Why Joe Manganiello's Marriage to Sofía Vergara Fell Apart

Joe Manganiello Spent 7 Years Anticipating His Death During Debilitating Autoimmune Disease Battle

Sofía Vergara and Joe Manganiello's love story had its joyous chapters, but a pile-up of challenges led to the end of their seven-year marriage.

Exactly what those challenges were depends on who you ask.

While they put up a united front when they first announced their divorce in July 2023, Manganiello's new memoir Bloodlines, released Oct. 13, paints a more complicated picture of what went wrong and how they ended up on entirely different pages.

The Magic Mike actor previously pushed back against Vergara's assessment that they broke up because Manganiello wanted to have children and the Modern Family alum, as she told El País in 2024, was "ready to be a grandmother" to her now-35-year-old son Manolo's future kids, "not a mother."

Manganiello said that was "simply not true," telling Men’s Journal, "We did try to have a family for the first year and a half."

Rather, as he surmises in Bloodlines, he and Vergara ultimately grew apart amid the very real possibility that they wouldn't get the chance to grow old together.

Throughout the book, Manganiello viscerally details his battle with an autoimmune disease that caused him agonizing abdominal pain from his digestive tract ulcerating, fevers, rashes, headaches, fatigue and rectal bleeding.

He notes that he got sick not long after he and Vergara got engaged in 2014 and, over the next seven years, the True Blood hunk lost 60 pounds, had numerous colonoscopies and underwent multiple surgeries, including the emergency removal of his large intestine in 2016 that left him temporarily relying on an ostomy bag. He credits Vergara for making the "brutal but life-saving decision" while he was already under anesthesia.

But before long, Manganiello writes, Vergara understandably started to see him more as a patient than a partner, let alone one of Men's Health's "100 Fittest Men of All Time."

He recalls in the book gasping with excitement after finding out he was wanted for the villain role in a Batman movie being directed by Ben Affleck (who passed the baton to Matt Reeves in 2017, scuttling the previous casting decisions) and Vergara "freaked out," assuming something was wrong.

She was "preparing for me to die," Manganiello wrote, "and was clearly deeply traumatized by her fear of my impending abandonment via death."

E! News reached out to Vergara's rep for comment on Manganiello's book but has not heard back. 

On Oct. 9, she shared one of Manolo's posts to her Instagram Story, a chart comparing the qualities of a "good man" to "a narcissistic man."

Asked about the post, which was widely interpreted as a dig at his side of the story, Managniello said on CBS Mornings Oct. 12, "I think anybody who said that should read the book first and understand what the book is actually about, because it’s not about that. It’s about the suffering I went through.”

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Manganiello writes in Bloodlines that, while Vergara was by his side, finding new doctors for him to see, driving him to appointments and even connecting him with a shaman—though not the shaman he meets later who, according to the actor, tells him his body "tried to kill itself" because he had married a person he wasn't meant to be with but had vowed to never leave—his health challenges strained their marriage to the point that it became "devoid of any emotionality whatsoever."

He alleges in the book that, toward the end of their marriage, they were sleeping in different rooms and Vergara wouldn't hug him when he asked her to. Meanwhile, he writes, his main source of emotional support was coming from Bubbles, the sickly Chihuahua-pomeranian pup he bonded with instantaneously and nursed back to health.

When it came to having children, Manganiello writes that Vergara agreed to it early on, but, after attempts at IVF were unsuccessful they didn't consider using an egg donor, as he was getting sicker and didn’t want to die and leave her with a baby “who wasn’t biologically hers."

Once he started feeling better years later, however, Manganiello writes that he told Vergara that he still wanted to be a dad and, telling her "'everything is back on the table,'' he wanted to gauge her feelings on the matter.

He alleges that she looked at him "expressionless, then rolled her eyes, laughed, and walked out of the room."

Manganiello subsequently refers to his marriage as being "over" and writes in the book that he hasn't spoken to Vergara since he moved out of their house. 

Jason Merritt/Getty Images for Turner

He filed for divorce in July 2023 and, according to the book, met his now-fiancée Caitlin O'Connor four weeks later.

But though he describes a very rough road traveled with his ex-wife, Manganiello writes that his "illness changed everything" and "no one would have willingly signed up for what I went through."

He knew Vergara loved him, he added, "and she would have given anything she had to make it all go away, but she couldn't." And they had since come out the other side of it "as different people." 

Read on for more scenes from the love story Manganiello is writing with O’Connor: 

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