Over the weekend, we discussed this new book about Tom Brady. The book? Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness. One of the funniest conspiracies I’ve seen about this book is that the author, Lars Anderson, used Gisele Bundchen as one of his main background sources. As in, Gisele supplied Anderson with information about her ex-husband. While the book excerpts have been pro-Gisele, I think the facts at hand are pro-Gisele and I also think that she’s completely moved on from Tom. Anyway, in some new excerpts, Anderson detailed what was happening behind the scenes in late 2006 and early 2007, when Tom dumped Bridget Moynahan and started up with Gisele, and Bridget was pregnant (Tom didn’t know she was preggo when he broke up with her).

Just two months after Gisele Bündchen and Tom Brady began dating, the new couple was hit with a major bombshell. Brady’s ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan announced that she was pregnant with the NFL star’s baby, leaving a “lost and confused” Bündchen to make a difficult decision on her future with Brady.

In the biography Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness, out September 23, author Lars Anderson took a look back at the pivotal crossroads moment in Bündchen and Brady’s early romance. According to Anderson, the new couple was vacationing together in France in February 2007 when Moynahan reached out to her ex with “a lightning strike of news: She was pregnant, and Brady was the father.”

Anderson claims that the Brazilian catwalk star was already “madly in love with Brady and believed in the promise of their relationship” but felt initially torn when her then-boyfriend explained the situation to her. “She didn’t know what to do. She had lived her life until Brady, but now she was truly alive, building a home in the sound of his voice, his laugh, his stories. Yet she repeatedly asked herself, Do I just run away? Do I really want this?” he wrote.

Anderson also alleged that Bündchen considered encouraging Brady to “reunite with Moynahan and to raise a family with his ex-­girlfriend, who described the situation as ‘f–ked up.’”

According to friends of both Brady and Bündchen, the athlete “drew on his deepest reserves of affection and eloquence, and persuaded Gisele to stay with him—­ a feat that must go down as one of the crowning achievements of his life.” The former Victoria’s Secret Angel “found herself in a place where her feelings for Brady were too strong to ignore,” despite the “traumatic” experience of co-parenting a child and working through “myriad issues” with her new boyfriend and his ex.

The former Patriots star and Bündchen also struggled to deal with the fictitious negative “optics” of Brady “[dumping] his pregnant ex-­girlfriend for the world’s most successful supermodel,” even though the athlete and Moynahan had broken up before his first blind date with Bündchen in December 2006.

According to Anderson, Bündchen stepped up to the challenge and “vowed to be a doting maternal figure to the child,” even “referring to Jack as her ‘bonus baby.’”

While she didn’t meet Moynahan until a year after Jack was born, Bündchen opened up about her “great relationship” with the Sex and the City actress in a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair, shortly after her divorce from Brady—although she admitted they didn’t always get along.

“Everything in life comes with work. You have to go through the roller coaster. You have moments where you get to the sticky points and you gotta overcome it,” she told the publication about their co-parenting dynamic. “My goal was always, how can I be the most helpful? How can I make it the easiest I possibly can? I put myself in her shoes and I was like, ‘How can I support her?’ Because in the end of the day, we are team players in ‘How are we going to do this so (Jack) can have the best life?’”

[From InStyle]

Do we believe that Gisele encouraged Tom to go back to Bridget? Eh. I’m not sure if I buy that. But I do believe that Tom would have never gone back to Bridget either way, regardless of whatever Gisele said or didn’t say. I also believe that Gisele and Bridget ended up getting along, and that Gisele adores Jack. Both Tom and Gisele have indicated in interviews over the years that Jack is the kid who is the most like Tom, and the kid who relates to Tom the most. I don’t think Benjamin is interested in football or any sports.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Tom’s Instagram and Gisele’s Instagram.