Joe Manganiello Says Sofia Vergara’s Narrative About Their Divorce Is ‘Not True’

Actor Joe Manganiello refutes claims that his marriage to “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara ended because he wanted to have children, but she didn’t.

Vergara is the one who made the claims following the end of the couple’s seven year marriage.

“My marriage broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids and I didn’t want to be an old mom,” Vergara told Spanish newspaper El País in January. “I feel it’s not fair to the baby. I respect whoever does it, but that’s not for me anymore.”

Now Manganiello, 47, says that’s “simply not true.”

“We did try to have a family for the first year and a half. And we had a huge conversation right out of the gate during the first month we dated,” he told Men’s Journal in a recent interview published Tuesday. “I said, ‘If you’re done with kids, then I understand. Just tell me, and I’ll know what this is, and that’s okay.’ But that wasn’t the case with her. And I swore to her that I would never leave if it didn’t work out. And I didn’t.”

Manganiello admitted wanting to have children but insisted that “wasn’t inevitably why everything ended.”

“It’s because two people grew apart, and sometimes that happens,” the “True Blood” actor told the outlet. 

“To be painted as if I had some sort of midlife crisis, and after nine years, turned to somebody and gave them an ultimatum of, ‘Do this potentially unhealthy thing to your body, or else I’m gone’? That’s never who I was,” Manganiello added.

Vergara and Manganiello released a joint statement last July saying that they had made the “difficult decision” to divorce. “As two people that love and care for one another very much, we politely ask for respect for our privacy at this time as we navigate this new phase of our lives,” they said at the time.

Vergara shares a 32-year-old son, Manolo, with ex-husband Joe Gonzalez. Manganiello has no children and had never been married prior to tying the knot with Vergara in 2015.