Jennie Garth hit rock bottom after splitting from husband Dave Abrams in August 2017.
The Beverly Hills, 90210 star, 54, reveals in her new memoir, I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention that the breakup of her marriage caused her to fall into “old patterns” of drinking and depression.
One night, her eldest daughter Luka, now 28, found her cutting herself with a piece of broken glass from a framed photo of her and Abrams.
“I was in so much pain that I was destroying a framed photo of me and Dave in my room,” Garth wrote.
“I was removing broken glass from a picture frame and trying to cut myself with the jagged pieces. It was definitely insane,” she added. “It was almost an unconscious act and a kind of punishment.”
Garth, who rose to fame as ’90s TV phenomenon Kelly Taylor, married Abrams, who is nine years her junior, in an intimate ceremony at a California ranch in 2015. But their relationship was torn apart after Garth suffered four miscarriages and underwent grueling IVF treatment.
“Dave said I had to get out of there, so I did,” she wrote.
On a dark night, I found Luca cutting himself and helped him pick up the pieces.
“She took the glass from me and cleaned it up for me. I curled up in bed and covered myself with a blanket of shame. When I woke up the next morning, my self-loathing was at an all-time high. I was so selfish and complacent, and now I was terrified that I had irreparably damaged my relationship with my daughter,” she wrote. “I was hurting my daughter by showing her that way. It was one of my lifelong regrets. She said, ‘Mom, you can’t go on like this. We need you.'”
Luca is one of Garth’s three daughters with her second husband, actor Peter Facinelli, from whom Garth sought a devastating divorce in 2012. Her first marriage was short-lived. She married musician Daniel B. Clark in 1994 at the age of 22. They divorced two years later.
She and Abrams finally reunited in 2019 after spending several days together at a retreat in Joshua Tree, where Abrams reportedly told her, “You’re mine.” They’re still together, but she reveals in her book that she kept the manila envelope containing the divorce papers in her truck for “quite a few years.”
“I think that represents some deep freedom for him. He has a choice: be together or break up. He can sign those papers whenever he wants. We all have free will,” she wrote.
The actress came into the spotlight at a young age. As a teenage pageant contestant in her home state of Illinois, she was discovered by a showbiz agent named Randy James. By the age of 17, she was living alone in Los Angeles.
At 18, she was diagnosed with depression and started taking Prozac. “For a long time, I thought that needing help, or medication, made me inferior. As a young woman who seemed to be living the dream, I felt shamed for being on such medication,” she wrote about taking antidepressants.
“Years of trying different medications left me feeling weak and carrying the burden of some kind of hurt. I tried every medication, sought balance, and fought the belief that I didn’t have to. What I know now is that my real strength was in not giving up on myself.”
She also suffered from an eating disorder and dysmorphic disorder. “It wasn’t until I came to Hollywood that I really started to feel the weight of attention, where looks are currency,” she writes. “It was always something about restricting diets, binge eating, purging, or even using diet pills to suppress appetite. It was like good old Kelly Taylor.”
Her personal struggles led her to explore Buddhism and meditation. She currently hosts the self-help and empowerment podcast “I Choose Me.” Both this book and the new book are named after the famous moment on “90210” when her characters choose themselves over their dueling lovers: Dylan McKay, played by Luke Perry, and Brandon Walsh, played by Jason Priestley.
In real life, Garth considers Perry one of his first true loves. It was such a shock to lose him. In February 2019, Perry’s longtime manager Steve Himber called and told him that Perry had suffered a sudden and unexpected stroke.
“I felt an immediate urge to go to him,” she wrote. She was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank, but no visitors were allowed.
A few days later, Himber called to tell her that Perry had died. He was only 52 years old.
Gabrielle Carteris, who played Andrea Zuckerman on 90210, held a memorial service at her home, attended by Perry’s children Sophie and Jack and his wife Minnie.
“She held me so tightly. Words were unnecessary between two once young women who loved the same man in very different ways,” Garth wrote of their shared grief.
Her best friend, Tori Spelling, “was the only person who really knew my true feelings for Luke,” Garth writes. “It broke her heart, but she knew I was hurting too. My complex emotions made it difficult for me to know where I stood in my grief. I don’t think anyone, including me, really understood our relationship. It was so painful that I just put it in a box and buried it deep inside my heart. I’ve never opened it, and I never plan on opening it.”
The cast of “90210” reunited for a short six-episode show in August 2019. Garth and Shannen Doherty, who had a controversial friendship, appeared to be “somewhat distant and distracted during filming,” and it was only later that Garth learned that her co-star’s cancer had returned.
Mr. Doherty passed away in July 2024 at the age of 53.
“I had a very dark feeling in the pit of my stomach after hearing so many ignorant public comments that she and I were never friends,” Garth wrote. “It wasn’t true. It stuck with me, as if my feelings and sense of loss were being denied or felt wrong in some way. I knew about our relationship, and I knew the truth. We had moved on from our minor disagreements in our youth and forged new, mature friendships as adults… I miss her, and always will.”
Decades after the show ended, she still feels a special bond with all of her ‘90210’ co-stars
“We’ve all been through so much together, on and off set. The show itself may have ended sooner than we had hoped, but the bond between us remained,” she wrote. “Shared history, laughter, conflict, and triumph were woven together over time to create something unbreakable. We may not have realized it at the time, but these complex, layered, and sometimes difficult friendships would last a lifetime.”
