The couple will file for divorce in Florida on Friday morning, PEOPLE has confirmed
Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady will file for divorce after 13 years of marriage, PEOPLE confirms.
A source tells PEOPLE that they will both file in Florida on Friday morning.
“The settlement is all worked out,” a source tells PEOPLE. “They’ve been working on the terms this whole time.”
The source adds: “They agreed to joint custody of the kids.”
The couple’s split comes after months of reports that the couple had been struggling, and that Bündchen, 42, “is done with their marriage,” another source previously told PEOPLE.
“She was upset about it for a long time and it’s still difficult, but she feels like she needs to move on,” the source said in early October. “She doesn’t believe that her marriage can be repaired.”
After Bündchen hired a divorce lawyer, Brady, 45, followed suit.
A source close to Brady told PEOPLE at the time that the quarterback is “hurt” about the latest developments in his marriage.
“She is the one steering the divorce,” the insider said. “She is playing offense and he is playing defense. He wants to protect himself, protect his interests, but he’s only starting to go the legal route in his defense from her. He doesn’t want this to be ugly, he doesn’t want to fight. If the divorce is happening — and it seems like it is — he wants it to go as smoothly as possible.”
The couple share two children — son Benjamin, 12, and daughter Vivian Lake, 9, along with Brady’s son John Edward, 15, with ex Bridget Moynahan. The source said that Bündchen “feels bad for the kids, but she doesn’t expect any custody issues” with Brady.
The couple recently purchased a property on the exclusive Indian Creek Island in Miami Beach for a $17 million, and the source says Bündchen would likely stay in the area if the divorce goes through.
In September, a source told PEOPLE that the couple had been living apart for “more than a month,” by the time the 2022-23 NFL season had started. “Gisele is busy with her own life now, and has spent time away from Tom in Miami and New York,” said one insider.
A second source explained: “During the season, they live separate lives.”
“She’s a very ‘pros vs cons’ person, and she sees very few pros to him playing anymore,” a source said of Bündchen. “She’s told him that he’s the GOAT, and he has absolutely nothing left to prove. He could be going out on top, and playing until the wheels fall off doesn’t seem to be the way to go out on top.”
Another insider said, though, that the seven-time Super Bowl winner is “totally devoted” to his children during the offseason, and spends time with his family in between games and traveling.
“No other husband gets six months off a year to be totally devoted to just their family,” the source said. “And during the season, yes he travels for games and trains, but he’s with his family a lot too.”
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback and the supermodel first started dating in late 2006. Not long after, Brady found out his ex-girlfriend Moynahan was pregnant with his child. She gave birth to Jack in August 2007.
In a 2015 interview with CBS This Morning’s Charlie Rose, Bündchen revealed that at the time, she considered splitting from Brady.
“It was a challenging thing because here I am, you know, thinking, I’m dating this guy, we met, and we started dating and everything is great and then this happens. So, then I felt like I didn’t know what to do. It was kind of one of those moments of like, ‘Do I just run away?’ ”
The couple stayed together, however, getting engaged in January 2009. Early the next month, they quietly said “I do” in Santa Monica, California. Brady and the supermodel exchanged vows again that April at Bündchen’s home in Costa Rica.
Both celebrated 13 years of marriage in February 2022, sharing gushing posts on social media. “13 years ago, we both said ‘I do’ …and you have been the best thing that ever happened to my life,” Brady wrote in his heartfelt caption. “I love you more now than I ever could have imagined. You are the best mother and wife and supporter in the world and I am blessed to call you my wife.”
Meanwhile, the supermodel captioned her post, “Happy anniversary love of my life! Te amo! ❤️ @tombrady.”
Despite having what Bündchen once called a “wonderful” marriage, the pair have been close to divorce in the past — especially amid the fallout from “Deflategate” in 2015. At the time, Brady slammed reports that their marriage could end, telling Boston’s WEEI radio, “We’re in a great place.”
“I’m a lucky man. I’ve been very blessed with support from my family and certainly her, and there’s no bigger supporter that I have than her and vice versa,” said Brady. “I’ve been very blessed to have an incredible relationship with my life partner, and I don’t think anything will ever get in the way of that.”
Brady said in 2020 that he and Bündchen saw a marriage counselor when they hit a rough patch in their relationship a few years earlier.
“[Gisele] didn’t feel like I was doing my part for the family,” Brady said during an interview with Howard Stern on his SiriusXM show in April 2020. “She felt like I would play football all season and she would take care of the house, and then all of a sudden when the season ended, I’d be like, ‘Great, let me get into all of my other business activities. Let me get into my football training,’ and she’s sitting there going, ‘Well when are you going to do things for the house? When are you going to take the kids to school and do that?’ ”
Bündchen wrote him a letter, Brady said, to share her thoughts on their relationship.
“She actually wrote me a letter, and it was a very thought out letter that she wrote to me and I still have it and I keep it in a drawer and I read it,” he said. “It’s a very heartfelt letter for her to say this is where I’m at in our marriage, and it’s a good reminder for me that things are going to change and evolve over time. What happened and what worked for us 10 years ago won’t work for us forever because we are growing in different ways.”
During an appearance on Ellen in December 2018, Bündchen joked, “I haven’t been very successful” at getting Brady to retire. Still, in an interview in May 2017, the model gushed of her relationship with Brady.
“I think we have been growing and learning a lot from each other,” she said. “You know, walkin’ this life with a partner where you can always grow and learn from, it’s wonderful.”
When Brady temporarily retired from football after the 2021 NFL season, a source told PEOPLE that Bündchen has been waiting for her husband to hang up his jersey for some time.
“Gisele has been hoping he would retire already for a few years, especially after he won the Super Bowl with the Bucs,” the insider told PEOPLE in February 2022. “She’s really happy because she would really worry about him. She hates seeing him get hit.”
Brady unretired and announced he would return to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers less than two months after the initial retirement announcement, a decision Bündchen both publicly and privately appeared to support despite her previous hopes.
“Gisele has been vocal about wanting him to retire for years but she’s also his biggest cheerleader. He would never do it if she weren’t on board,” the insider told PEOPLE. “Everything they do they decide as a family.”
In July 2022, Brady opened up about how the couple is raising their children, Vivian Lake, 9, and son Benjamin Rein, 12, on an episode of Spotify’s DRIVE podcast.
Brady said that raising his children to understand their privilege is “probably the hardest thing” due to his and Bündchen’s humble beginnings.
“My wife grew up in rural Brazil, the farthest state south, Rio Grande do Sul, very small kind of farming town, very simple girl,” he said. “There are two bedrooms in their house — one for their parents and one for her and her five sisters.”
“I grew up in, I would say, a middle-class family in California, my dad worked his a— off for our family,” he explained. “My mom stayed at home [and] took care of us kids and I saw my mom work every day to make food for us at night and wash our clothes and now they supported us by coming to all our games and it was amazing and then I look at my life with my family and it’s so fast.”
In a May interview with Vogue UK, the Brazilian model revealed she “takes the reins” when it comes to their family and Brady supports her decisions.
“I don’t think relationships just happen; it’s never the fairy tale people want to believe it is. It takes work to be really in sync with someone, especially after you have kids,” she told the outlet.
Added the former Victoria’s Secret Angel: “His focus is on his career, mine is mostly on the kids. And I’m very grateful that he lets me take the reins when it comes to our family. He trusts my decisions.”
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