When Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady announced their divorce last year, speculation ran rife about the reasoning behind the couple’s decision to separate. Almost every publication pointed to Brady’s retirement – and then unretirement – from football earlier that year as being Bündchen’s breaking point, something seemingly proven when Brady retired again (and for good) following the split.
Now, five months on from her separation, Bündchen is clearing up the rumours, telling Vanity Fair that a decision of that nature “takes years to happen” and that it was “very hurtful” to read false reports that she’d given her husband an ultimatum. The supermodel went on to say that the assumptions that Brady chose football over his family, and therefore Bündchen chose to leave him are “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Listen, I have always cheered for him, and I would continue forever,” Bündchen—who shares children, Benjamin, 13, and Vivian, 10, with Brady—explained. “If there’s one person, I want to be the happiest in the world, it’s him, believe me. I want him to achieve and to conquer. I want all his dreams to come true. That’s what I want, really, from the bottom of my heart.”
“What’s been said is one piece of a much bigger puzzle,” she shared. “It’s not so black and white.”
After wiping tears away while speaking about “the death of my dream,” in losing someone she thought was her life partner, Bündchen said, “sometimes you grow together; sometimes you grow apart. When I was 26 years old and he was 29 years old, we met, we wanted a family, we wanted things together. As time goes by, we realise that we just wanted different things, and now we have a choice to make.”
She continued, “that doesn’t mean you don’t love the person. It just means that in order for you to be authentic and truly live the life that you want to live, you have to have somebody who can meet you in the middle, right? It’s a dance. It’s a balance.”
Bündchen went on to say that she still plans to work with Brady as a family and a team. “We’re not playing against each other,” she told Vanity Fair. “We are a team and that’s beautiful. I look back and I have no regrets. I loved every bit of it.”
