I’ve been waiting for this for a while – Gisele Bundchen, the post-divorce magazine interview. Gisele covers the new issue of Vanity Fair and this is very much a classic of the Post-Divorce genre. Gisele is brave, fearless, warm, sad, resilient, honest. She suffered in her marriage to Tom Brady, she suffered during her modeling career, but now she is a phoenix rising from the ashes. Gisele fits into the genre perfectly, to be honest. It helps that she seems genuinely warm and effusive, and she acknowledges that she is a witch (a good witch). She also talks about her stepson Jack and how much she loves him and hopes to still be in his life, and her relationship with Bridget Moynahan and so much more. Some highlights:

How she feels post-divorce: “It’s like a death and a rebirth. Bündchen is mourning “the death of my dream. It’s tough because you imagine your life was going to be a certain way, and you did everything you could, you know? I believed in fairy tales when I was a kid. I think it’s beautiful to believe in that. I mean, I’m so grateful I did. You give everything you got to achieve your dream. You give a hundred percent of yourself, and it’s heartbreaking when it doesn’t end up the way you hoped for, and worked for, but you can only do your part.”

When Tom began playing with Tampa Bay: “When we moved to Tampa, I actually had never been there before. I just arrived and that was my life.”

On her kids: “Jack came into our lives and I felt so blessed and it kind of awakened in me this desire of being a mom. I’ve always dreamed of being a mom, but I think that happened a little faster than I thought, because now I have this beautiful little angel that I get to care for and love. My world was them. Do you know how grateful I am that I got that time for myself? I breastfed my kids until they were almost two years old. I was taking them to school every day. I was making them breakfast, lunch… I was there.”

On her involvement with FTX: “I was blindsided. I’m no different than everyone else that trusted the hype.” She says she is legally unable to discuss specifics, but says she had believed FTX to be “a sound and great thing based on what my financial advisers told me. It’s just…terrible. I’m so sorry for all of us that this happened, and I just pray that justice gets made.”

She never gave Tom an ultimatum about retiring: No such thing ever happened. She calls those characterizations “very hurtful” and “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Listen, I have always cheered for him, and I would continue forever. If there’s one person I want to be the happiest in the world, it’s him, believe me. I want him to achieve and to conquer. I want all his dreams to come true. That’s what I want, really, from the bottom of my heart.”

She would never divorce Tom just because he wanted to play one more season: “Wow, people really made it about that. What’s been said is one piece of a much bigger puzzle…It’s not so black and white.” Bündchen also dismisses digital murmurs that politics—namely, the MAGA hat spotted in Brady’s locker in 2015—drove a wedge. “Never,” she tells me.

Her summary on the marriage: “Sometimes you grow together; sometimes you grow apart. When I was 26 years old and he was 29 years old, we met, we wanted a family, we wanted things together. As time goes by, we realize that we just wanted different things, and now we have a choice to make. That doesn’t mean you don’t love the person. It just means that in order for you to be authentic and truly live the life that you want to live, you have to have somebody who can meet you in the middle, right? It’s a dance. It’s a balance. When you love someone, you don’t put them in a jail and say, ‘You have to live this life.’ You set them free to be who they are, and if you want to fly the same direction, then that’s amazing.”

On Jack & Bridget: Fifteen years of co-parenting Jack with Moynahan is helping inform how Bündchen navigates custody with Brady and sibling time for all three kids. “I say to Bridget—you know, I have a great relationship with her…Everything in life comes with work. You have to go through the roller coaster. You have moments where you get to the sticky points and you’ve gotta overcome it…. Love conquers all,” Bündchen says of her experience with Jack and his mom. “My life became so much richer because I got to learn so much from that.” The primary lesson: “Nothing is worth fighting [over].” With Moynahan, “my goal was always, how can I be the most helpful? How can I make it the easiest I possibly can?” Bündchen reflects. “I put myself in her shoes and I was like, ‘How can I support her?’ Because in the end of the day, we are team players in ‘How are we going to do this so [Jack] can have the best life?’ ”

On Brady’s last (terrible) season: “It was tough, but you know what? Let’s just be honest. It’s a team sport and you can’t play alone. I think he did great under the circumstances that he had. I mean, he had no offensive line.”

She’s a witch: “If you want to call me a witch because I love astrology, I love crystals, I pray, I believe in the power of nature, then go ahead.”

On fairy tales: “No one is going to come save you. Never give your power away to nobody. This is your life. This is your movie. You are the director on it.”

[From Vanity Fair]

Years ago, I went from thinking Gisele was being way too extra about Jack to actually appreciating how much she’s always tried to support Bridget. It’s actually clear, nowadays, that Gisele and Bridget are pretty close and that Gisele flat-out adores Jack and wants to be in his life no matter what. That moves me, as does her all of her talk about how she shifted her life and priorities around to move to Boston, support her husband and raise her children. Tom really let a good woman go, damn it. Anyway, I never expected to have this turnaround on Gisele. I really love her now.

Cover courtesy of VF, additional photos courtesy of Instagram and Backgrid.