Valerie Bertinelli, 62, is taking the next step toward the end of her marriage to Tom Vitale. The actress filed for divorce from her husband of 10 years on May 12, six months after they separated, court documents obtained by HollywoodLife show. The filing was done in Los Angeles Superior Court and cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for the split. The documents also show that Valerie and Tom, who is a financial planner, have a premarital agreement that they will follow in the divorce.
The divorce filing comes after the former lovebirds became legally separated in Nov. 2021. Valerie reportedly asked for neither of them to get spousal support, during the filing for the separation, and the prenup showed that they agreed to split all assets.
Before Valerie and Tom decided to go their separate ways, they got hitched in 2011 after dating for many years. They were first introduced by Valerie’s brother Patrick and hit it off. The One Day at a Time star opened up about her feelings about Tom shortly after their wedding, in an interview with People.
“I could have spent the rest of my life with Tom and not be married, but I wanted to call him ‘my husband’,” she told the outlet. “I really wanted to share how I feel about Tom with the people I love.”
Valerie married Tom after she was previously married to Eddie Van Halen, with whom she had son Wolf, 31, from 1981 until 2007. After the musician’s death from lung cancer at the age of 65 in 2020, she told the story of how she told him goodbye, in her memoir, Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, which was released in Jan. 2022.
“‘I love you’ are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me, and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing,” she wrote in the book. She also wrote that she offered him words of comfort in his final days that referred to how their marriage didn’t work out in this lifetime. “Maybe next time. Maybe next time, we’ll get it right,” she said to him.