In the summer of 2023, Joe Manganiello and Sofia Vergara split up and filed for divorce. Rumors spread like wildfire about the “reasons” for the divorce, and one of the biggest rumors was that Sofia simply didn’t want to have another child and Joe wanted to be a father. Sofia even referenced that issue in post-divorce interviews, and I thought it was probably the root of their split. But now Joe has written a memoir called Bloodlines, and he talks about the catastrophic autoimmune illness he dealt with for years, including the years he was married to Sofia. According to Joe, the real story is that Sofia had no interest in being tied to a man in poor health, and she even mocked and criticized him at his lowest.

Joe Manganiello‘s long hair is tied up in a top knot, his beard is perfectly groomed, and his skin boasts glowing tan. He looks healthy because, finally, he is. For seven of the last 10 years, the actor was secretly fighting a mysterious autoimmune illness so virulent it nearly killed him. In his new memoir Bloodlines (out Oct. 13), Manganiello, 49, opens up about recovering from a health battle that led to “major organ amputation” and contributed to the end of his seven-year marriage to actress Sofía Vergara, 54: “I can’t believe I’m alive,” he says. “I feel like I was reborn.”

Over the course of seven years, Manganiello lost 60 lbs., underwent countless colonoscopies, and in one emergency surgery in 2016, had part of his intestines removed, leaving him unable to go to the bathroom normally and relying on an ostomy bag.

Manganiello was prescribed meds for nerve pain as well as drugs used to treat Crohn’s and colitis. “None of them worked on me,” he says. Forced to turn to hydrocodone pills, fentanyl patches and marijuana to ease his agony, Manganiello wrestled with his hard-won 13 years of sobriety. “I didn’t feel like I deserved to say that I was sober,” he recalls, “[but] I had to put the pain and the condition first.”

As Manganiello cycled through hospitals searching for answers, his illness took a toll on his marriage, which he writes had “become devoid of any emotionality whatsoever.” He claims in the book that Vergara refused to hug him even when he begged and that she ridiculed him for his 5-lb. chihuahua Bubbles, a then-sickly pup Manganiello had adopted in 2019 when he was considering suicide. “I had to give my gun away because I kept thinking about it, and then the dog came. I went from being the patient to the caretaker,” he says.

The couple’s dream of having a child together had also been dashed. Vergara would later tell a Spanish newspaper that their marriage “broke up because my husband was younger; he wanted to have kids, and I didn’t want to be an old mom.” But Manganiello says he gave up the idea because of his illness. After failed IVF attempts led to them considering egg donors, he says he didn’t want to die and leave Vergara with a child “who wasn’t biologically hers.”

Writing this book was his way of correcting the record: “There were things said and printed about me that were false,” he says.

His marriage crumbling and his body failing, Manganiello looked beyond traditional medicine for answers. At one point his desperate search brought him to Cuba where a medicine man had him lick the pituitary gland in a goat’s skull, but Manganiello believes he eventually found healing through a Santa Monica shaman, who told him generational trauma was to blame.

Manganiello’s great-grandmother lost nine of her children to genocide in Armenia, and his grandmother battled lupus. He says he unburdened himself of his family’s torment by confronting it: “Whatever chains there were to the past suffering of my ancestors, they were completely broken. There’s not an ounce of fear in me about moving forward with my life.”

[From People]

Wow, so even the story about the dog was false? In 2023, people made a big deal about how Bubbles Manganiello, the Chihuahua, was Sofia’s dog and she gave the dog to Joe in the divorce because Bubbles clearly favored Joe. Now it turns out that Bubbles was always Joe’s dog, and Bubbles probably had good reason to hate Sofia? Yikes. Mostly, I’m stunned by how good Vergara’s PR really is – she really got her side out immediately, and I believed that they split due to Joe’s desire to start a family. We had no idea that Joe’s health was struggling to this extent, nor did we know that Sofia seemingly checked out of the marriage as soon as he got sick (women in male-dominated fields).

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Avalon Red.