'Why I had to leave Rod,' by Rachel
Rod Stewart's ex-wife Rachel Hunter has told of the agony behind her decision to leave her rock star husband because she felt stifled by their eight-year marriage.
The New Zealand-born model said she'd become so cosseted by her lavish lifestyle that she didn't have the confidence to do things on her own and felt like she had 'lost her identity'.
'By the time I was 29 I'd spent eight years with someone else's group of friends. I had no idea what it was like to be a woman with mates of her own to socialise with,' Hunter tells The Mirror.
'I'd become so cosseted I was too scared to do anything for myself. Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity. I was just nothing.'
The couple met in a Los Angeles nightclub in 1991. Within three weeks Stewart had proposed to Hunter and three months later they were married. Eighteen months after the ceremony their daughter Renee was born followed by son Liam two years later.
But Hunter began to feel increasingly stifled by her situation, where everything, even visits to friends, had to be planned by staff and organised in advance.
After communication between the couple had broken down, in December 1998, Hunter eventually plucked up the courage to leave Stewart. 'He was distraught,' she says. ' I'll take to the grave the pain I caused Rod. I hurt the one person I loved and cared about and that's a hard thing to live with on a daily basis.'
Two years on, Hunter says she has no regrets and says she remains good friends with Stewart, whom she describes as 'a good man'. 'We speak to each other all the time, and he'll pop round for a cup of tea,' she says.
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