The Moment
Tori Spelling is out here calling her divorce from Dean McDermott “one of the easiest divorces in Hollywood,” and honestly, who had that on their 2025 bingo card?
Just weeks after finalizing their split, the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star is publicly praising her co-parenting dynamic with McDermott. At a recent holiday concert event in Los Angeles, she said she’s “so grateful” that their relationship post-divorce is “super easy and loving” instead of the disaster everyone seemed to expect.
Tori Spelling reflects on ‘easy and loving’ co-parenting relationship with ex-husband Dean McDermott #divorce https://t.co/VjPirq960H pic.twitter.com/NvGr5MGATL
— Adalyn Justin (@AdalynJust69656) December 7, 2025
The exes, who were married for 17 years, share five kids: Liam, 18, Stella, 17, Hattie, 14, Finn, 13, and Beau, 8. According to Spelling, they still do family dinners and “everything together” for the sake of the kids.
This is all happening against the backdrop of a finalized divorce that reportedly includes a seven-figure tax debt hanging over them, plus a very public rough patch where Spelling was photographed crying, staying in a motel, and even living in an RV with the children for a time. And yet now, she’s framing the whole thing as… peaceful?
Welcome to 2025, where the headline is: Tori and Dean broke up, but the family group chat lives on.
The Take
I’ll say it: this might be the first time a Hollywood divorce sounds more like a blended-family sitcom reboot than a courtroom drama.
Spelling describes their split as “super easy and loving,” insists they “love and care about each other so much,” and says the horror stories she’d heard about divorce didn’t come true. That’s a sharp contrast with the imagery we’ve been fed for the last few years: tabloid shots of her in tears, kids in tow, bouncing between temporary housing, and endless whispers about money trouble.
Both things can be true: the breakup era can feel chaotic from the outside, and the legal divorce process itself can still end up being surprisingly civil. But let’s not pretend this was a breezy walk in the park. When you’ve got five kids, 17 years of marriage, and a seven-figure tax debt, “super easy” feels like a stretch, or at least a very generous reframing.
What I actually think we’re seeing here is something more interesting: a Gen X mom very publicly choosing the narrative of “We are still a family” over “He’s my ex.” She even admitted on her podcast that she almost never calls him “Dean” and still reflexively goes to “babe” after 20 years. That’s not a clean emotional break; that’s the messy middle where the romance is over, but the family ties are forever.
For a lot of divorced parents reading this, the idea of family dinners with your ex probably sounds like a fairy tale or a nightmare, depending on the day. But there’s no question the kids benefit when the adults can be in the same room without tension. Spelling is leaning hard into that message: we’re good, the kids are good, everyone relax.
If the usual Hollywood divorce is a demolition, Spelling is trying to sell us on a renovation: new floor plan, same house, kids still know where the kitchen is.
Receipts
Here’s what’s actually on the record, separated from the spin.
Confirmed:
- Spelling and McDermott, married for about 17 years, publicly announced their separation in June 2023.
- She filed for divorce roughly nine months later.
- Their divorce was finalized recently, with legal documents reflecting a remaining tax debt reportedly in the seven-figure range.
- They share five children: Liam (18), Stella (17), Hattie (14), Finn (13), and Beau (8).
- At a holiday concert event in Los Angeles, Spelling said she was “so grateful” for their “super easy and loving” divorce and friendly co-parenting relationship.
- She stated they still do “family dinners” and “everything together,” emphasizing it’s “really good for the kids.”
- On her misSPELLING podcast last month, she called it “one of the easiest divorces in Hollywood” and doubled down: “Take Hollywood out. This is one of the easiest divorces.”
- On a previous podcast episode in March, she said she’d called McDermott “babe” for 20 years and found it hard to stop, noting she’d never really called him “Dean.”
- McDermott has been romantically linked to Lily Calo since the split; Spelling has been linked to Ryan Cramer.
Unverified / Framed by Tori:
- Spelling says she “always read horror stories” and that “everyone predicted” their divorce would be messy. Those predictions are her characterization, not documented facts.
- Descriptions of the breakup as “intense” are based on public sightings and photos (crying outside, temporary motel and RV stays) that don’t show the full private context.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you lost track of Tori and Dean somewhere around the height of their reality TV days, here’s the shortcut. Tori Spelling, best known as Donna on Beverly Hills, 90210 and daughter of TV mogul Aaron Spelling, married Canadian actor Dean McDermott in the mid-2000s. They built a mini media empire on being a couple-multiple reality shows, books, public ups and downs, and very public money struggles.
Over 17 years, they had five kids and survived more than a few scandals and breakup rumors. In 2023, after a particularly rocky period that included health scares, housing drama, and obvious marital strain, they finally announced their separation. She filed for divorce months later, and the case wrapped recently, with reports of serious tax debt still attached to their names.
Now, instead of sniping in the press, Spelling is selling a united front: exes, yes, but still a family unit.
What’s Next
Spelling has found a new lane with her misSPELLING podcast, and she clearly isn’t shy about processing her personal life in front of a microphone. Expect more detail-maybe even some gentle revisionist history-about how this “easy” divorce really went down, especially as she leans into a single-mom-but-still-a-team storyline.
On the practical side, that lingering seven-figure tax debt is not going to pay itself. How they jointly or separately tackle that will likely show up in future legal filings or public comments, and it may shape what kinds of projects each of them takes on next.
The co-parenting narrative will also be one to watch. Family dinners and holiday concerts together sound great now; the real test comes when new partners get more serious, schedules clash, and the kids scatter into adulthood. It’s one thing to say, “We’re still family” at the start of the post-divorce honeymoon phase; it’s another to maintain it five years in.
Still, for anyone who remembers the early reality show chaos, this version of Tori and Dean-divorced but planning group dinners-feels almost radical.
Sources (human-readable): recent celebrity news report on the finalized divorce and co-parenting comments (Dec. 7, 2025); on-record red-carpet interview at a Los Angeles holiday concert event (Dec. 6, 2025); misSPELLING podcast episodes discussing the divorce and name habits (March and November 2025).
Your turn: Would you actually want regular “family dinners” with an ex, or does that only work in very rare, very Hollywood-style breakups?
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