Actor Joe Manganiello says he believes his marriage to Sofía Vergara might have survived if he hadn’t been battling a serious, long-term illness during their relationship.
Manganiello, 49, discussed the 2023 split during an appearance on SiriusXM’s “Radio Andy” Wednesday. When host Andy Cohen asked whether he thought the marriage would have “survived” had he been healthier, Manganiello replied, “Possibly, maybe.”
Manganiello is now engaged to Caitlin O’Connor after two years together. Asked by Cohen whether he regrets not being healthier during his marriage to Vergara, he said, “Yeah, of course,” adding that the thought resurfaces when he sees old photos from early in their relationship.
“It’s heartbreaking when you look at these two people with life ahead of them, but for us, we didn’t know what was ahead,” Manganiello said. “I felt guilty for a long time.”
He said he had talked to Vergara, 54, about those feelings of guilt at the time. “I felt guilty. I felt like a burden. I knew that everyone was sick of me, sick of watching me go through this,” he said. He added that he hasn’t spoken with Vergara since their divorce was finalized in February 2024.
Vergara has previously said that Manganiello’s desire to have children — while she did not want to be an “old mom” — contributed to the divorce, a characterization Manganiello has disputed, saying it wasn’t “inevitably why everything ended.”
Details From the Memoir
In his new memoir, “Bloodlines,” released Oct. 13, Manganiello writes that he battled life-threatening “autoimmune-related illnesses” for seven years, a struggle that ultimately led to the “amputation” of an organ.
He previously told People the experience was “the most brutally difficult time of [his] life, one [he] wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but also [his] greatest adventure.”
Manganiello writes that after pursuing unconventional treatments, a Cuba-based shaman told him by phone that someone still in love with Vergara had put a curse on him. He recalls the shaman saying: “Someone from your past is still in love with you. He put a voodoo curse on your husband. He did it in New Orleans.”
The memoir also alleges that Vergara “ridiculed” him while he was ill, particularly regarding his dog, Bubbles, whom he adopted in 2019 while dealing with suicidal thoughts. “I had to give my gun away because I kept thinking about it, and then the dog came,” he writes. “I went from being the patient to the caretaker.”
Manganiello further claims that Vergara refused to hug him even when he asked for affection during his illness.
Vergara’s Response
Following the memoir’s release, Vergara shared a post on social media about “narcissistic men,” credited to her 35-year-old son, Manolo, whom she shares with her first husband, Joe Gonzalez. The post read, in part: “Remember kids … it doesn’t matter how much you do for [a narcissist]. They will resent you for it and nothing will ever be enough, and they’ll always somehow try to paint you as the bad guy.”
Manganiello addressed the backlash during an appearance on “CBS Mornings” this month. “Well, I think anybody who said that should read the book first and understand what the book is actually about, because it’s not about that,” he said. “It’s about the suffering I went through.”
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