After Gisele Bündchen found out her then-boyfriend, Tom Brady, was expecting a child with his ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan, the supermodel found herself between a rock and a hard place.
“When Brady explained the situation to Gisele, she didn’t know what to do,” author Lars Anderson writes in Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness, out now. “She had lived her life until Brady, but now she was truly alive, building a home in the sound of his voice, his laugh, his stories. Yet she repeatedly asked herself, ‘Do I just run away? Do I really want this?’”
Moynahan, 55, revealed she was pregnant in February 2007, roughly two months after she and Brady, 49, broke up and the NFL quarterback almost immediately began dating Bündchen, 46.
According to the book, Bündchen “wondered if she should encourage Brady to reunite with Moynahan and to raise a family with his ex-girlfriend, who described the situation as ‘f***ed up.’”
Indeed, Moynahan candidly addressed the controversial timeline of events with Harper’s Bazaar in June 2008, 10 months after she welcomed son Jack. “Going through that traumatic time of being heartbroken and then being pregnant turned my whole life upside down and inside out and just knocked the wind out of me,” the Blue Bloods actress said at the time. “But I got so much out of that. It’s golden and it’s tough and it was f***ed up. But now I have a child, and it’s the best thing in the world.”
Us has reached out to Brady and Bündchen for comment.
Despite the turmoil, Bündchen had made up her mind.
“After days of talk and thought, the most famous supermodel in the world chose to stay with Brady as he was about to become the father to another woman’s child,” the book says.
Brady, Bündchen and Moynahan “worked through their myriad of issues in private.”
“Hard talks were had as gossip columnists from coast to coast wondered how three rich, famous, beautiful people planned to raise a child,” Anderson writes. “Gisele was madly in love with Brady and believed in the promise of their relationship, but initially, she wasn’t sure what to do. Over several days, according to friends of both, Barry drew on his deepest reserves of affection and eloquence, and persuaded Gisele to stay with him — a feat that must go down as one of the crowning achievements of his life.”
The author added, “Gisele vowed to be a doting maternal figure to the child. Moynahan planned to live in Los Angeles. And Brady agreed to co-parent with her as best as he could while residing on the East Coast most of the year.”
Brady, of course, was quarterback of the New England Patriots at the time.
He and Bündchen got married in February 2009, and later welcomed son Benjamin in December 2009 and daughter Vivian in December 2012. The couple divorced in October 2022 after 13 years of marriage.
