The Moment
Penn Badgley is stepping out of character and into something much more vulnerable: real life. In his new essay collection, he reveals that he and his wife, musician and doula Domino Kirke, nearly split after suffering two miscarriages.
According to an excerpt shared from his book, Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, Badgley writes about their second loss together, saying it felt like the cycle would never break and that he and Kirke “neared separation as many do after losses like that.”
He explains that a big part of the strain was how isolated they felt. In his words, we live in a culture that does not really know how to talk about miscarriage or support the people going through it. That silence, he suggests, made a hard situation feel almost unbearable.
Badgley also spoke about the experience on the podcast Totally Booked, where he called pregnancy loss “really common” and “universally painful,” and said we at least need to start by talking about it more.
Timeline-wise, the couple are now parents to son James, born in August 2020, and twin boys, who arrived in September 2025. So this is not a story stuck in heartbreak; it is a story about what their relationship had to survive on the way to the family they have now.
The Take
I will be honest: when a handsome TV star announces a book of essays, I brace for humblebrags and lightly filtered trauma. Instead, Badgley went straight for one of the rawest, least Instagram-friendly topics out there: miscarriage and what it does to a relationship.
What lands hardest is that line about “nearing separation.” People love to imagine that couples who look great on a red carpet somehow skate past the ugliest parts of grief. But this is what miscarriage actually does to many partners: it does not just break your heart, it scrambles how you see each other.
And he is right about the silence. Hollywood will talk about breakups, Ozempic shots, and facelift rumors like they are the weather, but miscarriage is still treated like a deleted scene we are not supposed to mention. The result? Couples feel alone in something that is statistically very common.
There is also something quietly radical about a man being this open about pregnancy loss. So much of the public conversation has centered (rightly) on women’s bodies, but partners often stay in the background, unsure whether they are allowed to speak about their own grief. Here you have a guy saying, This nearly ended my marriage. That is not attention-seeking; that is a reality check.
The cynic in me always asks: is this confessional moment just good promo for a book? Sure, vulnerability sells now. But the details he shares — like the lingering dread he feels at every sonogram after seeing a still baby on that black-and-white screen — do not read like a polished brand pivot. They sound like the stuff people say in support groups, not at press junkets.
Here is the bigger cultural shift I see: we are moving from “stars announce a happy baby bump” to “stars admit they almost did not make it here.” It is less fairy tale, more survival story. And if that makes one couple out there feel less broken or less alone, then honestly, let every celebrity essay collection come with a chapter like this.
Receipts
Because this is heavy and personal, let’s separate what is confirmed from what is more general context.
Confirmed (from Badgley’s own words and reporting on them):
- Penn Badgley writes in his essay collection Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age that he and Domino Kirke experienced two pregnancy losses together and “neared separation” afterward.
- He describes feeling isolated in a culture that “doesn’t talk much about these things or know how to support those going through it.”
- On the podcast Totally Booked, he calls miscarriage “really common” and “universally painful,” and says we at least need to start by talking about it more.
- Badgley, 39, and Kirke, 41, share son James, born in August 2020.
- Kirke gave birth to twin boys in September 2025, after announcing a surprise twin pregnancy on Instagram earlier that year.
- The couple began dating in 2014 and married in a New York courthouse ceremony in February 2017, later celebrating with a larger wedding that June.
Unverified / Not publicly detailed:
- Exactly when the two miscarriages happened and how far along the pregnancies were.
- Who first raised the idea of separation or how close they came to formally splitting.
- Any private medical information beyond what they have chosen to share.
Everything beyond the direct quotes and timeline comes from public reporting about the book and podcast appearance, as well as previously reported details about their relationship and children.
Backstory (For Casual Readers)
If you know Penn Badgley mainly as the guy glaring at you through a bookstore window on You or brooding around the Upper East Side on Gossip Girl, here is the quick refresher. He broke out as Dan Humphrey in the mid-2000s, then resurfaced in a big way playing Joe Goldberg, the charming sociopath at the center of Netflix’s hit thriller.
Offscreen, his life looks very different from his stalker-boy persona. Badgley married Domino Kirke in 2017. She is a musician and a longtime doula, known in wellness circles for supporting women through pregnancy and birth. Together they welcomed son James in 2020, and five years later, twin boys. They keep their kids mostly out of the spotlight, popping up occasionally in candid photos at events like the U.S. Open but not staging influencer-style family rollouts.
What we are seeing now is the couple opening up just enough to explain that their picture of domestic happiness was not a straight line. Between the courthouse wedding and the twins, there was a stretch of real grief and almost-breaking.
What’s Next
In the short term, expect Badgley to keep talking about this — carefully. A book tour plus podcast circuit means more questions about the miscarriages, their near-separation, and how they found their way back to each other. Given how thoughtful he has been so far, it would not be surprising if he uses those interviews to highlight resources for people going through pregnancy loss, not just to rehash his own pain.
The book itself, Crushmore, will likely become part of a growing shelf of celebrity memoirs and essay collections that deal with fertility, miscarriage, and complicated parenthood. That used to be the stuff stars left to anonymous blogs; now it is slowly being pulled into the mainstream, where, frankly, it belongs.
For Badgley and Kirke personally, the “what’s next” may be blissfully ordinary: raising three young boys, juggling his set schedule with her birth work and music, and occasionally dressing up for a fashion show date night. There is no sign they are interested in turning their pain into a full-time brand — and that restraint is part of why this confession lands the way it does.
The bigger question is what the rest of us do with it. Do we treat their story like just another headline, or do we actually talk more openly about miscarriage at our own kitchen tables, therapist offices, and friend group chats?
So I’ll throw it to you: when public figures share something this raw about pregnancy loss, does it make you feel more comfortable talking about it, or would you rather celebrities keep that part of their lives private?
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