Emily Ratajkowski has spoken candidly about her transformation from devoted “Madonna” figure to self-described “wh***” in the aftermath of her divorce, detailing a period of “compulsive dating” in a new essay for The Cut that revisits the breakdown of her marriage and the high-profile relationships that followed.
The 35-year-old model and actress split from husband Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2022 amid rumours about his fidelity, just a year after the couple welcomed their son Sylvester Apollo Bear in March 2021. In the essay, Ratajkowski wrote: “In a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated.” A source previously told Page Six that McClard had cheated, describing him as “a serial cheater” who is “gross” and “a dog” — an account Ratajkowski did not contradict, having liked a tweet at the time accusing him of cheating.
Ratajkowski wrote that she struggled with the reaction she received following the split. “I hated the condescending way people looked at me in the wake of my breakup,” she said. “Their furrowed brows, the pity in their faces as they delivered an ‘I’m so sorry, Emily.’ I couldn’t stand my pathetic reflection in their eyes. They saw me as someone who was unwanted, who had been left. A reject with the burden of a needy, hungry, two-foot-tall sidekick.” She described having long feared becoming a single mother, a status she associated with having “no freedom, no choices, no emergency exit.” In response, she said she adopted a persona to cope. “The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous.”
She described her first post-divorce date as being with an unnamed sober DJ who lived two blocks from her former marital home, recounting that he opened the evening by telling her incest “actually runs in my family” and describing an incident involving his mother and sister. “That was my introduction to the dating scene. I didn’t f*** him, okay?” she wrote, acknowledging he was “an anomaly.” She also described a relationship with an “Elder Millennial” her friends considered unattractive, whom she stayed with for the validation of being desired more than she desired him in return.
Reflecting on her romantic history before the divorce, Ratajkowski said she had slept with only “eight people,” all of whom she believed “would fall in love with me, because I wanted to feel precious.” She wrote that she had believed men “didn’t fall in love with, want forever with, raise babies with, or take care of sluts,” but came to feel a sense of “naivete and inequality” on realising the men she dated had been far more sexually experienced than she had been. “I decided to f*** my way into a new kind of woman,” she wrote. “I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the w****.”
To promote the essay, Ratajkowski shared an Instagram post in which she appeared topless beneath an open leather jacket, miming breastfeeding a baby doll while holding a drink, with a man in underwear visible on a window ledge behind her.
The essay arrives after a high-profile string of relationships and rumoured romances following her split. In March 2023, Ratajkowski was photographed kissing Harry Styles in Tokyo, a moment that drew criticism given her friendship with Styles’s ex-partner Olivia Wilde. A source told the Daily Mail at the time: “Olivia and Emily were friends and this is a betrayal.” Ratajkowski later dismissed the episode to the Los Angeles Times, saying she was “not thinking about guys” but that “sometimes things just happen.” The Daily Mail also exclusively reported she was seen in deep conversation with Tom Brady at Michael Rubin’s 2023 Fourth of July party in the Hamptons, shortly before Brady began dating Russian model Irina Shayk. Later that year, Ratajkowski was linked to French actor Stéphane Bak after the pair were photographed kissing in Paris, though a source told the Daily Mail the relationship was casual rather than serious.
Separately, in March 2023 it emerged that Bear-McClard had been dropped by the Safdie brothers’ production company Elara Pictures following grooming allegations, while simultaneously engaged in mediation with the Safdies alongside his divorce and custody proceedings with Ratajkowski. Throughout the period, Ratajkowski largely avoided discussing the circumstances of her marriage’s breakdown publicly, telling the Los Angeles Times she felt “scared” to be more candid because “I’m learning that outspoken women don’t often get their children.”
