Former Beverly Hills 90210 star Tori Spelling has spoken of how “super nervous” she felt to call Canadian actor Dean McDermott and tell him about their recent divorce filing.
The American actress, also known for Scary Movie 2 and her spells on reality TV shows, has been married to McDermott since 2006 and they have five children together.
In the first episode of her Misspelling podcast, the 50-year-old says she recorded telling McDermott – who she had been with for more than a decade and separated from last year – about the divorce filing at Los Angeles Superior Court.
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After she leaves him a message to call her back, Spelling says: “He’s (going to) read this online so I just filed for divorce… Whoa, I said the words that I’ve said like in my head for like 16 years, wild.
“Anyway, I just got word from my lawyer that it’s public. There’s this weird thing that I didn’t know about before that, you have to be careful with your ex, like it’s a he said, she said who filed first.
“So I had to file and go through the process and then once it was accepted and publicly posted, then I’m allowed to like call and fill in my ex, so I just called Dean, he’s at work and I have to tell him and I’m super nervous because I don’t like confrontation.
“And yeah, (that feeling has) probably… stopped me from a really, long time wanting to do this, and hurting him and protecting him and protecting the kids.”
She shared the recording, which appeared to show her explaining to McDermott that it was a “formality” and she had checked “irreconcilable differences” on the form.
After telling him, she “loves” him, the call ended and Spelling said that she has “never felt more alone”.
Spelling also explained that the marriage “would have been over a lot sooner” but their children Liam, 17, Stella, 15, Hattie, 12, Finn, 11, and Bo, seven, were born mainly one to two years apart so she had never felt it was the right the time.
She also put it down to the fact that her father Aaron Spelling, who she worked with on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, was a producer so she has been “conditioned” to think that there is always a “happy ending” in relationships.
“I wanted the whole dream,” she added. “But my thing was always like, even from a young age, I was like, ‘oh, I want to be the perfect wife and mom, and housewife and cook’.
“And I was never taught how to clean so that’s not (going to) happen… or cook, but I taught myself (how to) bake.”
She also said: “But I can still call myself a girl, I can still call myself Miss Spelling because I can do whatever I want to do.
“Because we can redefine words, the way they make sense to us and how we want to proceed with them.”
When the couple first began a relationship after meeting on TV movie Mind Over Murder, McDermott was with his wife of more than a decade, Mary Jo Eustace, and Spelling had just got married to actor-writer Charlie Shanian.
She also said: “Dean and I had this fairy tale romance, even though we were both married when we met.
“Not fairy tale, right… but we had other partners that we cheated on and then left and then we got together.
“And people were like, ‘Oh, I give it six months’. We always say like, ‘Hey, it made it 18 years’. It shouldn’t have made it 18 years like it was.”
The couple and their children featured on the reality shows Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, True Tori and Tori & Dean: Cabin Fever, and Spelling is also known for playing a version of herself on VH1’s So Notorious.
Most recently, she has been on the American, French, Australian and Spanish version of celebrity competition show The Masked Singer and appeared in the 2018 action film The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time with McDermott.
