Entertainment

Liberty Ross Speaks Out On KStew

by Alanna Bennett

It feels like forever ago that news broke about Kristen Stewart's affair with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. There were tears and public apologies and we got Robert Pattinson eating break-up ice cream on The Daily Show out of it. The behind-the-scenes of it all was oh too real, though, especially for Sanders' wife Liberty Ross, who is now talking about what that period of time was like for her as the spurned wife.

“It was horrible,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair's Evgenia Peretz. "It was really the worst, really the worst.”

Her brother, Atticus Ross — composer for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and a friend of Sanders' — also had a bit to say about the ordeal:

It was fucking crazy. To some extent at that moment, Rupert was in denial, and Liberty didn’t know what was going to happen.... I’m texting people because I know this is going to be huge. I knew this had all the makings of what our world has become. This is going to be fucking big, and Liberty needs to be protected. It was about it not destroying [Liberty]. I don’t think people understand what being in the eye of that storm is like.

Liberty was in a particularly interesting place when this was all going down: Not only had her husband cheated with his leading lady (one of the most famous young people out there), who in turn happened to be in a relationship that was very beloved by the tween set, but Liberty was also in Snow White and the Hunstman with Stewart — as Stewart's mother.

“[Snow White] was all we’d come here for, and we’d done it," Ross recalled. "We were driving around town and seeing these billboards of his movie. We were so excited, like, ‘Wow, how did we do that?’ I was so proud of him, what he’d done — what we’d done. We were a team, and the movie was made out of love.” So there's no doubt that the summer before last was a devastating one for the Ross/Sanders family.

As for her tactic when all the metaphorical crap hit the fan?

I just visualized [being] this sort of Masai warrior. I was just going to stand very still and very strong, and just let it all roll past me. I tried to keep as far away from it as I could and to understand that this is my family and it’s the most precious thing to me.

She and Sanders called it quits after the incident (to the collective cheers of all those watching from home), and she calls the period following the rough times a "rebirth." And hey, there's no debate over who came out looking better when that marriage ended.

You can read the rest of Ross' interview over at Vanity Fair.