Gisele Bundchen was just ‘surviving’ before Tom Brady split: ‘Now I’m living’

In an upcoming interview with Lee Cowan for CBS News Sunday Morning, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, 43, opens up with new revelations about her divorce from former NFL superstar Tom Brady, 46. 

“I’m in a different place in my life. I’m able to choose more of what I want,” Bundchen said from her Costa Rica home, according to a preview of the interview on Paramount. 

“I think before I was more surviving, and now I’m living, which is different.”

She’s been pulling back from doing runway shows, and she revealed that before, her public persona was a facade. Her life was full of stress to the point where she even fantasized about “jumping” out of a window, she said. 

“You know, I was in tunnels. I couldn’t breathe. And then I started being in studios, and I felt like suffocated. I lived on the ninth floor, and I had to go up the stairs because I was afraid I would be stuck on the elevator, and I’d be hyperventilating … You know when you can’t breathe even when the windows are open, you feel like, I don’t want to live like this, you know what I mean?”

“Did you really think about jumping?” Cowan asked. 

“Yeah. For, like, a second, because you’re like, I can’t …” Bundchen replied. 

Bundchen and Brady married in 2009 and divorced in 2022 after 13 years of marriage and 16 years together total. They share Benjamin Rein, 13, and Vivian Lake, 10. 

After their split, Brady has been linked with supermodel Irina Shayk, 37, who shares a son with Bradley Cooper. 

TMZ has run conflicting reports that Bundchen is “not happy at all” with Brady’s relationship with Shayk, and alternately that she’s not bothered and finds it “helpful” that he’s moved on. 

Reflecting on her life, Bundchen says she wouldn’t change anything, including her relationship with the famous quarterback, even though she has said that she wanted their marriage to work.

“I think it’s not what I dreamed of and what I hoped for. My parents have been married for 50 years, and I really wanted that to happen,” she said. 

“But I think you have to accept you know sometimes that the way you are in your 20s, it’s sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart … I mean, he’s the father of my kids, so I always wish him the best, and I’m so grateful that he gave me wonderful children.”

The interview for “CBS New Sunday Morning” will air on Sunday, Sept. 24 on CBS, and also stream on Paramount+.