Joe Manganiello says his ex-wife Sofía Vergara ridiculed him and refused comfort while he fought a near-fatal disease, and his new memoir challenges her public story about their divorce.
Actor Joe Manganiello is using his upcoming memoir to push back on the public account of his split from Sofía Vergara, claiming she mistreated him while he battled a life-threatening autoimmune disease during their marriage.
Page Six reported that in “Bloodlines,” due out Oct. 13, the 49-year-old “Magic Mike” and “True Blood” star sayd that Vergara “ridiculed” him over his tiny dog and would not hug him even when he begged for it at his sickest. He also disputes the family-planning story she has told about why the marriage ended.
The claims land in a Hollywood lane already crowded with long, expensive breakups and competing public narratives, the kind of post-split fallout seen across celebrity divorces that reshape lives and bank accounts alike.
Manganiello and Vergara married in 2015. He says the health crisis began shortly afterward and stretched across roughly seven years.
He lost 60 pounds. He went through multiple colonoscopies. Medicine stopped working. In 2016 he needed emergency surgery that removed part of his intestines and left him with an ostomy bag.
In material drawn from a People interview and excerpts, Manganiello described the downward slide in plain terms.
"I was getting sicker and sicker,"
He later had follow-up surgery that reconnected his digestive tract. He says he is now symptom-free and off medication.
A Santa Monica shaman he visited blamed “generational trauma,” citing ancestors lost in the Armenian genocide and his grandmother’s lupus. That is his account of the visit, not a medical finding.
In 2019, deep in the illness, Manganiello says he was thinking about ending his life. He gave away his gun. Then he adopted Bubbles, a five-pound dog, and shifted into caretaker mode.
"I had to give my gun away because I kept thinking about it, and then the dog came,"
He added:
"I went from being the patient to the caretaker."
According to his book claims, Vergara ridiculed him for the dog. He also says that when he was severely sick and begged for a hug, she refused.
Page Six reached out to Vergara’s representative for comment. No response is reported in the coverage.
In 2024, Vergara, now 54, framed the split around children and age. She has a son, Manolo Gonzalez Vergara, 34, from her first marriage to Joe Gonzalez.
"My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids, and I didn’t want to be an old mom,"
She also said she felt it was “not fair to the baby,” and that having more children was not for her anymore.
Manganiello’s version is different. He says they tried IVF, it failed, and they considered egg donors before he walked away from the idea. His stated reason was the disease: he feared dying and leaving behind a child who was not biologically his.
That gap between a polished public reason and a messier private one is familiar in star breakups, including cases such as the Amy Schumer divorce finalization after a grinding legal process.
He is blunt about why he wrote the book.
"There were things said and printed about me that were false."
And:
"It happened to me, and it’s the truth, and I have all the scars to prove it,"
Manganiello is now engaged to Caitlin O’Connor. He says the couple is open to having children. After years of expecting to die, he describes a life that finally feels possible again.
"For seven years I thought I was going to be dead the next week. The world has opened back up to me."
Career and personal rebounds after ugly splits are their own Hollywood genre, from Brad Pitt’s comeback after years of divorce fallout to stars who rebuilt fortunes when the marriage ledger went cold, as when Jennifer Garner panicked over finances and built a massive food brand instead.
Vergara has not answered these specific allegations in the latest reporting. Manganiello is putting his medical ordeal, the dog, the refused hug, and the kids dispute on the record under his own name. Readers can weigh a scar-and-surgery account against a cleaner “we disagreed about children” storyline and decide which one needs more proof.
When a marriage collapses in public, the first story out of the gate is rarely the full one, and sick men still deserve basic decency at home, famous wife or not.
