Emily Ratajkowski Said Sex Ended 6 Months After Sylvester's Birth
Emily Ratajkowski said she stopped having sex with Sebastian Bear-McClard six months after their son Sylvester was born. The 35-year-old made the disclosure in a new essay for the Cut, pairing it with a timeline that moves from marriage to separation to divorce.
March 2021 to September 2022
Ratajkowski wrote that she welcomed Sylvester in March 2021, then described life after his birth as “a violent transition into a new reality of screaming baby on my aching tit and ring on my swollen finger.” Six months after that, she said, “my husband and I stopped having sex.”
“Less than a year later, we separated,” she wrote. That sequence gives the breakup a sharper date range than the wider reporting around it, which included a July 2022 note that she had split from Bear-McClard after 4½ years of marriage. She filed for divorce in September 2022 and finalized it last summer.
After the Divorce
Ratajkowski also said the reaction around her divorce was condescending, quoting people who told her, “I’m so sorry, Emily.” She added that what had felt crucial to her as a kid was avoiding becoming a single mom, and wrote, “Having a child with the wrong man was the fastest way to ruin your life as a woman — it meant having no freedom, no choices, no emergency exit,” before summarizing that state as “All baggage and no security.”
The essay places that private timeline beside a more public reinvention. Ratajkowski said she “decided to f–k my way into a new kind of woman” after embracing single motherhood, and wrote that before the separation she had “only slept with eight people,” including “four of whom had been live-in boyfriends.”
Bear-McClard and The Cut
The Cut essay also ran with a photo shoot of Ratajkowski breastfeeding a doll, a visual choice that matches the bluntness of the writing. The piece adds one more specific marker to a breakup that had already been tracked through separation, divorce filing, and finalization, and it leaves the central takeaway in plain view: her account is less about gossip than about the short runway from new motherhood to a marriage ending.
