Jennie Garth Admits 'Forgiving' Ex-Husband Peter Facinelli for Their Divorce Was the 'Most Freeing Thing in the World'

Jennie Garth found forgiveness in the depths of her divorce.

In a Friday, April 10, interview, the actress revealed that only when she showed ex-husband Peter Facinelli grace for their divorce did she find true freedom.

Garth, 54, was initially hurting when the actor, 52, asked her to separate after 17 years together.

"I spent a good amount of years being angry, hurt, sad, just tormented by it, and it eked out into all aspects of my life," she recalled. "And I noticed my light really dimming. I noticed I wasn't putting off good vibes. And I could see it in the mirror. I could look at the negative impact that that kind of grief and anger was having on me."

After wallowing for some time, she found the strength and courage to persevere.

"I don't know, there was a weird switch where one day I just said, 'I don't want to carry this anymore. I have done this for long enough,” she expressed. “It's impacting my relationships with other people. It's impacting how I feel about myself. I've got to let it go. I've got to forgive him.' And then I did. And it was the most freeing thing in the world. I'm sure it's hard to hear as a woman going through [divorce], or really in the belly of the beast to hear me say it's like a switch that you have to flip, but it is."

To Garth, it was less about directly addressing Facinelli and more so about healing her relationship with herself.

"It has nothing to do with the other person. It has everything to do with you preserving yourself, your life and wanting to move forward and wanting to be happy,” she explained. “Because you can never be happy when you're holding onto that fear, that attachment to the anger and the resentment. It's just self-sabotage."

The 90210 alum — who is now married to Dave Abrams — maintains an amicable co-parenting relationship with Facinelli for the sake of their three kids.

"I didn't see the happy ending coming, honestly," she admitted. "It's weird. My whole life has been things just coming at me: fame, responsibilities, children, marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce. I've just been swimming and trying to keep up and really doing the best I could do without any training. We don't get an instruction for life. We don't know how to do it. We're making it up as we go."

In June 2024, Facinelli confessed that his relationship with Garth did not feel organic and seemed like an “arranged marriage.”

"We came together very fast, very furious, and very quick and I remember thinking, 'Well, let's move in together and see how it goes,' and it just went," he recalled on his ex’s podcast. "Five years went by, and I thought, 'Well, we should get married.' Then we got married and had another kid. It was almost like an arranged marriage in a way and things seemed well. We had disagreements here and there, but I think we were really young."