Joe Manganiello Says Sofia Vergara's Divorce Claims Are "Not True"

It’s been a year since Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara announced their divorce, but it sounds like the true story behind the decision hasn’t been fully told. In the months since, Vergara has claimed the reason the eight-year marriage ended was because Manganiello wanted to have kids, but she did not. However, Manganiello recently stated Vergara’s version of the events is “simply not true.”

The two actors, who tied the knot back in 2015, shocked fans when they filed for divorce in July 2023. About a month before the divorce was finalized, Vergara opened up about the reason for the split: “My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids, and I didn’t want to be an old mom,” she told El País in January.

Vergara has one son, Manolo, whom she welcomed with her first husband Joe Gonzalez in 1991. At 51 years old, the actor stated that she did not want to have any more children. “I respect whoever does it, but that’s not for me anymore,” she said. “I had a son at 19, who is now 32, and I’m ready to be a grandmother, not a mother.”

But Manganiello claimed that family planning was not the true cause of his divorce from Vergara. “That’s simply not true,” he told Men’s Health of his ex-wife’s comments. “We did try to have a family for the first year and a half. And we had a huge conversation right out of the gate during the first month we dated. I said, ‘If you're done with kids, then I understand. Just tell me, and I'll know what this is, and that's okay.’ But that wasn't the case with her. And I swore to her that I would never leave if it didn't work out. And I didn't.”

Manganiello admitted he did want to have kids, but that “wasn't inevitably why everything ended. It's because two people grew apart, and sometimes that happens.”

He went on to clear up that he would have never left Vergara over what she wants to do with her own body: “To be painted as if I had some sort of midlife crisis, and after nine years, turned to somebody and gave them an ultimatum of, ‘Do this potentially unhealthy thing to your body, or else I'm gone’? That’s never who I was.”