Jennie Garth & Peter Facinelli Relive Their Breakup On Her Podcast - And It's Cathartic As Hell!

Jennie Garth and Peter Facinelli are face to face again over a decade after their divorce… And they’ve got a LOT to say.

For the first time since their 2013 split, the exes came together to publicly discuss their years-long relationship and the family they share on Jennie’s I Choose Me podcast. And of course… the divorce. Here’s how it went down!

Breaking The Ice

In Wednesday’s episode, Peter came in strong talking about how much they’ve both changed since parting ways:

“We haven’t really spoken a lot about life about stuff in years, so I honestly don’t know you … and I don’t think you know me. And yet, it’s like when you go home and you’re with your mom or your dad or, you know, your sisters and they just treat you like you’re 16, 17, 18, like, you know the time they saw you last when you were younger, and so there’s this feeling of like, ‘Oh, I know her because we were together for so long, but you’ve grown into this mature, wonderful adult woman and I’ve grown.’ When we look at each other, we still look at each other like the 21- [and] 22-year-old version of each other”

Jennie and Peter met in 1995 while shooting the movie An Unfinished Affair. At the time, Jennie was just 22 years old while Peter was 21. They went on to have their first daughter Luca in 1997 (she’s now 26!) and soon after got married in 2001. Then in 2002, they welcomed daughter Lola, now 21, followed by Fiona, now 17, in 2006.

Peter Announces He Wants a divorce

But everything changed one fateful day when the Twilight star announced he wanted a divorce while he and Jennie sat together in an RV they co-owned — which the 90210 alum admitted “pissed” her off! But Peter said he felt like it NEEDED to happen so he could find himself after committing to so much at such a young age. He shared:

“I felt a lot of it was I was in this marriage and it felt to me a little bit like an arranged marriage. Like, I loved you, and we had this beautiful family, from the outside but I just was… I hadn’t developed who I was. I don’t even know how you could love me because I didn’t know me.”

Damn, that’s rough… Those kinds of insecurities can be like cancer in a relationship. We feel for Peter, but… No wonder Jennie was pissed! You know?? This was the guy she built her whole life with! But the feeling of always having to “play parts” — whether in movies or as a standup dad — overshadowed his ability to develop himself, he later realized:

“Sometimes we would drive up to your mom’s house, and I was the guy who drove, I planned the vacations, I was the dad. I was the soccer coach and then I go play parts [on acting jobs] and I was this other person playing parts, and so I was just like, ‘Well, I never got [to] fully develop me.’ I didn’t know who I was, and so I needed to figure that out. I didn’t feel like I had the space to do that within the marriage.”

See, now that’s the problem. If he’d communicated this at the time, maybe they could have figured things out?

Innerestingly, he added that he probably would have “stayed” in the relationship if they “didn’t have kids” together, because he would have in theory had more space to figure himself out. Huh. It kind of sounds like he wasn’t ready to be a dad after all. Oof.

splitting custody & co-Parenting

But while they may have been at the end of the road in their relationship, the two made it their mission to “put everything aside” to continue to give their girls the best lives possible. Peter added:

“When you break up with someone and then you still have this immense, tremendous responsibility with them, you have to put everything aside to, like, to work together. And there’s still a lot of pain there in the relationship not working out [and] a lot of feeling like if you failed the kids, or you know, we failed the kids in some way, and a lot of feelings of, like, ‘my way is right, your way is wrong, your way is right.’”

They ultimately settled on 50/50 custody — though Jennie sometimes regrets not fighting for more. But in retrospect, she knows it was the best thing for the kids:

“There were times when I really emotionally regretted that decision or not fighting harder for more. But at the same time, I knew that having them [spend] 50 percent of their time with you, their father, was absolutely the best thing for them. Whatever I was dealing with, you know, that part of me that wanted to have them more was just me being selfish and thinking about myself because it hurt so bad when they would leave.”

Peter added:

“It was all about trying to find a balance and picking up the kids and knowing that they were going to miss you for the week and then dropping off knowing they were going to miss me for a week. I always felt like they were visiting me and maybe choosing a home, like your house is the home house and there’s a lot of feelings of like, ‘Well, is my house the house they come visit? Is your house the house they visit? You know, like where is their home?’”

That’s so hard! But like everything, co-parenting takes effort and communication — which could sometimes be hard when it came to different “standards.” Peter mused:

“It’s tough. It takes patience [and] it takes a lot. We could have been better at it, and I still try to be better at it. A lot of trying to understand where the other is coming from because I think when we had a passion for something, you know, about something our kids were going through, and we understood, you know, where you were coming from and where I was coming from, even if we didn’t agree on the end result of it there was a compassion there that I think helped us through it.”

Jennie added:

“I would send them to you and I would think they weren’t being taken care of well enough or to my standards or whatever it was. But then just I would have to step back from that because like you were doing the best you could and giving them all the things that you knew to give them.”

Ultimately though, the two are each other’s biggest supporters. Jennie concluded: