Tori Spelling is putting it all out there about filing a divorce from fellow actor and husband of 18 years, Dean McDermott.
In the first installment of her new podcast, misSpelling, the former Beverly Hills, 90210 actress opens the episode by telling listeners she’s about to call McDermott and tell him that she’d filed. “I just filed for divorce,” she says, “I don’t know what feels more like a punch in the stomach: that it’s out there and it’s final, or that I have to call him right now,” she continues, before dialing McDermott on air.
“There’s this weird thing that I didn’t know about before, that you have to be careful with your ex, like it’s he said, she said, who filed first, so I had to file and go through the process and then once it was accepted and publicly posted, then I’m allowed to call and fill in my ex,” Spelling adds. “I have to tell him and I’m super nervous ‘cause I don’t like confrontation.”
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The phone rings, but McDermott doesn’t answer on the first go—so she gives her audience some background about why she’s made the decision to end her nearly two decade marriage.
She recalls a friend reminding her that she’d been saying she would leave her husband for years, but put it off to have help with their children. Spelling says her friend told her, “You said, ‘I need the extra help with hands. When the kids are old enough to undo their own car seats, I’ll leave him,’” she recalls. As the couple had more children, Spelling said she put off leaving McDermott longer and longer. “I just should’ve left after Beau,” she said of her youngest.
As she reflects on the grievances in her marriage, her phone rings—and the podcast exposes her side of the phone conversation she has with McDermott. “Hi, I’m OK, how are you?” she says in an unassuming tone before breaking the news to him.
“I hate to do this to you while you’re in the middle of—you’re going to work and everything,” she says into the phone and podcast mic. “They’ve done it. It’s just the formality. It’s like a one sheet you check off and you’ll have to sign it.”
McDermott seems to share concerns about how her filing first would be perceived. “I feel like I deserve to file first,” she told him. “You basically put it all out there with DailyMail, like you said everything that you’ve done to me over the years, so I think it would make perfect sense that it’s followed up that I would file,” she says, referencing McDermott’s interview with the site from last year, in which he detailed how his struggle with drugs and alcohol addiction had strained his family.
“It ended up with me drinking a fifth of tequila every night, seven days a week, and a handful of narcos by myself with a beautiful family in the other room,” he told the site, adding, “All Tori's ever done to this day is want me to be happy and healthy and I inflicted a lot of damage and pain on that woman.”
Spelling then expresses to him that the interview set the stage for her to call it quits first. “Those are things I would never have divulged to anybody and you did,” she tells McDermott on the podcast before informing him about how to fill out his part of the paperwork: “It’s just a one sheet where you check divorce and irreconcilable differences,” she said. “OK, I love you. OK. Bye.”
From there, the actress shares her reaction to the conversation with listeners. “Wait, that's it, oh my god,” she says. “I’ve never felt more alone—in a room full of friends doing a podcast! Fuck.” She gets emotional as she recalls her ex’s reaction to the news. “He was like ‘Great, good, great. Yeah I have a lawyer, I was gonna do this but cool, saves me $500 dollars.’”
The conversation seemed to have brought her to a particularly dark place, because she then says, “I don’t feel worth loving, that’s the truth. That starts when you’re young.”
“You are not alone,” supporters in the room tell her, “You are so loved by so many.”
After recovering from the weight of the moment, Spelling talks about being seen as a “dumb blonde” and “sex symbol” because of the characters she played in the 1990s and 2000s and the pressure of growing up in a famous family.
The Daily Beast reached out to representatives for both Spelling and McDermott, and has not received a response. McDermott, however, briefly spoke to a paparazzi reporter after the podcast episode dropped, saying that he and Spelling are “good” and that their divorce was a “long time coming.”
