Joe Manganiello has put his version of the end of his marriage to Sofía Vergara in print. His memoir, Bloodlines, came out Oct. 13, and according to E! Online, it describes years of serious illness and a marriage that slowly lost its footing under the weight of it.
Joe Manganiello and Sofía Vergara announced their divorce in July 2023 after seven years of marriage. Back then they presented a united front.
The Health Crisis That Changed Everything
Manganiello writes that he got sick not long after the couple got engaged in 2014.
E! Online reports that he describes an autoimmune disease that brought fevers, rashes, fatigue and severe abdominal pain. He lost 60 pounds over the next seven years. He went through numerous colonoscopies and multiple surgeries, including the emergency removal of his large intestine in 2016.
He was already under anesthesia when the call had to be made. He credits Vergara with making the decision that he says saved his life.
Seven years of marriage. Nearly all of it spent sick.
Manganiello’s Perspective on Family and Future
Vergara has offered her own explanation. She told El País in 2024 that the split came down to children. Manganiello wanted them, and she said she was ready to be a grandmother to her son’s future kids, not a mother again. Manganiello disputed that. He called it simply not true in an interview with Men’s Journal, and added: “We did try to have a family for the first year and a half.”
Bloodlines offers a different explanation. He and Vergara grew apart, he writes, under the real possibility that they would not get to grow old together. Each of them has now given a public reason, and the two reasons do not line up.
How Illness Can Shift Relationship Dynamics
Manganiello was once named one of Men’s Health’s 100 Fittest Men of All Time. In the book, he writes that his wife came to see him more as a patient than a partner, and he calls that understandable.
He gives a specific example. He learned he was wanted for the villain role in a Batman film Ben Affleck was set to direct, and he gasped with excitement. Vergara panicked and assumed something had gone wrong with his health. Affleck later handed the project to Matt Reeves in 2017, and the earlier casting fell apart.
Good news sounded like an emergency in that house.
Years of hospital visits will do that. The person who has been bracing for the next crisis hears a sharp breath and assumes the worst. The person who is sick wants to be seen as more than the illness. Both reactions make sense, and they pull in opposite directions.
The Emotional Toll of Caring for a Partner
Manganiello writes that Vergara was preparing for him to die. He says she was deeply traumatized by the fear of losing him, and he describes that fear as a kind of abandonment she was expecting. He does not write it as an accusation. He writes it as the cost of the illness. A partner who spends years rehearsing a funeral has already started grieving, and a spouse who survives still has to live inside that distance.
E! Online says it reached out to Vergara’s rep for comment on the book and has not heard back. On Oct. 9, four days before Bloodlines was released, she shared a post from her son to her Instagram Story. She has said nothing directly about what her ex-husband wrote.
Sources: E! Online
