What’s it like to be cheated on, especially under Hollywood’s microscope? Liberty Ross is sharing her own experience, which came when then-husband Rupert Sanders was captured on film in mid-2012 necking around town with his Snow White and the Huntsman star Kristen Stewart.
The affair would go on to demolish both Robert Pattinson’s relationship with Stewart and Ross’ marriage to Sanders, despite public apologies from both guilty parties.
“It was horrible,” Ross, 35, says in the December issue of Vanity Fair. “It was really the worst, really the worst.”
“I have no words to describe what we went through,” says the model-actress, who heard about the slew of sleazy paparazzi shots from her then-husband only 20 hours before the photos went worldwide. “But I think, for me, something always has to completely die for there to be a rebirth. And, for me, I feel like I’m going through a rebirth.”
Ross enlisted the help of a publicist specialising in crisis management, then secured a friend’s house up the coast from her Hollywood Hills home as a haven where she and her two children could hole up until the tidal wave of attention receded.
“I was able to be there completely secluded,” says Ross, who was with Sanders for 16 years. “I just visualised [being] this sort of Masai warrior. I was just going to stand very still and very strong, and just let it all roll past me. I tried to keep as far away from it as I could and to understand that this is my family and it’s the most precious thing to me.”
Ross said she realised in hindsight that her marriage wasn’t quite clicking before the affair. “We’d lost our real connection,” she says.
She also says that, despite their failure to reconcile, she forgives her wayward ex.
And no, she didn’t have a word to say about Stewart.
