Bridget Moynahan reflects on her public breakup with ex Tom Brady: 'I'm still working through that'

It’s been over a decade since Bridget Moynahan split from her ex-boyfriend, Tom Brady after their nearly three-year relationship. But the actress has only recently come to terms with the fact that she might still be carrying some of the pain and anxiety that came with the very public 2006 split.

The 47-year-old actress opened up about that time in her life while speaking about her new book Our Shoes, Our Selves on the BUILD stage. The book, which she co-wrote with Amanda Benchley, dives into the personal narratives that a single pair of a woman’s shoes may represent and how they hold significance in their lives. When Moynahan spoke about her black Miu Miu boots that are featured in the book, she said that she was taken back to a very specific period of time when she decided, “I was gonna take a little bit of my life back.”

“I had a public breakup and then I was pregnant and then I had a baby,” she said, referencing her and Brady’s now 11-year-old son, John Edward Thomas Moynahan. “And those moments were kind of stolen from me by the paparazzi, the tabloids, whatever.”

Moynahan became a tabloid fixture at the time as a result of her 2007 pregnancy announcement, which came three months after she and Brady had already broken up and the football player had moved on with model Gisele Bündchen. Although Moynahan felt that she was being followed everywhere she went, it was one time in particular that led her to a pair of shoes, and a revelation.

“One time I was followed to the mall, and I snuck around and found myself in a store. I was trying to buy some time that maybe I lost this person and I ended up in the shoe department,” Moynahan explained. “I saw these boots, and I think they really reminded me of who I was before all this stuff happened and before the attention.”

The Blue Bloods actress has since talked about raising Jack primarily as a single mom, while balancing her co-parenting relationship with Brady and Bündchen, who share two children. But when asked to reflect on calling these boots “the security blanket for my feet” in her book, Moynahan said she may have subconsciously been holding onto that feeling until this project made her check in.

“If I was going into a public space still or walking through the streets, sometimes I change my posture or hide a little bit because of that period of time. Because of that attention that was unwanted,” she said. “I feel like this project has kind of shown that to me that I still unconsciously carried that around with me. And so I’m still working through that and kind of shedding that now.”

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