What We Know About Valerie Bertinelli's Divorce From Tom Vitale

Food Network host Valerie Bertinelli has been in a spotlight for a long time. She first appeared on television at age 15 in the show "One Day at a Time," starred in several other notable shows, and eventually found success as a food personality. She's got her own cooking show, "Valerie's Home Cooking," and has appeared as a judge in several other Food Network competition shows now, too. But her life off-screen is almost just as interesting as her life in front of the cameras.

Her first marriage was to recently deceased rockstar Eddie Van Halen, with whom she had son Wolfgang Van Halen, who is also a musician. More recently, she was married to Tom Vitale. But the couple made headlines a few months ago when, after 10 years of marriage, they announced they were separating. At the time, what we knew about Bertinelli's split from Vitale wasn't much, but Bertinelli's most recent actions seem to clarify that the separation is pretty set in stone.

Though Valerie Bertinelli and Tom Vitale legally separated in November, they weren't officially divorced. However, on Thursday, May 12, Bertinelli filed an "amended petition" to the existing separation agreement, asking for a full divorce due to what she called irreconcilable differences (via People). This won't be too surprising to those familiar with the couple. Even though they didn't file for legal separation until 2021, ET Online notes they had been separated for almost a full year beforehand. Bertinelli talked at length about how they grew apart in her autobiography "Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today," even saying that their marital troubles began nearly half a decade before their initial decision to split (via USA Today). Considering that's about half of the time they were married, it seems like the couple did take several years to try to work through their incompatibilities before deciding to divorce. 

Bertinelli has been through a lot lately. But though some concerned fans on Instagram reached out to the star the day the news broke, Bertinelli responded that she was just having a "very bad day." "Sometimes we have bad days," she added, "and then we get over them, and then there's a good day... So I'm looking forward to the good day."