Gossip Girl’s Kelly Rutherford: “I’ll raise my children alone”
For Gossip Girl star Kelly Rutherford, the news that she was expecting her second child came as a bittersweet surprise. When she was three months pregnant, Kelly, 40, made the heart-wrenching decision to leave her husband, Daniel Giersch, and have the baby on her own. Their daughter, Helena Grace, was born on June 8 in LA. Now, for the first time since the controversial split, Kelly is speaking out to Life & Style about the life-changing choice, her bitter custody battle and her plans to raise her two children on her own.
The couple conceived Helena when they were trying to make things work. And when Kelly realized she was expecting again, she thought another baby might actually save her marriage. “I found out I was pregnant, and I thought, Oh, maybe things will be nice, maybe it will be calm,” Kelly recalls. “But it wasn’t. Things only got more intense.” The strain at home, Kelly reveals, was made even worse by her husband’s professional troubles. “He was very litigious,” she says. “He says he’s an entrepreneur, but I think he just sues people. It was very angry [behavior]. I was kind of scared to leave.”
Though Kelly declines to go into specifics, her close friend and confidante Suzannah tells Life & Style that Kelly’s husband was “cold, controlling and paranoid — he threatened to ruin her career and sabotage her. He gave me the creeps, and he was beginning to get scary. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get away.”
Despite extremely tense relations with her ex, Kelly is flourishing in her new role as a single mom. And she doesn’t think she needs her ex to make her family complete. “A lot of great men, presidents even, were raised [only] by their mothers under those conditions,” she says.” “The most important thing is that the children have love and stability in their lives, whether that comes from a mother or a father. [Alone], I can raise them to be much more peaceful.”
