Nearly a year after filing for divorce from Sofia Vergara, Joe Manganiello is denying her claims that their relationship fell apart because he wanted children.
“There’s been a lot of talk in the press about me wanting a family,” the “Deal or No Deal Island” host said in a Men’s Health article published Tuesday. “That’s just not true.”
“My marriage fell apart because my husband was young. He wanted children and I didn’t want to be an old mother. I feel it’s unfair to my baby,” Vergara, 52, told El Pais newspaper in January.
Vergara has a 32-year-old son named Manolo from her first marriage.
Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello’s divorce is finalized: ‘She’s very happy’
Nearly a year after filing for divorce from Sofia Vergara, Joe Manganiello is denying her claims that their relationship fell apart because he wanted children. (Dia Dipaspil/Getty Images)
However, Manganiello, 47, told Men’s Health magazine that the former couple were initially trying to conceive.
“We tried to start a family for the first year and a half,” he revealed, “and in the first month of dating, we had a lot of conversations from the beginning. I said, ‘If you’re sick of having kids, I understand that. Just tell me, and I’ll know what that means, and I’ll be okay with it.’ But she wasn’t. And I swore to myself that if it didn’t work out, I’d never break up with her. And I didn’t.”
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After eight years of marriage, Manganiello filed for divorce in July 2023, citing “irreconcilable differences.”
The former “True Blood” star said that although he wanted children, he and Vergara didn’t have them because “it’s normal for two people to become estranged.”
Sofia Vergara and her son Manolo, 2017 (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)
He also told the magazine that he was hurt by reports that they broke up because she didn’t want children.
“To be portrayed as if I had a midlife crisis and nine years later I gave someone an ultimatum: ‘Do something that might be bad for you or I’m gone’? That’s not what I did,” he explained.
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Manganiello is currently dating actress Caitlin O’Connor, 34, while Vergara is dating plastic surgeon Justin Suliman. (Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images, Courtesy of Netflix, Hollywood Curtains/Bauer Griffin/GC Images)
Last year, the couple released a joint statement saying, “We have made the difficult decision to divorce. We are both people who love and care about each other very much, and we ask that you respect our privacy as we move on to this next phase of our lives.”
Manganiello is currently dating actress Caitlin O’Connor, 34, while Vergara is dating plastic surgeon Justin Suliman.
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Fox News Digital has reached out to Vergara’s representatives for comment.
