From Good Girl to Villain: Emily Ratajkowski's Post-Divorce Reckoning

There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes when the life you carefully constructed falls apart. For Emily Ratajkowski, that reckoning arrived in the form of a divorce that forced her to examine every choice she’d made—and every choice she’d denied herself.

In an essay published by The Cut on Friday, June 12, the 35-year-old supermodel opened up about her dating life after splitting from film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, her husband from 2018 to 2022. But this isn’t a story about finding love again or rebuilding. It’s a story about deliberately burning down the version of herself she’d spent decades constructing and seeing what would grow in its place.

Ratajkowski describes her pre-divorce romantic history as deeply conditional: eight partners total, four of whom were live-in boyfriends, and a rigid rule against one-night stands. She didn’t sleep with anyone she wasn’t certain would fall in love with her because, as she puts it, she wanted to be precious. That’s the Madonna archetype she’s referring to—the carefully curated good girl designed to inspire protection and admiration, not desire. Then came an eight-pound baby and a marriage that didn’t work, and suddenly all those rules felt like prisons.

What followed was her self-described“villain era,”a deliberate embrace of the characters she’d always kept at arm’s length:“Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary,”drinking gin martinis and answering only to herself. Within a week of her separation, she was in Brooklyn searching for distraction, tasking her friends with introducing her to“every unattached and (relatively) unembarrassing man”they knew. The shift was seismic—from a woman who needed to be loved to one who wanted to feel powerful, untouchable, enviable.

But here’s where the story gets complicated, and honest. Ratajkowski eventually realized that swapping one performance for another isn’t liberation—it’s just a different cage. Her fling with someone she nicknamed“Elder Millennial”ended when she recognized she wasn’t even connected to her own desires; she was performing a role again, just in a different costume.“Despite my performance as the supervillain, a character I’d believed made me impenetrable, I was just as misguided and vulnerable as I’d been in my 20s when I was playing the good girl,”she concluded.“It was all ridiculous, a silly game of performances with no substance.”

That’s the real headline here: not that she dated freely after divorce (plenty of people do), but that she was willing to admit that swinging from one extreme to another didn’t answer the fundamental question. The Madonna or the whore, the precious girl or the invincible villain—these are all just masks. The harder work is figuring out who she actually is underneath them. For a woman in her mid-30s starting over as a single mother in New York, that reckoning wasn’t just about sex or dating. It was about permission, power, and the exhausting labor of living for an audience instead of for herself.