Liberty at last: Liberty Ross on moving on and falling in love again after THAT affair

Alongside Kate Moss, Liberty Ross was one of London’s top models of the Noughties, then she gave it all up to move to LA with her film director husband. But following the furore surrounding his affair with Kristen Stewart two years ago, she hid herself away to heal. Now she’s re-emerging — as a designer, a model and a woman in love again. Helena de Bertodano meets her at home in Bel Air
Helena de Bertodano15 September 2014

Two summers ago British model Liberty Ross’ world fell apart. Pictures were published of her film director husband Rupert Sanders caught on a secret tryst with actress Kristen Stewart. Their divorce was finalised a few weeks ago, and this month Ross launches herself as a designer with a capsule jeans collection for LA’s Genetic Denim.

‘I think God signed me up for a cleanse two years ago, but forgot to tell me about it,’ jokes Ross, 35, sitting by the pool at the beautiful ranch home she is renting, deep in a secluded canyon in Bel Air, Los Angeles. Friendly and relaxed, she wears ripped black jeans and a plaid shirt, her bare feet tucked up on the chair beneath her.

If anything, she says, her life is better than it was before. ‘What I went through was extreme and extraordinary and shocking and very traumatic. I think I’m still in bits of trauma obviously, but in a funny way I think it was all very much meant to be.’ It is Ross who introduces the topic of Sanders into the conversation, perhaps the strongest sign that she has put the past behind her. ‘I’ve been mute deliberately for two years. But now everything is great.’

These days, she says, she feels nothing but compassion for her former husband, whom she met as a teenager and who is the father of her two children, Skyla, who is about to turn ten, and Tennyson (or Sonny as he is known), who has just turned eight. ‘Rupert and I are really close. I married my first boyfriend, which is probably not the wisest of choices, but I was young and in love. I have no regrets, we’re the best of friends and we always will be and we have two amazing children.’

Genetic X Liberty Ross skirt overalls, £515

A few days before we meet, she and Sanders held their son’s eighth birthday party together at her house. Birthday cards are clustered on a surface in her bright open-plan kitchen and outside are his new hockey goals: ‘We still do everything together,’ says Ross. ‘We tag-team just like any other couple; one of us will take the kids to soccer, the other takes them to dance. It’s exactly like it was, just healthier.’

In their divorce settlement, Sanders kept their Malibu home while Ross kept their two London homes and the LA one. In addition she reportedly receives £18,000 a month in spousal support for the next four years, £10,000 a month in child support for their two children, 15 per cent of profits Sanders gets from movies, with the exception of Snow White and the Huntsman (his breakthrough film), and half of their bank accounts and retirement funds.

She now has a new boyfriend, Jimmy Iovine, 61, a record and film producer who was a recording engineer for artists such as John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen and then a producer for U2 and Dire Straits before co-founding Interscope Records, which has Lady Gaga and Eminem on its slate: ‘I wasn’t expecting to be with someone ever again; it all came out of the blue. We started off very much as friends. I’d never even heard of him and had no idea what he did. I think he loved that.’ She does not know if Sanders is seeing anyone else: ‘I could be wrong, but we haven’t been introduced to anyone so I don’t think there’s anyone serious.’

Genetic x Liberty Ross plaid jeans, £250, top, Liberty's own

For the first few months, she and Iovine kept their relationship secret: ‘I didn’t want to tell anyone until I knew this was a decent, real person. He’s a remarkable human being, I couldn’t be more lucky. He’s been incredible with me and my kids and he’s very respectful of Rupert. Bizarrely we’re very similar; he thinks I’m funnier than him, which I love because I think he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He’s Italian Brooklyn and he’s very clever and witty. We have a lot of fun.’

She met Iovine when she was at her lowest ebb. ‘At my most raw, I didn’t have the energy to pretend I was anything other than what I really was. Having been married once, it’s great because you know exactly what you need and you cut through the crap. I knew I wasn’t putting up with anything less than exactly what I wanted. And his friends are so happy for him because he’d been single for seven years. He didn’t want to put his children [he has four, all adult] through anything that wasn’t real so I’m the first girlfriend they’d met.’

I ask if she would consider getting married again. ‘Absolutely, yes. I believe in love and I have no trouble with commitment or loyalty, that’s never been a problem for me.’ Although she had hoped to emulate her parents’ long and happy marriage, she is philosophical about her own divorce. ‘I think in this day and age you’re lucky if you’re with someone the whole of your life; it’s very hard, very unusual.’

Ross had a peripatetic childhood. She is the fifth child of Ian Ross, who founded the 1960s pirate radio station Radio Caroline, and Roxana ‘Bunty’ Lampson, daughter of Lord Killearn, the wartime high commissioner and ambassador to Egypt. When Liberty was a baby, the family moved to LA, where her father set up Flippers, a gold-domed roller disco that for a few years was the place to be — until it closed down and he had to reinvent himself as a butler. ‘It was one adventure after another and then my mum, who had always rolled with it with very little money and six kids, finally said she’d had enough.’ So when Ross was seven, the family moved back to London. She went to school in Notting Hill before winning a scholarship to Queen’s College, Harley Street.

Ross's rented LA home

Her parents still run a market stall on Portobello Road and Ross describes herself as ‘a mix of both their madness’. Her mother (who famously turned up to her debutante ball wearing a pair of white shorts) is here today, ready to step in when Ross leaves later in the week to launch her collection in London with a dinner at Selfridges. ‘I’m an international babysitter,’ jokes Bunty, who has 16 grandchildren and looks like an older version of Liberty.

When Ross was ten a family friend asked her parents if she might be interested in posing as the child bride of Ozzy Osbourne for the cover of his new album, No Rest for the Wicked. Her parents jumped at the opportunity. ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’ says Ross as she shows me the album cover, which is displayed in her study. With frizzy hair and a zoned-out expression, she sits passively next to Osbourne: ‘His hands were very shaky and there were these huge pythons slithering around us.’

That was the start and end of her modelling career for a while. Although frequently scouted in her teens, she turned down all offers, preferring to stay at school to finish her A levels. Eventually, Mario Testino, who was a friend of her brother Atticus, a composer who won an Oscar in 2010 for his score for The Social Network, persuaded her to do a shoot for Vogue. ‘That’s how it started and it snowballed and I just rode the wave. I never really felt the pressure and I think that’s because I always had my family. It’s vital for girls to have strong roots because there’s no denying that, like any business, it’s pretty cut-throat at times.’

Hailed as the new Kate Moss, Ross appeared on the cover of Vogue and became the face of Burberry, Dior and Jimmy Choo. At 24, she married Sanders in a lavish wedding at Port Eliot, the Cornwall home of her uncle Peregrine Eliot, the tenth Earl of St Germans. At the time Sanders directed commercials but was keen to break through as a film director, so the couple moved to LA to further his career. Ross was then pregnant with their first child and found her early years in LA very lonely as her husband was often away: ‘Everyone lives under their rocks in LA, so it takes a long time to find your lane.’

After a three-year break Ross returned to modelling and acting, appearing in W.E. — Madonna’s film about Wallis Simpson — and then Snow White and the Huntsman, the movie that established her husband’s name as a director, as well as spelling the end of his marriage. Kristen Stewart played Snow White and Ross her mother. A box-office hit, Ross gave an interview just after the world premiere in London, describing her ‘tears of pride’ at her husband’s success.

A few weeks later, when the long-lens pictures of her husband and Stewart emerged, Ross — who had never suspected anything — was blindsided. ‘Wow,’ she wrote succinctly on her Twitter account, which she then deactivated before disappearing. ‘I just got my kids and got the hell out and threw away my phone,’ she says today. ‘No one knew where I was, apart from my mum, and that was exactly the right thing to do. I had no choice but to be strong as I had two children. Rupert was probably the one that was in the most shock of everybody.’ Ross says today that it wasn’t this alone that broke them up. ‘That was absolutely not what it was. I could easily have got over that. It was really nothing, but it became so public that it became really hard for me.’

I ask her if she thinks her marriage could have survived if there had not been so much publicity (the story was so big partly because Stewart was still dating her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson at the time). Ross looks thoughtful, but then shakes her head. ‘I actually don’t think so, by that point we were very much brother and sister and we function so much better in our own bedrooms under separate roofs.’

Liberty Ross with Jimmy Iovine at the Emmys last month

Later Ross shows me around the house, furnished with characteristic quirkiness: a chair from Syria with inlaid mother-of-pearl, a photograph of Patti Smith, old blue sofas shipped over from her London home: ‘I’ve never had a decorator, so it’s a total mishmash of my different lives and travels, and things I’ve gathered from flea markets and all over the place.’ Beyond her large white bedroom overlooking the garden is her walk-in wardrobe, organised with military precision. When I ask her what her favourite item of clothing is, she searches in vain for a denim jacket: ‘Annoyingly, because I’m half here and half at my boyfriend’s house, I can never find anything.’

Her capsule collection with Genetic Denim is hanging outside the wardrobe, featuring six pieces, including three pairs of jeans, a romper suit, a jacket and skirt with a strong graphic design: ‘It’s a retro disco print: I feel like the collection represents the weave of my London and LA lives.’

She describes the collection as a fun experiment, but when I ask if she will continue as a designer, she answers vaguely: ‘Who knows?’ The past couple of years, she explains, have made her change her perspective on life. She used to look far ahead and make plans: ‘I don’t do that any more. You can plan all you want, but you never know what tomorrow holds.’

Genetic x Liberty Ross is available at Selfridges and Net-a-porter. Portraits by Steve Schofield

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