Kimora Lee Simmons is officially done. Tim Leissner, her husband of more than a decade and the former Goldman Sachs banker who was at the center of the multi-billion-dollar Malaysian (1MDB) fraud case, filed for divorce around the time he went to prison to begin a two-year sentence. The timing is brutal. The optics are messier. The Internet is expected to have opinions.
Some of these opinions are loud. “She’s leaving him because he’s locked up.” “He came forward first to save face.” “This was always going to end.”
maybe. Or maybe the gossip is missing the actual story. Because what looks like a clean breakup never happens, and the true end of a marriage usually happens long before anyone signs anything.
A story that began years before the filing
This is what I want to say gently, as someone who sits with couples at the worst times of their lives: A divorce that was filed in a week like this is not decided in a week like this.
By the time a long marriage reaches the paperwork stage, the relationship has typically been in a state of slow erosion for years. There were conversations that didn’t happen. There were attempts to reach each other but they failed. There were nights one of them would lie in bed wondering if this was the person they thought they had married, and they would fall asleep without saying so.
Tim Lesnar pleaded guilty in 2018. This means that Kimura has been the public face of a private disaster for seven years. Seven years of headlines, court dates, asset forfeiture fights, raising kids through it, and trying to keep the family together while the man she married was slowly and legally dismantled in public.
You don’t stay neutral within it. Even the most loving partner gets tired. Even the most loyal partner begins to protect themselves in small, quiet ways. A marriage that enters the courtroom is rarely the one that began. It is a marriage that has survived, or not survived, thousands of small ruptures that no one outside the home has seen.
So when people say “I left him because he went to prison,” I’ll offer this. She did not leave him because he went to prison. She has made a decision that may have taken years to make, and her prison sentence is simply the moment the public gets to see it.
The hot class that always misses
Here’s what makes this a lot harder than the comments section would have you believe.
When one partner experiences something truly shameful in public, the other partner is in an impossible bind. Stay, and you’ll be loyal but also seen as empowering. Leave and he will see that you are abandoning him at his lowest point. There’s no version of this where strangers read Kimura generously, and she knows it.
In my office, I see this dynamic in less dramatic forms all the time. One partner suffers a financial collapse, a relapse into addiction, and infidelity that becomes the story of the marriage. The other partner is then expected to perform a kind of emotional sanctity. Stay forever, never resent it, never need anything for yourself. Real humans can’t do that. They tried, but they were exhausted, and one day they realized that the marriage they were fighting for wasn’t actually the marriage they were in anymore.
If you are reading this and recognize the flicker of your own situation, it is helpful to take a few minutes to discover the dynamics of your attachment. Not because your story is their story. Because the patterns below are remarkably consistent across very different lives.
Another thing that everyone misses is that divorce is not a judgment on whether two people love each other. A lot of marriages end between people who are still doing it in some way. Loving someone and being able to stay married to them are two different questions, and mixing them up is one of the cruelest things our culture does to people in Kimura’s situation.
What could an ending like this actually look like?
The conventional wisdom about celebrity splits is to turn to lawyers, lock in the press strategy, and never speak again. This works for tabloids. It does not work for children, there are children here.
What actually helps in a breakup like this is not just communication. It’s something more specific. This is what I would call trying to make amends, which may seem nice but is the hardest thing on earth to do in the middle of a conflict. It’s one partner saying, actually, this hurts and I don’t want it to get ugly forever between us, even if we can’t stay married.
For couples in the Bay Area working through the long tail of public estrangement, this is precisely the field of couples therapy in San Francisco, and also the field of post-marriage co-parenting work itself. Either way, the step is the same. Stop building a case against the other person. Start by building the smallest possible bridge that your children can walk across safely.
If you want the basic skill in plain English, I wrote about the most important skill in your relationship, and it applies to endings as much as it does to continuing marriages. The endings have a tone. Tone is something you choose, even when you don’t feel like anything else was chosen.
What seems best here is not reconciliation. It is a divorce that does not require the children to choose a parent.
The part that no one tweets about
Somewhere this week, there were two people standing together at the altar, sitting in two completely different rooms, coming to terms with the reality that the life they had built was officially over. One of them is in a dungeon. Someone signs papers in a house that seemed like the beginning.
None of them are the villain in this story. They’re just two people whose marriage couldn’t survive what was asked of it. This is not a scandal. This is a common human ending quietly, loudly with their last names.
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Figs O’Sullivan is a couples therapist and relationship expert on Stars and Silicon Valley, founder of Empathi, and built Figlet, an AI-powered relationship coach trained in his clinical work.
