Sofia Vergara is responding to ex-husband Joe Manganiello's recent remarks about what led to the end of their marriage.
Manganiello, 47, shot down media reports that claimed the pair split because he wanted kids and Vergara didn't — calling the reports "simply not true" — during an interview with Men’s Journal published July 2024.
Now, Vergara, 52, is shrugging off her ex's comments and questioning whether they are even accurate.
“At the end of the day, you never even know if that’s what he said for real. I’ve read a lot of things that I’ve said that I’m like ‘Huh?’ What am I gonna do, call him? I don’t know if he even said that," the former "Modern Family" star told Variety in a new interview, out in August.
Manganiello told Men’s Health that he and Vergara, from whom he split in July 2023 after nearly eight years of marriage, “did try to have a family” during the first year and a half of their marriage.
The pair, said the former “True Blood” star, also had “a huge conversation” about kids during their first month of dating.
“I said, ‘If you’re done with kids, then I understand. Just tell me, and I’ll know what this is, and that’s OK.’ But that wasn’t the case with her,” recalled Manganiello. "And I swore to her that I would never leave if it didn’t work out. And I didn’t.”
Manganiello said he would have liked to have children with Vergara, but that “wasn’t inevitably why everything ended.”
“It’s because two people grew apart, and sometimes that happens,” explained the actor, who proposed to Vergara in December 2014 after several months of dating. They married in 2015.
Manganiello said it pained him to see himself depicted as someone who would abruptly walk away from his wife.
“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,” he said.
Manganiello’s comments came months after Vergara told the Spanish newspaper “El País“ that she and her ex went their separate ways because they disagreed about starting a family together.
“My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids and I didn’t want to be an old mom. I feel it’s not fair to the baby. I respect whoever does it, but that’s not for me anymore,” the “America’s Got Talent” judge explained.
Vergara, who is mom to an adult son from a previous relationship, told El País that any diapers she changed in the future would belong to her grandchildren.
“I had a son at 19, who is now 32, and I’m ready to be a grandmother, not a mother,” she said, adding, “I’m almost in menopause; it’s the natural way of things.”
“When my son becomes a dad, let him bring the baby to me for a while and then I’ll give it back to him and go on with my life; that’s what I have to do.”
In April, Vergara posted a photo in her Instagram story showing her with her rumored new boyfriend, Justin Saliman, an orthopedic surgeon at Cedars-Sinai and founder of OutcomeMD. In text that accompanied the photo, Vergra referred to Saliman as "a handsome doctor."
Meanwhile, Manganiello has moved on, too. He began dating girlfriend Caitlin O’Connor months after filing for divorce from Vergara.
