Mandy Moore has forgiven Wilmer Valderrama for claiming he took her virginity
Mandy Moore made her debut on The Howard Stern Show and seemed well equipped to answer all the personal questions thrown her way by the legendary host. Perhaps that’s because a certain ex-boyfriend of hers got into big trouble on the show before.
Stern pressed the This Is Us star about her famous relationships, and Moore was more than willing to play ball. Here’s what she had to say about her string of exes — and current fiancé.
Wilmer Valderrama
In March 2006, the That ’70s Show star boasted to Stern about taking Moore’s virginity. (The pair dated for about two years before splitting in 2002.) “The sex with Mandy was good, but it wasn’t like warm apple pie,” Valderrama claimed on the show.
The only problem? It was a lie.
Moore refuted Valderrama’s statement again, saying “he did not” take her virginity, with both she and Stern noting the actor seemed to have gotten caught up in the moment.
“I dated him when I was 16 and 17, no,” she responded. “I love him and I still love him. And he’s a very good friend, and that’s why I was so shocked by it, because not only was it a fib, but it was so unlike him. It was so uncharacteristic.”
She added: “He’s dated all the ladies … I met him at a photo shoot for some teen magazine, literally, when I was 15.” Moore said she was innocent, having never having even French kissed a boy, saying, “he was like my first true boyfriend.”
That’s why she was so hurt by his comments. “I remember in the moment he tried to explain it away that he did get caught up and maybe insinuated more than actually outright said it, and [I said], ‘No, you outright said it,'” she exclaimed. “I was like, ‘Why would you ever talk about that with anybody and lie about it?'”
Shockingly, the pair are still friends — he has dated her BFF Minka Kelly on and off — and it’s a topic they don’t discuss. “I moved past it now,” she said. “He’s a good guy, he really is.”
Zach Braff
The actress and the Scrubs star split in 2006 after about two years together. Still, Moore admitted she thought they were in it for the long haul. “I did,” she told Stern. “You’re like, ‘This is it, I know who I am, what I want.’ I knew nothing, in reality.” Braff falls into the “friendly exes” category though, and she says they are still in touch.
Andy Roddick
The tennis pro does not fall into the “friendly exes” category — although Moore says she doesn’t have any ill will toward Roddick.
“He broke my heart, Howard,” she admitted. “I was a kid, he was a kid. I started dating him when I was 18. We met in Toronto — I was doing a movie and somehow he and another tennis buddy of his came to visit me on set. I met him that way.”
She was vague on details but said they split because of her broken heart. “It got poured into a record that eventually became an album that came out three to four years after that,” she says, referring to her album Wild Hope. On the song “Ladies Choice,” Moore hinted at a lover being unfaithful with the lyrics, “You said you could be good, but somehow you’re guilty / And you’re not even sorry.”
Although people assumed it was about Braff, Moore hinted at the time it was about a different relationship.
Moore generically explained to Stern that men “get a wandering eye. It’s human nature, part of the human condition. You’re on to the next! It’s OK, wasn’t meant to be.”
Although she hasn’t talked to Roddick “in years,” she isn’t losing sleep about the romance from over a decade ago. “He’s moved on,” she said. (Roddick is married to Brooklyn Decker.) “He’s like married with kids and he seems super happy, and I’m happy for him. … We were kids; I don’t care. Ten years ago, I would have had an axe to grind, but now I’m like whatever.”
Ryan Adams
Moore called the divorce with Adams “devastating” but said it wasn’t her ex-husband who had a wandering eye. “We’re just different; we were not meant to be,” she said. “It was a very lonely life. Someone who’s obsessed with themselves and obsessed with their work and wasn’t able to be a partner or husband. The anger subsided for me now. I have so much distance from it now. I have a different perspective.”
The singer-songwriter and Moore were married from 2009 to 2015, but she isn’t down on marriage.
“It didn’t sour my idea of romance or marriage or monogamy,” she said. “I just chose the wrong person. … We couldn’t be more different, but that’s what was attractive … we should have dated.”
When Stern joked that Moore should have taken a page from her past and dated for only about two years, Moore quipped, “Maybe less!”
It’s a good thing Moore is open to love again — because she is engaged to Taylor Goldsmith. “Life is good. I feel very lucky,” she said.
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
