An old line from Emily Ratajkowski’s June 12 essay for The Cut is circulating again on X this weekend, paired with a photo of the model in a bikini holding her son.
“Having a child with the wrong man was the fastest way to ruin your life as a woman,”
Ratajkowski wrote. The Cut published the essay two months ago; the line is what people are repeating today.
Ratajkowski, 35, said the fear started in childhood.
“The term itself could be lodged as an insult,”
she wrote.
“All baggage and no security.”
The piece, titled
“Sex As a Single Mom,”
is the fullest public account she has given of the years between her marriage’s collapse and her current relationship with French director Romain Gavras, whom she hard-launched in February 2026.
She married film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard in February 2018 after a few weeks of dating, People reports. Their son, Sylvester Apollo Bear, arrived March 8, 2021. Six months after the birth, the couple stopped having sex. Less than a year later, they separated. Ratajkowski filed for divorce in Manhattan Supreme Court in September 2022. The judgment was entered July 22, 2025, making the pair legally single nearly three years after she filed, according to court records cited by The Daily Mail.
The essay is clear about who ended it.
“I wasn’t left; I left,”
she wrote.
“I knew then that being able to leave, to say ‘no,’ was the only real superpower I’d gained through divorce.”
After the separation she started dating within a week. She described it as “compulsively” trying to figure out what kind of woman she wanted to be. The character she embodied, she wrote, was a villain: “Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary. And she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis.” The piece quotes a man she calls “Elder Millennial” telling her,
“Single moms, man! Y’all are ah-mazing. Women are ah-mazing.”
She set two rules for herself that she says she never broke.
“Never miss bedtime and basically no sleepovers.”
After nights out she would dress and leave before her son woke at 6 a.m. for her.
She also wrote that many men were turned on by motherhood, the opposite of what she had feared as a child. A woman at a party told her men don’t care about the kid thing.
“I soon came to find out that it was quite the opposite of ‘They don’t care.’ In fact, they liked it,”
she wrote.
“There were many men who experienced the loneliness that comes with years of selfishness. They were particularly attracted to the idea that being a parent meant self-sacrifice was a given in my life.”
Before the marriage she had wanted to be
“precious,”
she wrote — the kind of woman who would not have a one-night stand. After the divorce, she decided to destroy that version of herself.
“I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be,”
she wrote,
“and replace her with the whore.”
US Magazine quoted the passage the day the essay published.
The piece drew sharp responses. Critics called it tone-deaf, according to Fox News, and some single mothers said the framing felt out of touch with the daily financial and logistical grind most of them live. Other readers praised the piece as the rare first-person essay from a younger woman about leaving a marriage on her own terms.
Bear-McClard, 44, is the co-founder of Elara Pictures, the production company behind Safdie Brothers films including Good Time and Heaven Knows What. Reports at the time of the split described alleged infidelity. In early 2023, Variety published accusations of sexual misconduct from multiple women. He has not publicly addressed those claims in detail.
Ratajkowski has said the cost of leaving was high.
“Becoming a single mother changed the way people looked at me, exactly as I’d feared it would,”
she wrote.
“But it also allowed me to finally see myself.”
Sylvester is five. The photo circulating this weekend shows Ratajkowski carrying him in matching swimwear, the old line about the wrong man paired with the moment she said she stopped fearing being a single mother. For Hypefresh’s related reporting on sexual-misconduct allegations against public figures, see our coverage of Jared Leto accused of sexual misconduct by four women and the Kanye West sexual-assault lawsuit settlement with his former assistant Lauren Pisciotta. For additional sexual-misconduct cluster coverage, see our reporting on the sexual assault lawsuit against DJ Akademiks.
