Hollywood actress and model Emily Ratajkowski has candidly revealed how she consciously reinvented herself as a 'sexual but scary' villain figure in the aftermath of her 2022 divorce — a transformation she has described as her 'villain origin story.'

The Split That Changed Everything

Ratajkowski separated from film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, the father of her now five-year-old son Sylvester, in 2022 following four years of marriage. In a personal essay published in The Cut, she detailed the raw emotional state she was in just days after the split and the deliberate persona she chose to build in its wake.

What She Wrote in The Cut

In the essay, Ratajkowski described her post-divorce mindset in strikingly unfiltered terms. She wrote that she wanted to dismantle the identity she had carefully cultivated before motherhood and replace it with something altogether different. 'I decided to f*** my way into a new kind of woman,' she wrote, adding that just a week after her separation she found herself in Brooklyn, 'a shell-shocked and sleepless version of myself,' relying on friends to arrange introductions to available men as a form of distraction.

One such introduction was to a DJ — described as low-stakes because he lived locally, had been sober for over 10 years, and was a 'friend of a friend of a friend.' Ratajkowski clarified she did not pursue anything beyond friendship with him, but said the experience helped trigger a liberating new chapter.

The 'Villain' Persona She Embraced

The character she said she embodied during this period of 'compulsive dating' was, in her own words, a villain — invoking comic-book archetypes like Poison Ivy and 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,' she wrote.

Notably, Ratajkowski framed the experience not as recklessness but as self-reclamation — a way of refusing the role of the pitiable divorcée.

Lessons From the Experience

Ratajkowski, who was barely into her 30s when the marriage ended, reflected on what the period taught her. 'I'd learned the hard way that being alone was better than most partnerships,' she said. She also described how living in New York City as a single mother felt, in her framing, 'sexier and bohemian' — though she acknowledged she may have been telling herself a comforting story. Her essay positions the divorce not as a collapse but as an accelerated education in self-sufficiency that many women, she observed, only encounter in their mid-40s.