Jamie Lynn Sigler is reflecting on the darker chapters of her first marriage to AJ Discala and how she has come to terms with how it all ended.
“I desperately needed him at that time, so I can’t be like, “What were you thinking?” I know what I needed, and he provided a lot of that for me,” Sigler, 44, exclusively revealed in Us Weekly’s latest cover story.
“As the relationship evolved, can I look back and see a young girl who was possibly being taken advantage of? Yes, but I also don’t think that he really thought that that was happening either,” Sigler, 44, exclusively revealed in Us Weekly’s latest cover story. “I think we were both caught up in a ride, and I think our relationship was really toxic, and I think that it was really complicated, and it started off really messy.”
Sigler married her former manager Discala, 55, in 2003. They separated in 2005.
Sigler married her former manager Discala, 55, in 2003 and they divorced two years later.
“He was in a relationship and tied to his family and then I got diagnosed with MS right in the beginning of it,” the actress recalled to Us. “It was almost like all of these things I had to make worth [it] … like, this relationship had to work.”
As Sigler dealt with her multiple sclerosis diagnosis amid her marital woes, she opened up in her new memoir, And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope (out on May 5) about fantasizing about her own death during her marriage to DiScala. And how difficult it was to relive that.
“I don’t think I’d relived that moment until I wrote it,” she told Us. “It was like as I was getting towards it, it’s almost like the memory resurfaced fully, and it wasn’t even really about suicide. It was like a cry for help. I needed someone to know how much pain I was in. I needed somebody to know how terrified I was, how overwhelmed I was, and he was going through his own thing, and he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t share it with anybody else. It was just a desperate cry for help, and I was terrified.”
Sigler continued, “I knew that I didn’t want to be with him, but I was terrified to be without him. Who would protect me? I had no idea about my finances. I had no idea about anything. Could there have been things that he said back then to make me feel that I would never survive without him, sure, but I also think that I felt that whether he had said that or not, because I was so dependent on him for my survival and to protect me.”
Discala had been Sigler’s closest confidante amid her MS battle.
“He was the only person that could protect me. If I didn’t have him, I would be free-falling,” she recalled. “It was very complicated and very scary, and I think that’s what led to that incredibly painful and dark moment for me of just feeling, like, ‘I can’t feel this much pain anymore.’”
Throughout the earlier years of her MS journey, Sigler attempted to hide her health condition from the public. She also kept her marriage struggles and past eating disorder quiet.
“All these secrets had piled up on top that I was just suffocated and just literally just trying to survive every day,” she told Us. “I was constantly in fight or flight. I was constantly in survival mode, and that kind of became my new normal for the next almost decade after that.”
According to Sigler, she eventually realized that she “was not going to survive” if she and Discala stayed married. And even after writing about discovering that AJ was talking to other women, she reveals to Us how she has reconciled what went down with him.
“Even a marriage at 20 is still a marriage. It’s a very serious thing, and I needed a lot of proof to leave, and so did he,” Sigler told Us. “I needed a lot of things to happen to show me that this has to be over. I was aware [of] when I went through his phone, just knowing something shady was going on. All women feel that way. I wanted to share that not to bash him, but for other women. This is something that happens. It’s something we go through.”
Sigler further revealed that she stayed in the marriage out of fear of being “a failure.”
“I was so embarrassed to feel this cliché of [getting] married young and divorced,” she said. “I felt like I was always letting people down, letting myself down [and] to then get a divorce at 24 was just the icing on the cake. I had to get to the moment where [I understood] that I was not going to survive much longer if I stayed in that marriage, and I think he knew that too.”
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In 2012, she began a new chapter and found love again with second husband Cutter Dykstra, whom she married four years later in 2016. Sigler and Dykstra, 36, share two sons, Beau, 12, and Jack, 8.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
For more from Sigler, pick up the new issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.
