Jennie Garth has some regrets about the way she mourned her 2013 divorce from Peter Facinelli.
“I wasn’t at a place in my life where I had the kind of mind control that I do now, or the kind of knowledge of how to survive deep pain like that, so I made some unhealthy decisions and things I regret,” Garth, 54, told The Guardian in an interview published on Wednesday, May 13, recalling her struggles with alcohol abuse following her split from Facinelli, 52, after 11 years of marriage.
Garth and Facinelli announced their separation in March 2012. Shortly after their breakup, the estranged spouses met with a couples therapist in Phoenix, Arizona. Though Garth believed that she and Facinelli were there to try and mend their relationship, she soon realized that Facinelli had already decided it was over between them.
As Garth revealed in her April memoir, I Choose Me, the Beverly Hills, 90210, alum then checked into a hotel, where she mixed alcohol with anxiety pills. Her assistant flew out to Arizona and found Garth unconscious. She was rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped and subsequently entered rehab.
Garth told The Guardian on Wednesday that she spent years feeling ashamed of herself and of how the incident affected her and Facinelli’s daughters, Luca, 28, Lola, 23, and Fiona, 19. However, she has since come to terms with her experience.
“I don’t carry that shame around,” she continued. “And also, nobody’s looking at me and shaming me, not my children, not my husband [Dave Abrams], not my friends, and that’s all that really matters to me. You have to forgive yourself and realise that we all make mistakes, we all have to learn the tough lessons one way or another.”
Garth added that it took her nearly a decade to fully recover from her divorce from Facinelli.
“Like, when is this going to go away?” she recalled of her feelings at the time. “It would affect all the parts of my life, these feelings of being unwanted or having not been enough for someone, or feelings of failure — I’ve failed my children, I’ve ruined their lives. I just reached a point where I thought: I don’t want to live my life like this.”
Following her divorce from Facinelli, Garth tied the knot with Abrams, 44, in 2015. The pair briefly separated in 2017, with Abrams filing for divorce months later, but they reconciled in 2019.
Today, Garth and Facinelli — who is engaged to Lily Anne Harrison — maintain a positive coparenting relationship.
“She’s the mother of my kids and I love both Dave and Jennie. Our relationship has gotten to a really great place,” Facinelli told Us Weekly exclusively in February 2025. “I think it’s important to have that friendship.”
The Twilight alum continued, “I wish we got to that place sooner because when you’re coparenting with someone you’re not with, it can get frustrating and it can be hard and sometimes your ideologies might not line up. Being able to figure out how you navigate that together, it can be tricky.”
