Jennie Garth was rushed to the hospital after drinking and taking pills as her marriage to second husband Peter Facinelli fell apart in 2012.
“I started to remember the little bottles of liquor from the mini bar, how easy it was to drink one adorable bottle in two swigs before moving on to the next,” Garth, 54, wrote about how she coped with their imminent split in her I Choose Me memoir, released on Tuesday, April 14. “I remembered the anxiety pills that my doctor had given me and how I thought swallowing a few of those would help take the edge off my desperate, broken heart.”
What Garth “didn’t remember” was the phone call with her best friend in which the actress confessed “dark thoughts fueled by the booze and pills.” The friend alerted Garth’s assistant who found the actress “unconscious on the floor” in “a random hotel” in Arizona.
“She called 911 and I was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where I had to get my stomach pumped. I was out of the woods. At least physically,” Garth wrote. “The rest of the day before came into focus, and I felt my heart break all over again.”
Garth explained that the incident — which resulted in a rehab stay — came after she and Facinelli, 52, traveled to Arizona for an appointment with a “highly recommended marriage specialist.” Things didn’t quite go as planned.
“Our marriage was breaking down, had already broken down maybe, and this was my last-ditch effort to save us,” Garth explained. “I suggested this appointment, and I was grateful that he agreed. It had been my last hope.”
Facinelli was already at the appointment when Garth arrived, something she found “strange.” Things quickly escalated once their session started.
“The energy in that room was tense and heavy from the moment I sat down. She looked at me gently but without hesitation, and asked, ‘Jennie, why do you want to be with someone who doesn’t love you?’ It was a statement that I will never unhear,” Garth recalled. “In that moment, everything inside me felt like it was cracking open. I felt like the earth had just stopped spinning. My perspective was in slow motion. I didn’t have an answer. Not a real one.”
Garth came to terms during their session that Facinelli wanted to end their marriage. Garth and Facinelli were married from 2001 to 2013. They share three daughters: Luca, 28, Lola, 23, and Fiona, 19. They’ve both moved on romantically and have been able to forge a positive coparenting relationship. (Garth wed husband Dave Abrams in 2015, while the Twilight actor has been engaged to fiancée Lily Anne Harrison since 2019.)
“I hadn’t fully understood what he had been saying for the last few months,” she admitted. “I had been clinging to hope, or disbelief, or denial. But now, in no uncertain terms, it was over.”
Garth fled the appointment and checked into the hotel room.
“Inside that room, I realized how alone I was. Not in that moment, but forever. I couldn’t stop my mind from spinning and my heart from breaking. Everything I thought I had built came crashing down that day,” she recalled. “I needed to dull the edges of the sharp knives of pain. I needed to quiet the relentless noise in my mind. So I had a drink. And then another. We know where the night went from there.”
I Choose Me is out now.
