After a public divorce, injury and surgeries, Gisele Bündchen is regaining her strength

Beautiful people are not spared the humiliations of overworked joints. That’s how supermodel Gisele Bündchen found herself facing two shoulder surgeries in 2019 and 2020.

At the time, Bündchen was living in Boston with NFL quarterback Tom Brady, then her husband, and still recovering from a back operation to treat an injury she had suffered falling from a horse. She had refused the procedure at first, turning to holistic alternatives like acupuncture. But the MRIs revealed what the glitzy fashion shoots and paparazzi photos couldn’t: Approaching 40, she was a wreck.

“I’ve never felt so depressed and vulnerable,” recalled Bündchen, now 43. She was unable to lift her own luggage or pick up her two young children, Benjamin and Vivian. “If I was sitting down, it was hurting,” she said.

Currently, she was sitting, dressed in faded jeans and a white mesh shirt. —so informal that she could be mistaken for the prettiest mother in school. But as the sun filtered through and her gaze narrowed, the face that sold millions of Victoria’s Secret bras came into focus.

Bündchen grimaced as he recalled his months in and out of the operating room. They were exhausting years. She lives in Miami now, having left behind the freezing winters of Massachusetts for the warmer climate of Florida with easier access to Brazil. The move was documented by both ESPN and Instagram gossip account Deuxmoi.

The bottom line: Brady retired and came back from retirement quickly, leaving his beloved game and the New England Patriots for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. (It would last three seasons.) Fans speculated about Bündchen’s resentment toward his sudden change. Reddit warriors accused her of undermining his triumphant return. Months into the move, the two shared nearly identical statements announcing their divorce.

Recently, photographers caught Bündchen in an apparent encounter with his jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente. Brady has been photographed with other women since the split, but Bündchen has faced accusations that he was spared —Rumor has it that her relationship with Valente preceded her divorce.

“I really don’t want to turn my life into a newspaper,” she said. “I don’t want to expose myself to all that.” But the stories seemed more insidious to him and more familiar too: the trope of the adulterous wife is as old as time. Bluntly, she refuted the accusation that she had cheated: “That’s a lie.”

“This happens to many women who are guilty when they have the courage to leave an unhealthy relationship and are labeled as unfaithful,” said Bündchen. “They have to deal with their communities. They have to deal with their families. Of course to me, that’s a little amplified.”

Bündchen pushed aside the details of her past relationship to make a broader point. “Nobody really knows what happens between two people, just the two people in the relationship,” she said. She noted that she has been divorced for almost 18 months. In that time, Brady seemed to move on. Now she does too.

Yes, she confirmed, she is dating someone, and it is new, and she is careful. “This is the first time I’m dating someone who was my friend first,” she said. “It’s very different. It’s very honest and transparent.”

Life goes on

Before the surgeries, Bündchen vowed to transform her own health. Long before most Americans realized the power of juicing, Bündchen was drinking her vegetables. She was religious about her workouts, building a pickleball court and a yoga pavilion at her beachfront retreat in Costa Rica. Now she has been focusing on her strength.

When the moving company came to pack items from the home she shared with Brady, she demonstrated her newfound power by lifting boxes and moving furniture. She carried a table to the truck. “Those guys! If you saw their faces,” she said, “they were like, ‘You’re crazy.’

Her twin sister, Patricia, attested to Bündchen’s skill and determination. “She has the ability to nail, screw, sand, fix anything,” she wrote in an email. “She really gets her hands dirty.”

This month, Bündchen will release her first cookbook, “Nourish: Simple Recipes to Strengthen Your Body and Nourish Your Soul,” which features 100 recipes, one of which is the “summer roll,” vegetable rolls with chestnut sauce that she served as lunch on the afternoon of this interview. She really got her hands dirty, folding wet rice paper over mounds of vegetable sticks. She did this on her kitchen island, a white block that sits in the center of the modest Miami home she purchased in 2022.

She loves the intimacy of this house. Washing her hands in the sink, Bündchen pointed to the children’s bedroom doors. “When I say, ‘Benny, Vivi, dinner!’, it’s like, ‘Are you listening to me,'” she said. “‘You’re definitely listening to me.'”

She laid off a large team. She makes breakfast and picks up her children from after-school sports activities. Housework became a focus. “Now that I’m here, I can be alone with them,” she said. She added, “They have to help me, and I tell them that. I say, ‘Listen, I understand we had chefs working with us and everything, but Mom is choosing to do it this way now.'”

It took an adjustment after the divorce to not have her children with her all the time. But since then, she has realized the advantages of raising children alone. “They have this house, with the things I consider necessary. They will learn to live in a simpler way,” she said.

The scale feels closer to the environment in which it was created. Bündchen is one of six sisters, born in the small town of Horizontina, in Rio Grande do Sul. Both parents worked, and her mother took care of all the household chores in addition to her work as a bank teller. When Bündchen’s children fail to put their clothes in the hamper, she thinks of her mother, boiling hot water and scrubbing her daughters’ dirty socks in buckets.

A month before this interview, his mother passed away from cancer, aged 75. Bündchen cried when the conversation turned to the loss —not delicate tears, but real sobs. “It’s just because it’s so recent,” she said. “My mother is a superwoman to me. She is a warrior.”

Bündchen announced she would leave the runway in 2015, making a conscious choice to cut back on her work. Still, she made millions of dollars from partnerships with designers like Chanel and brands like Pantene. Since her divorce, she has worked with many other fashion brands, including Louis Vuitton, Alaïa, Balmain and Frame. Next year marks his thirtieth working in the industry. She insisted she would not retire, but intended the milestone to mark the end of this phase of her career. “I feel like it’s a good time to have some closure and start a new season,” she said.

Whatever comes next, she doesn’t care about looking easy. Bündchen is keen to point out that she hired someone to help her finalize and test the recipes in “Nourish.” “I’m like, ‘Just put a little bit of this, a little bit of that,'” she said of writing recipes.

With her disposition in mind, nearly every recipe in the book includes improvised tweaks, aimed at parents who cook like her and have kids with a palate like hers. “One day they like carrots, the next day they hate carrots,” she said, pointing to the vegetable rolls.

Complaints related to vegetables she can accept. But now she has to prepare her children for the world outside her kitchen, where mistakes are inevitable.

“You think you know something, and then you find out you don’t,” he said. “You think you make a judgment on a person, and then it’s not what you thought.” She survived her own disappointments; she hopes her children learn to do the same. “We can’t live life wrapped in bubble wrap,” she said. This, from a woman who can now put her detractors in a rear naked choke. She is less fragile than she thought.