Emily Ratajkowski, the 35-year-old model and actress, has written a new essay for The Cut detailing her post-divorce dating life in terms so graphic they read less like personal reflection and more like a bid to monetize wreckage. The piece, which the Daily Mail reported on extensively, chronicles a period Ratajkowski describes as a deliberate transformation, from wife and mother into a self-styled "villain" who drank "many, many gin martinis" and treated men as disposable conquests.
The essay is being treated, predictably, as an act of empowerment. It deserves a more honest read.
Ratajkowski married movie producer Sebastian Bear-McClard in a courthouse wedding in 2018. They welcomed their son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, in March 2021. In her essay, Ratajkowski wrote that the marriage fell apart fast after that:
"In a time period that felt both instant and excruciatingly slow, my marriage collapsed. Six months after my son was born, my husband and I stopped having sex. Less than a year later, we separated."
The split became public in 2022. A Page Six source said at the time that Bear-McClard "cheated. He's a serial cheater. It's gross. He's a dog." Ratajkowski herself appeared to confirm the infidelity by liking a tweet that read, "can't believe that little b**** cheated on emrata." By March 2023, Bear-McClard faced "grooming" allegations and had been fired by the Safdie brothers' production company, Elara Pictures. He was also tangled up in mediation with the Safdies alongside his divorce proceedings and custody battle with Ratajkowski.
None of that is trivial. A young mother discovering her husband's infidelity, navigating a custody fight, and watching her ex-husband's professional life implode, that is genuinely painful. No reasonable person would deny that.
But what Ratajkowski chose to do with that pain, and how she chose to frame it publicly, tells a different story than the one the cultural establishment wants to celebrate.
Ratajkowski wrote that she resented the pity she received after the breakup:
"I hated the condescending way people looked at me in the wake of my breakup. Their furrowed brows, the pity in their faces as they delivered an 'I'm so sorry, Emily.'"
She described feeling diminished, seen as "someone who was unwanted, who had been left. A reject with the burden of a needy, hungry, two-foot-tall sidekick." That last phrase refers to her toddler son. Set that aside for a moment.
Her response, as she tells it, was to construct a new identity. She wrote that she adopted the persona of a cinematic villain, "Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary." And she described her approach to post-divorce dating in terms that would make a fraternity pledge blush:
"I decided to f*** my way into a new kind of woman. I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I'd worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the w****."
She recounted her first post-divorce date with a sober DJ who lived two blocks from what had been her marital home. She described going back to an unnamed man's apartment after a bar date and narrated the encounter in predatory terms, writing that she "found everything I'd come there for, a praying mantis devouring her mate." Before that encounter, she claimed, she had slept with only eight people.
The essay's promotional rollout matched its tone. Ratajkowski posted an Instagram album in which she went topless under an open leather jacket and mimed breastfeeding a baby doll, with a drink in her hand and a man in underwear standing on the window ledge behind her.
This is what passes for female empowerment in 2025: a mother of a young child publicly branding herself a predator, describing her son as a "burden," and staging provocative photos to sell magazine copy. The applause from media and cultural gatekeepers was as predictable as it was hollow.
Ratajkowski's post-divorce dating life was anything but private. She ran through a roster of famous men that reads like a tabloid editor's fever dream. She was pictured with comedian Eric Andre at a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on the eve of Valentine's Day 2023. In March of that year, she was spotted passionately kissing singer Harry Styles in Tokyo, a development that reportedly strained her friendship with Styles' ex, Olivia Wilde. A Daily Mail source with inside knowledge said, "Olivia and Emily were friends and this is a betrayal."
The celebrity relationship carousel is nothing new, of course. High-profile splits and new romances generate media coverage regardless of who is involved. But the sheer velocity of Ratajkowski's public entanglements, and her willingness to narrate them as a philosophy, sets this apart from ordinary tabloid fare.
She also had on-off flings with DJ Orazio Rispo and was linked to comedian Pete Davidson. The Daily Mail exclusively revealed that Ratajkowski was locked in conversation with Tom Brady during billionaire Michael Rubin's 2023 Fourth of July party in the Hamptons. Brady shortly thereafter took up with Russian model Irina Shayk. By fall 2023, Ratajkowski was spotted kissing French actor Stéphane Bak on the streets of Paris.
Through all of it, she sidestepped romance rumors with Brad Pitt and offered coy non-denials. When asked about the Harry Styles kiss, she told the Los Angeles Times that "sometimes things just happen" and that she was "not thinking about guys."
Buried beneath the bravado, Ratajkowski's essay and public comments reveal something more sobering. In remarks to the Los Angeles Times, she said she was "scared" and offered a striking admission about her custody battle with Bear-McClard:
"I'm learning that outspoken women don't often get their children."
That line deserves attention. It suggests Ratajkowski understands, at some level, that the persona she has built, the "villain," the self-described predator who drinks gin martinis and treats men as prey, may carry consequences in a family court. She frames this as a gendered injustice, as though the problem is that she speaks her mind. But the issue is not candor. The issue is judgment.
A mother engaged in a custody dispute who publicly describes her toddler as a "needy, hungry, two-foot-tall sidekick" and a "burden" is not being silenced for being outspoken. She is creating a written record that any competent family attorney would introduce in proceedings. The question is not whether women should be allowed to date after divorce. Of course they should. The question is whether a parent's decision to publish graphic sexual confessionals while a custody battle is pending reflects the kind of judgment courts are supposed to evaluate.
When public figures go through messy divorces, the fallout often extends well beyond the principals involved. Deception and broken trust in relationships create ripple effects that touch colleagues, friends, and, most importantly, children who have no say in any of it.
The real story here is not Emily Ratajkowski's love life. Famous people date other famous people. Divorces are painful. People cope in different ways.
The real story is what our cultural institutions choose to reward. The Cut published this essay. Instagram amplified the promotional photos. The entertainment press covered it with a mix of breathless fascination and performative admiration. Ratajkowski is being treated as brave for doing something that requires no courage at all, leveraging her beauty, her fame, and her child's existence to generate clicks and sell a narrative of liberation that is, at bottom, a story about a woman in obvious pain making choices she may well regret.
There was a time when mainstream culture would have recognized this for what it is. Not a scandal, people make mistakes, and divorce is genuinely difficult. But not heroism, either. A woman who refers to her own child as a burden, who describes herself as a predatory insect, who stages photos mocking motherhood to promote an essay about her sex life, is not breaking barriers. She is performing damage.
The entertainment world has long rewarded this kind of spectacle. Celebrity scandals involving serious personal allegations generate enormous traffic, and the incentive structure is clear: the more provocative the confession, the bigger the platform. The line between candor and exhibitionism vanished years ago.
And the culture's gatekeepers, the editors, the publicists, the social media managers, know exactly what they are doing. They are packaging self-destruction as self-discovery and selling it to young women as a roadmap. The model who writes about destroying the "Madonna" in herself to become the "w****" is not offering wisdom. She is offering a cautionary tale that nobody in her orbit has the honesty or the incentive to call what it is.
Ratajkowski wrote in her essay that she constructed a character, "she was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous." That framing tells you everything. The entire exercise is built on the fear that people will see the truth underneath the performance.
Meanwhile, a little boy named Sylvester is growing up. Someday he may read what his mother wrote about the period after his birth, how his arrival preceded the end of her marriage, how she described him as a burden, how she detailed her sexual encounters for a national audience while fighting for custody of him. The cultural establishment that cheered this essay along will have moved on to the next confession by then.
Bear-McClard's reported conduct, the alleged cheating, the "grooming" allegations, the professional fallout, may well make him the worse parent in this story. That is for a court to decide. But the fact that one parent may have behaved badly does not transform the other parent's public exhibitionism into an act of courage. Celebrity families face unique pressures, but the obligation to put a child's interests above one's own brand is universal.
Ratajkowski asked her readers whether the men she dated "wanted me as their mommy? Maybe." It was meant as a joke. But somewhere in that question is a real child who already has a mother, one who, by her own account, spent his toddler years building a public identity around being anything but.
A culture that calls this empowerment has lost the plot. And the people who will pay the price are never the ones writing the essays.
