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Rachel Zoe opened up about the moment she knew her marriage to Rodger Berman was over during an interview earlier this week.
As the 54-year-old Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star explained her decision to walk away from styling, signaling the lack of trust she had in her former assistants, Rachel looked back on the end of her 26-year marriage to Rodger, 57, admitted she should have left the relationship sooner, and confirmed she is “absolutely dating.”
“I was done. I was really done,” Rachel told PEOPLE of her September 2024 split from Rodger on December 31. “I don’t suffer from guilt of not having given it everything I could have. I don’t suffer from that, and I don’t suffer from feeling like it was a failed marriage. Having been married for 26 years, I would say that three-quarters of that was amazing.”
According to Rachel, who filed for divorce in July, just one month after confirming her role on RHOBH season 15, she knew her relationship had become fractured when she began “to question decisions” and realized that she and her then-spouse were on different pages about the results they hoped for.
“I started to feel like this may not be the most advantageous situation for our children,” she said, giving a nod to sons Skyler, 14, and Kaius, 12. “For me for the last 14 years, literally every breath I take is for my kids. So every decision I make, every lens that I look through is through a lens of my children, of what are they going to think? What are they going to say? How will this affect them? I have never felt that people should live together and stay together unhappy.”
“In hindsight,” Rachel admitted, she “100%” should have “left sooner.”
“I think if you ask any woman who has left a situation, they would probably say that they probably should have done it sooner,” she noted. “But it is what it is. At the end of the day, I ultimately did what’s best for the kids. I think that having two parents that love them is more important than having two parents together that maybe shouldn’t be together anymore.”
As she shares her post-split story on RHOBH, Rachel said she hoped “to help as many women as possible.”
“I mean, probably at least 30% of the women in my life are going through a separation or a divorce,” she revealed. “The question I kept getting asked and still get asked is: ‘Why am I so okay coming out of a relationship that really transcended my entire adult life?’ It’s because I’m independent — financially, professionally and socially. I think that there isn’t enough emphasis put on the importance of that.”
“You have to have your own things to wake up for every day,” she continued. “I think because of that, when I made the decision to leave my marriage, it was like, okay, next. No matter what life throws at you, you have to be able to stand up on your own. You just have to.”
Speaking of dating, Rachel said she’s having “fun.”
“To be honest, that wasn’t hard for me to get into. It really wasn’t,” she shared, adding that this era in her life is about “freedom.”
“Anyone who comes into my life or our lives is only going to be someone that adds value in terms of making me laugh, making me smile and really just making sense,” she stated. “It’ll have to feel organic and natural to who I am now.”
During another interview with PEOPLE, Rachel opened up about her past career in styling, which she left 12 years ago after being betrayed by former assistants.
“In full disclosure, I just couldn’t trust assistants,” she said. “The definition of insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. I think after being completely betrayed, for lack of a better term, in various ways, by enough assistants and not being able to trust them with my clients and stuff to represent what I do and how I am with my clients, it just wasn’t worth it anymore.”
Because Rachel’s clients felt like “extended family,” there was “no margin for error.”
“I never wanted to let them down, ever,” she shared. “But if I have five clients going through an award season, I physically cannot be with all five at the same time. You have to be able to entrust that in people that represent your work, and if you can’t do that, the system is broken.”
It also became difficult for Rachel, who spoke publicly about her falling out with Brad Goreski, 48, who was seen alongside her on The Rachel Zoe Project, to juggle her styling with motherhood.
“It was hard to give styling my undivided attention and to get up and jump on a plane every other day, which is really what that life is,” she says. “It’s incessant and unpredictable traveling, with fittings at 2 a.m. You are working for other people, and you are on other people’s schedules, and that’s very hard to do when you have multiple businesses, and you are the CEO and you have a newborn and a toddler.”
“I’ve definitely spent my life trying to be all things to all people,” she continued. “But in the end, it’s not sustainable in the sense that you can’t really be 100% everything to everyone in every area of your life and your business. You just can’t.”
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 15 airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Bravo.
