IT’S OVER!
Good looks, success and money can’t save model Gisele Bündchen and quarterback Tom Brady’s marriage
With six Super Bowl rings, Tom Brady is arguably the greatest NFL quarterback in history. But wife Gisele Bündchen doesn’t understand his passion for the game. “Gisele is not really into sports,” Tom admitted six months ago of his Brazilian bride. “She’s like a kite flying in the sky, and I’m kind of tethering her. Sometimes I have to hold on hard.”
But now it seems she’s the one letting go. “It’s over between Tom and Gisele. They had a long, good run, but they’ve grown apart,” a source tells Life & Style, explaining that friends are buzzing that Gisele, 39, has made it clear that she wants a break from the football legend, 42, ahead of their 11th wedding anniversary in February. “Tom and Gisele are definitely at a crossroads in their marriage.”
ALWAYS AT ODDS
A big part of the problem? For years, Gisele has been begging Tom to retire. But, although his contract with the Patriots is now up, the athlete says it’s “unlikely” he’ll step away from the field. So a disappointed Gisele would be looking at at least another year of sleeping in separate bedrooms. “Gisele puts up with his training and game schedule, but she hates that he’s away from home so much — and always demands that he fly home as soon as he can to be a
husband and father,” says the source. “She has very high standards. Even when he made the effort in the past, nothing he did was ever good enough.” Tom loves his family, which includes his two kids with Gisele, Benjamin, 10, and Vivian, 7, as well as son Jack, 12, with ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan. “But he also loves it when he’s away from Gisele’s tough love,” adds the source. “She wears the pants in the family, and everyone knows it.”
Lately, things have been going from bad to worse. “They’ve been having some nasty, blowout fights,” says the source. “One was after Gisele told Tom that a psychic told her to leave him!
Of course he told her that was ridiculous and laughed at her.” But it’s no joke, says the source, that the duo are at their breaking point. “They’ve said some ugly things to each other — it’s gotten really bad,” adds the source. “Some friends think there’s no going back.”
There are also signs that they’re ready to move on. In early January, they slashed the asking price for their Massachusetts mansion by nearly $6 million (see box). “Gisele hates living there. She thinks it’s tacky and wants to live in LA‚ but Tom doesn’t,” says the source. Considering they’re worth a combined $600 million — Gisele was the highest-earning model in the world for more than a decade straight and is reportedly on pace to reach $1 billion in career paydays, while Tom’s made more than $235 million in NFL contracts alone — a split would be a financial nightmare. “Their divorce would be very messy,” warns the source, “and drawn out.”
A HISTORY OF DRAMA
Problems have been building for years. There were widespread rumors that their marriage was in trouble in the wake of the Def lategate scandal (see sidebar) — which Tom was accused of lying about — a year after he was in hot water for letting Ben Affleck’s alleged mistress pose for a photo wearing four of his Super Bowl rings on a private jet. More recently, Tom hinted at ongoing challenges in their relationship. “Marriages…ebb and they flow,” he said in a TV interview that aired on Dec. 4. “I think the challenging part for us is we are very ambitious people. A lot of the times, you know, I’m going one direction, she’s going the other, and it’s ships passing in the night.”
Gisele has previously confessed that marriage has been full of sacrifices. The globetrotter agreed to move to Massachusetts for Tom’s career, but living in New England “was a big transition for me. I didn’t know anyone in Boston, and living there made it harder for me to do my work,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir, Lessons. “What I’d worked so hard to achieve, the thing
I’d done since the age of 14 [modeling], had to take a back seat.”
A QUESTIONABLE FUTURE
Ultimately, Gisele made the decision to retire from the catwalk in 2015. But, after 20 years in the NFL, Tom is resisting doing the same. While Patriots owner Robert Kraft says, “I just hope and pray” the quarterback returns to Gillette Stadium, there’s also speculation that Tom will head to another team. Over the years, Gisele resigned herself to his decision to keep playing, explaining that “what will be will be.” Now the same could be said for their marriage, claims the insider. As Gisele herself wrote in her book, “life unfolds in unexpected ways. The only constant is change.”