Jamie-Lynn Sigler never thought she would “survive” her “toxic” marriage to ex-manager Abraxas “AJ” DiScala.
The actress told Us Weekly on Wednesday that she fantasized about death during her “complicated” and “really messy” romance with her first husband.
When the former couple started dating, DiScala, 55, was “in a relationship and connected to his family, and then[Sigler]was diagnosed with MS,” the “Sopranos” alum recalled.
Because of “all of this,” Sigler felt that “the relationship had to work out” for the struggle to be “worth it.”
The “Entourage” alum was hiding her multiple sclerosis, marital problems and past eating disorder from the world at the time, but all those secrets “combined” and “suffocated” her.
“I was just… literally trying to survive every day,” Sigler told the magazine. “I was always in survival mode. … I knew I didn’t want to be with him, but I was scared of being without him. Who would protect me?”
The host of the podcast “MeSsy” felt he was “too dependent” on Discala and would be in “freefall” without him.
“It was very complicated and very scary. I think that led to an incredibly painful and dark moment for me where I was like, ‘I can’t feel this much pain anymore,'” she said. “I had to reach a moment where I[understood]that I wasn’t going to survive much longer if I stayed in this marriage.”
She added that thoughts of death were not “really even thoughts of suicide,” but rather “cries for help.”
Sigler said, “I needed someone to know how much pain I was in. I needed someone to know how scared I was and how overwhelmed I was. And he was going through his own thing, but he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t share it with anyone else. It was just a desperate cry for help, and I was terrified.”
She felt like her divorce at age 24 was a “failure,” but Sigler and DiScala eventually called it quits.
Mr. DiScala was later convicted of a $300 million stock pump-and-dumping scheme and sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.
Sigler, who talked about their breakup in her memoir “And So It Is,” went on to date restaurateur Scott Sartiano, followed by actor Jerry Ferrara and NFL player Mark Sanchez.
In 2012, she started dating her current husband, Cutter Dykstra.
The couple married in January 2016 and have two sons, Beau, 12, and Jack, 8.
The family of four lives in Austin, Texas, but Sigler moved there in 2021 to have more privacy to further his battle with MS.
