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See more photos of Liberty Ross
British model turned actress Liberty Ross—looking better than ever in a sexy photo spread by Norman Jean Roy—speaks for the first time to Vanity Faircontributing editor Evgenia Peretz in the December issue__ __about her husband director Rupert Sanders’s affair with her Snow White and the Huntsmanco-star Kristen Stewart. “It was horrible,” she tells Peretz. “It was really the worst, really the worst.”
“I have no words to describe what we went through,” Ross says. “But I think, for me, something always has to completely die for there to be a rebirth. And, for me, I feel like I’m going through a rebirth.”
Ross tells Peretz that Sanders told her about the affair with Stewart 20 hours before the paparazzi photos showing Sanders and Stewart kissing and hugging on the side of the road in Los Angeles appeared in Us Weeklyand then went viral online.
“It was fucking crazy,” Ross’s brother Atticus, an Academy Award–winning composer and a close friend of Sanders’s, tells Peretz. “To some extent at that moment, Rupert was in denial, and Liberty didn’t know what was going to happen.... I’m texting people because I know this is going to be huge. I knew this had all the makings of what our world has become. This is going to be fucking big, and Liberty needs to be protected. It was about it not destroying [Liberty]. I don’t think people understand what being in the eye of that storm is like.” Atticus called Jimmy Iovine, co-founder of Interscope Records (with whom Ross has recently been romantically linked in the press), who provided Ross with a P.R. woman experienced in handling media circuses.
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A friend of Atticus’s offered Ross and her two children her home up the coast as a haven from the paparazzi. “I was able to be there completely secluded,” recalls Ross. “I just visualized [being] this sort of Masai warrior. I was just going to stand very still and very strong, and just let it all roll past me. I tried to keep as far away from it as I could and to understand that this is my family and it’s the most precious thing to me.”
Ross tells Peretz about the early days of her relationship with Sanders in London (they started dating when Ross was 18), when her modeling career was taking off: “We used to joke and call Rupert ‘the Hand,’ because he was always chopped off in all the pictures we did together.”
When Ross was pregnant with their first child, she and Sanders moved to Los Angeles to focus on his career. “I really felt like I wanted him to have his time to shine,” she tells Peretz. But she found herself more alienated by Los Angeles than she had expected. “I went from really the high end of it all, and then I’m living on a hilltop in Hollywood Hills, breast-feeding.”
When Sanders landed *Snow White and the Huntsman,*Ross tells Peretz, “it was all we’d come here for, and we’d done it. We were driving around town and seeing these billboards of his movie. We were so excited, like, ‘Wow, how did we do that?’ I was so proud of him, what he’d done—what we’ddone. We were a team, and the movie was made out of love.”
After the cheating scandal, Sanders issued a public apology and wanted to reconcile, but Ross realized the marriage was over. “I’m not a quitter,” she tells Peretz. “I’ve done everything I could to be the perfect wife and mother and really support my husband. But I just didn’t have any more to give, you know?”
Stunned as she’d been by the affair, Ross tells Peretz, in retrospect, she now sees that something had already been off with her marriage, and that the pursuit of success and fame had corrupted their relationship: “I knew that I wasn’t feeling 100 percent right. I found myself on a roller coaster, like, I’m going to keep things moving, keep things going. I’m going to keep up this amazing [façade], everyone looking at me and Rupert, thinking, Oh, wow, you guys have it all…. Really, I had times when I felt very lonely, very disconnected from Rupert. We’d lost our real connection.”
In spite of everything, Ross tells Peretz, she forgives Sanders: “We were together for 16 years, and that in itself is really beautiful. And we’ve created two exceptional lives together.”
