It’s been more than a decade since Bridget Moynahan discovered that she was expecting a baby with her ex-boyfriend Tom Brady — and now, the notoriously private actress is reflecting on the mayhem surrounding her high-profile pregnancy.
“Having a baby should have been the most joyous time of my life, but instead I felt assaulted,” the 47-year-old Blue Bloods star wrote in her new book, Our Shoes, Our Selves. “It’s unnerving to be followed and stalked like that, especially during such an emotionally vulnerable time.”
Moynahan added that she “barely left” her house because of the media attention.
“I became reclusive for a bit,” she wrote. “I became wildly private. I shared little and only with a select few.”
Moynahan and Brady, 41, welcomed son John “Jack” Edward Thomas in August 2007, months after he started his relationship with Gisele Bündchen. In the model’s book, which she cowrote with Amanda Benchley, Moynahan gave partial credit to her “strong” and “badass” black leather Miu Miu motorcycle boots for helping her regain confidence following her split from the NFL star.
“I decided that these boots would give me back some of the confidence and strength that I had lost — lost from a very public breakup; lost from having a baby on my own; lost from two surgeries to correct hernias from having my baby,” the Coyote Ugly actress wrote. “Lost from not losing the baby weight because the two surgeries kept me from recovering; lost from feeling incessantly violated by the paparazzi.”
Moynahan went on to marry businessman Andrew Frankel in 2015. Brady and Bündchen, meanwhile, wed in February 2009. The couple share 9-year-old son Benjamin and 6-year-old daughter Vivian.
The Brazilian supermodel also wrote about Moynahan’s pregnancy in her 2018 memoir, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life.
“Two months into our relationship, Tom told me that his ex-girlfriend was pregnant. The very next day, the news was everywhere and I felt my world had been turned upside down,” Bündchen said.
While she admitted that her boyfriend welcoming a baby with another woman “wasn’t an easy time” for her, Bündchen also referred to Jack as her “bonus child.”
She added: “[He made] my heart expand in ways I didn’t know was possible.”
Our Shoes, Our Selves: 40 Women, 40 Stories, 40 Pairs of Shoes if available now.
