acting with young women in big movies and I'm playing a role in Mom that, while I love it, is completely unsexy."
Elsewhere in her memoir, she wrote, "A while back, Chris asked me if I felt a lot of pressure from being in a high-profile relationship and I told him that I did — it was an odd circumstance. That he was asking that question made me think he probably felt that way, too."
When author Justine Musk started dating her ex-husband, Elon Musk, they were both students. As she later wrote of his rising business profile in 2010, "Although I'd been dating a struggling 20-something entrepreneur, I was now engaged to a wealthy one."
Justine said that Elon's South African upbringing and "he vast economic imbalance between us" resulted in a "certain dynamic" between them. "Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. 'I am your wife,' I told him repeatedly, 'not your employee,'" she wrote. "'If you were my employee,' he said just as often, 'I would fire you.'" He would go on to get engaged to actor Talulah Riley six weeks after their split.
Cynthia Lennon gave birth to her child with then-husband John Lennon, right around the same time that Beatlemania began to take over the world. In her 2005 memoir, John, she wrote that she was told to "stay away" and even blocked entrance into a hotel John was staying in as security thought that she was a fan.
John would go on to admit to numerous affairs following his fame, with their relationship ending shortly after she walked in on him and Yoko Ono sitting in robes. She wrote in her memoir, "The truth is that if I'd known as a teenager what falling for John would lead to, I would have turned round right then and walked away."
Finally, Tom Cruise's first marriage, prior to his Top Gun success, was to actor Mimi Rogers. He would go on to initiate their divorce shortly before filming Days of Thunder, where he fell in love with his second wife, Nicole Kidman. In an interview in 2001, she said she didn't mind being the less famous one in their relationship, explaining, "I was doing the work that I wanted to do, and if I didn't have the commercial success that Tom had well, that's just the luck of the draw. When I met him, his career was just beginning to take off, and neither of us could imagine that he would become such a big star in such a short time."
"But the stardom wasn't really a problem. What did annoy me, though, was the age thing," she said of their age gap. "Some of the tabloids brought it up all the time, and exaggerated the gap between Tom and me. Every six months they seemed to add a year to my age. If Tom and I were still married, the tabloids would probably have me in my sixties by now."
Do any other high-profile examples come to mind? LMK in the comments!