Emily Ratajkowski has reflected on the messy reality of dating after divorce in a candid new essay, describing a phase that rapidly transformed her public image from “Madonna” to a “whore.”
In a personal essay published by The Cut on June 12, 2026, the 35-year-old model, actor and author wrote about life after her split from film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, with whom she shares a son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, born in March 2021.
Ratajkowski and Bear-McClard separated in July 2022 after almost five years of marriage, and she filed for divorce in September that year. At the time, reports claimed he had cheated on her.
At the time, a source told Page Six:
“cheated” and was “a serial cheater”
Bear-McClard has never publicly responded to those claims. Then, in 2023, a Variety investigation accused him of sexual misconduct and inappropriate behaviour involving teenage girls. He has denied those allegations.
Ratajkowski also appeared to add to the chatter by liking a tweet that read:
“can’t believe that little b*** cheated on emrata.”
Instead of retreating from public view after the split, she said she leaned into a period of intense dating while adjusting to life as a single mother in New York. She wrote that she embraced a more dangerous, hyper-sexual persona as a way of remaking herself after the breakup.
“The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary,” she wrote in the essay, published Friday in The Cut.
“She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her.”
Still, the first date of that new chapter nearly shut the whole thing down immediately. She said she met up with a sober DJ who lived near the home she had once shared with her ex, but the night took a bizarre turn almost right away.
According to her essay, he opened with:
“actually runs in my family,”
He then told a story involving his mother and sister catching him watching what he called:
“some sibling s***.”
Ratajkowski summed up the experience bluntly:
“That was my introduction to the dating scene. I didn’t f*** him, okay?”
Even so, she noted that he was:
“an anomaly.”
The dates that followed were hardly conventional. In the essay, she describes a string of men including:
“Vegan Graffiti Artist with impeccable posture,”
“who thought he might have chlamydia,”
“Spanish Gen-Zer who couldn’t stop sending me nudes,”
“heavily self-medicated Son of a Billionaire with questionable politics,”
and an
“Elder Millennial”
whose friends apparently labeled him:
“ugly,”
and who was fixated on:
“dental hygiene, psychedelics, and dirty talk.”
She admitted she continued seeing that last man largely because it flattered her ego.
“I’d seen a tweet about ‘doing it for the plot’ that I’d begun to repeat a bit too often in those days, as if it were a mantra,” she admitted.
Before that period, Ratajkowski said she had only slept with eight people, and believed each of them would ultimately fall in love with her.
“I wanted to feel precious,” she wrote.
“I decided to f*** my way into a new kind of woman.”
Her dating life after the breakup also unfolded in public. She had an on-and-off romance with DJ Orazio Rispo, and was also connected to Pete Davidson and Eric Andre. In March 2023, she was photographed kissing Harry Styles in Tokyo, despite reports that she had been friendly with his former partner Olivia Wilde.
A source later claimed Wilde viewed the moment as:
“a betrayal.”
Ratajkowski later addressed the situation by saying:
“sometimes things just happen.”
She was also seen chatting closely with Tom Brady at a Fourth of July party in the Hamptons, and later shared a brief romance with French actor Stéphane Bak, with the two photographed kissing in Paris in autumn 2023.
Eventually, she said that chapter ended less because of emotion and more because it no longer felt worth it.
“I wasn’t getting off on the sex,” she wrote, adding that she was
“too preoccupied”
with raising her son Sly, who is now five.
One of the essay’s most revealing details was her claim that she and Bear-McClard had stopped having sex altogether just six months after their son was born.
“Less than a year later, we separated,” she wrote.
Despite how painful the breakup was, she said it left her with a sense of agency she had not anticipated.
“I wasn’t left; I left. I knew then that being able to leave, to say ‘no,’ was the only real superpower I’d gained through divorce. I was brave. Really, actually brave.”
Bear-McClard’s attorney, Caroline Krass, has been approached for comment.