A darker time. Mandy Moore reflected upon her roller-coaster seven-year marriage to Ryan Adams after accusing the singer-songwriter of emotional and verbal abuse.
“I was living my life for him,” the This Is Us star, 34, said on the “WTF With Marc Maron” podcast on Monday, February 18. “I had no sense of self. I was imperceptible. I was so small in my own world.”
She continued, “I felt like I was drowning. It was so untenable and unsustainable and I was so lonely. I was so sad. … I knew that this wasn’t the rest of my life. I knew that this wasn’t the person I was supposed to be with. I knew that I wasn’t the person I was meant to be.”
Moore detailed how her relationship with Adams, 44, started while she was on tour in Minneapolis in 2008, approximately a year after her mother left her father for a woman with whom she had been having an affair.
“When you feel out of control in a situation, [like] I can’t control my immediate family, and the fact that this particular situation blew us up in a way … I guess kind of just thought, ‘I’ll create my own family,’” she said.
The “Candy” singer said she was initially “smitten” by the indie rocker “as a 23-year-old impressionable woman.” They married a year after meeting, and Moore’s career “really sort of quieted down” soon after.
“I would do little jobs. It’s not like I completely stopped working. I would do things here or there, but it became abundantly clear while I was working, things would completely fall apart at home,” she explained. “I couldn’t do my job because there was just a constant stream of trying to pay attention to this person who needed me and wouldn’t let me do anything else.”
After “months and months and months” of crying and trying to avoid confrontation, Moore ultimately decided to walk away. She filed for divorce from Adams in January 2015, and they finalized it the following June. (She went on to marry Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith in November 2018.)
The Golden Globe nominee’s appearance on the podcast came five days after The New York Times published an exposé accusing Adams of manipulative behavior, abuse and harassment. Five women claimed the Grammy nominee offered to be their mentor and eventually started making sexual advances, while another accuser alleged that she was 14 years old when Adams started “sexual conversations” with her online and over text messages.
Adams admitted in a statement to Us Weekly on February 13 that he is “not a perfect man” and has “made many mistakes,” but called the exposé “upsettingly inaccurate” with some details being “misrepresented,” “exaggerated” and even “outright false.” In a separate statement to the Times, Adams’ lawyer called Moore’s depiction of their marriage “completely inconsistent with his view of the relationship.”
