As most people know, Bundchen is emerging from a long and productive league to once again become former NFL quarterback Tom Brady – God or pariah, you choose. Last October, the super couple finalised their divorce after headlines conflated the fate of their marriage with his career: Brady’s long-awaited February 2022 retirement, which Bundchen seemed to approve of; his UN- 40 days to retirement; his 11-day absence from Tampa Bay Buccaneers training camp to address “personal ” issues; the hiring of a lawyer; the other shoe dropping after a brief but flamboyant divorce watch: an almost identical statement vowing to be friendly co-parents and expressing gratitude for their time together. By the time Brady retired in February, the two had made a conscious effort to separate.
Their glittering union seemed the perfect prom: 11 times rocking the Met Gala (famously coordinating Versace); embracing amid the hoopla of Brady’s Super Bowl win; their second wedding in the house in 2009, followed by a Catholic ceremony in Santa Monica, after which Brady grilled steaks for dinner. Their proportions are therefore those of Julie Pitian and Peter Aniston. The feeding frenzy is partly a supersocial projection, partly a gender discourse: if “Giselle and Tom” can’t do it, what about the rest of us? Can two alphas at the top of their careers co-exist in a marriage, and must the female partner in a cishet partnership – no matter how successful she is – always take on the bulk of the childcare responsibilities? Or perhaps gloat.
About two and a half months had passed when she picked me up at my hotel in Costa Rica wearing a taupe sports bra, matching shorts and rainbow flip-flops. A blue and white linen scarf was wrapped around her head and face, not for privacy – she was considered a local by the locals, if not a tourist – but to combat the dust raised on the unpaved roads. She gave me a matching scarf and we accelerated uphill.
Just two and a half months, or 13 years, later, Bündchen’s mood remains distinctly raw. “It’s like death and rebirth,” she tells me. She sits cross-legged in the living room of the main building, an open-air temple in the sky that could be described as the lobby of the Aman Endeavour. The gated compound houses a pikeball court, a yoga shed and a chicken farm where the family collects eggs and recycles waste – overlooking a sleek swimming pool with an endless ocean in the distance.
The loss of a partner in divorce is often compared to death, and Bündchen is mourning “the dashing of my dreams”, she says. “It’s hard because you imagine that your life is going to happen a certain way and you do everything you can do, you know?” Her voice broke as she said it. She apologised and pressed her fingertips into her eyes, which were pink and watery. After a few yoga inhales and exhales, Bunsen continued the exercise. “I was raised to believe in fairy tales. I think it’s wonderful to believe in that. I mean, I’m grateful that I did.”
“What was said above is just one part of a bigger puzzle. It’s not so black and white.”
“You give everything you have to make your dreams come true,” she adds. “You give 100 per cent of yourself and when it doesn’t end the way you hoped and worked for it, it’s heartbreaking, but you can only do your part.”
Bündchen’s marital contribution is well documented: for much of her time with Brady, the woman who had long been the world’s highest-paid model scaled back her career in favour of supporting him. in 2015, she stopped walking the show, and a few years later, she moved from Boston, where she had long lived, to Florida. “When we moved to Tampa, I had never actually been there,” Bündchen tells me. “I had just arrived and this was my life.”
The initial decision to focus a lot of her energy on her wife and mother was entirely Bündchen’s. “When I met Tom, I was 26 and I wanted a family. I felt ready for it,” she says. Since she was found in a St Paul’s shopping centre at the age of 13, she has worked tirelessly, up to 350 days a year, and in December 2006, a year after her split from Leonardo DiCaprio, Bündchen and Brady were set up on a blind date with “their mutual friend Ed Razek”. The moment Bündchen saw Brady at West Village bar Turks & Frogs, “I knew right away,” she told the magazine in 2009. I knew immediately,” she told the magazine in 2009.
In the middle of the couple’s honeymoon period, the day before the news went public, Brady told Bündchen that his ex-girlfriend actress Bridget Moynahan was pregnant. Some (many?) of the women may have run away. In fact, Bündchen considered quitting. In retrospect, it was “a challenging situation for all of us,” she says. Instead, when Brady and Moynahan’s son Jack was born in 2007, Bündchen embraced him as her ‘extra child’.
When their marriage officially broke up in 2007, the media and the public assumed the timeline and its causality: the marriage ended after Brady’s U-shaped retirement. But marriages don’t build or break up overnight, Bündchen says now. “It took years for that to happen.”
The headlines portray Bündchen as a marginalised shrew, and the prevailing explanation focuses on a presumed ultimatum: if his career continues, their marriage will not. The only problem is that, according to Bündchen, such a thing never happened. She calls the descriptions “very hurtful” and “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard”.
“Look, I’ve always cheered for him and I’ll always cheer,” Bündchen insisted, her voice full of emotion. “If I want to be the happiest person in the world, it’s him, believe me. I want him to achieve and conquer. I want all his dreams to come true. That’s what I really want, from the heart.”
