Emily Ratajkowski turned heads after sharing a striking beach photo in a tiny leopard-print bikini years after her split from ex-husband Sebastian Bear-McClard. The 35-year-old model posed in the strappy two-piece while soaking up the sun, completing the look with a pair of silver hoop earrings.
The couple married from 2018 until their separation in 2022. She filed for divorce later that year, and it was finalized in 2025. The former couple share a five-year-old son, Sylvester, who goes by Sly.
© Kevin Mazur/VF20The beach snapshot, posted to Ratajkowski’s Instagram Stories, comes after she reflected on how dating became part of her personal reinvention following the end of her marriage. In an essay for The Cut, the Gone Girl actress revealed that she threw herself into dating almost immediately after the breakup.
"I decided to f*** my way into a new kind of woman. I wanted to destroy the Madonna, the special girl I’d worked so hard to be before an eight-pound baby had torn my vagina in two, and replace her with the whor*.”
© IG: EmRata"I wish I could say I’d started to date slowly … but the truth is just a week after my split, I found myself in Brooklyn, a shell-shocked and sleepless version of myself. ‘I just need a distraction,’ I’d said, tasking my friends, who had giddily gotten to work by texting every unattached and (relatively) un-embarrassing man they knew.”
Elsewhere in the essay, Ratajkowski reflected on the persona she embraced after her divorce, describing herself as a comic book-style “villain” inspired by characters like Poison Ivy and Catwoman. She explained that this alter ego helped her reclaim her confidence during a difficult chapter of her life.
© Raymond Hall"The character I’d learned to embody after my divorce, in my period of compulsively dating, was a villain: Poison Ivy. Catwoman. Sexual but scary, and she drank gin martinis. Many, many gin martinis. She was not tragic. Nothing close to a victim. No one needed to feel sorry for her. In fact, they should all be jealous.”
The model also shared that the experience ultimately changed her outlook on relationships and independence. Looking back, she said she realized being on her own was “better than most partnerships,” even if it took time to reach that conclusion.
© IG: Emily Ratajkowski"I’d seen too much, discovered what many women do only when they get divorced in their mid-40s. I’d lived through the failure of a unit, yet I was barely into my 30s. Being a New Yorker made being a single mom feel sexier and bohemian, or at least that’s what I told myself.”
“I wasn’t driving a minivan to the grocery store; I was carrying my stroller up stairwells and yelling at loud neighbors through the apartment wall while still wearing my miniskirt and eyeliner from the night before. Erin Brockovich of Canal Street.”
© @emrata
