Anyone who follows pop culture will look back on 2023 as the year when major A-list celebrities said goodbye to their marriages. It felt like one jaw-dropping couple after another — Sofía Vergara and Joe Manganiello, Kevin Costner and Christine Baumgartner, and Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth — all of these familiar faces entered 2024 with a life looking very different from the start of 2023. What was going on in Hollywood to make these power couples call it quits?
That's where Laura Wasser, famed celebrity family law attorney at Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles, P.C. and the Chief of Divorce Evolution at Divorce.com, enters the chat. While she can't give away her clients' secrets, including Costner and Manganiello, she can share her insight into some of the reasons why celebrity couples, in general, went their separate ways in the same year. Since her work is directly tied to the Southern California area, Wasser noted that the events that were "happening in our world" had a major effect. "We had a huge strike or strikes between the writers' strike and then the actors' strike and we had a lot of people that weren't working. They were really looking forward to getting back to work post-COVID," she explains to SheKnows.
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Joe Manganiello and Sofía Vergara.
Not only did the pandemic and work stoppages create "financial pressures," it also resulted in a "rift of schedules." Wasser notes, "You're not going into an office, a writer's room, a set every day. So those kind of pressures become difficult. And your dynamic changes. Your family dynamic." The simplest household errand can throw everything into pure chaos. "The person who's taking the kids to school could be different. And if it's not different, why isn't the person who is not working… why can't he get in the car and drive them to school? So, I saw a lot of that," she admits.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – OCTOBER 08: Divorce Attorney Laura Wasser attends a book party in her honor on October 8, 2013 in West Hollywood, California.
But it's Hollywood and Wasser has seen it all, so she wasn't fazed by the Great Breakup of 2023 as a family law attorney. "I think sometimes the stars align a certain way, and it may have nothing to do with anything, and it just is a coincidence," she says. The one thing she always hopes for is a peaceful mediation and divorce, Wasser doesn't want to get anywhere near a split fought through tabloid headlines. She leaves it up to the celebrities and "their PR people" to handle the news. But she does have a warning for any star who files in LA County: TMZ and RadarOnline are always lurking at the courthouse.
"It's never nice to find out that you're getting divorced by seeing it on TMZ or Radar," Wasser advises. "So, definitely let your spouse know before we file. And if you are people who are in the public eye, it may not be a bad idea to come up with a well-crafted social media post or have your PR people do it." Spoken like a true pro who has seen more than one Hollywood divorce go awry.
Before you go, click here to see the longest celebrity divorces that took years to get finalized.
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