Valerie Bertinelli’s ex Mike Goodnough is sharing his side of the story after their split.
“I’ve been receiving messages and replies similar to the one above with increasing frequency over the last two months,” Goodnough wrote via Instagram on Monday, March 31. “The message common to all of them is that Valerie and I appear to be communicating with each other via our Instagram posts and stories. That is not the case.”
Alongside the caption, Goodnough shared a screenshot of a comment that read, “I’m no detective but you and VB have a lot in common … and your Instagram posts appear to be messages to each other. I read yours, look for her next post, vice versa!” the user wrote. “Can you please work it out? Your souls appear intertwined!”
Goodnough, however, denied the idea.
Valerie Bertinelli has broken her silence on the end of her 10-month relationship with former boyfriend Mike Goodnough. “I am irreversibly changed by him for the better,” Bertinelli said of her ex in a post shared via Instagram on Monday, March 3. “I know I am becoming a much stronger and more benevolent human for […]
“I have never at any time posted something on social media for the purposes of communicating with someone indirectly when I know them personally and have ample ways to reach them directly,” he wrote. “I have never at any time posted something for the purpose of getting a message to someone or getting reaction out of someone. I’ve never posted something in an effort to impact someone’s feelings about me privately or to influence others’ opinions of them publicly.”
Goodnough noted that he’s an adult and “very capable of communicating openly and directly with people I know and care about.”
“I care about Valerie,” he wrote. “I have love for her and I always will. I want her to be happy. It will bring me nothing but joy to see that she is. Exactly one year ago, Valerie and I were together for the launch of her book. It was one of the most joyful weeks of my life. Taking true deep joy from Valerie’s happiness and success was the easiest thing in the world. It is no harder now. Our relationship as partners ended. My caring about her did not.”
He continued, “Unfortunately, over the past two months, Valerie has been prone to lapsing into a place where she has been playing a one-woman tennis match thinking there is someone on the other side of the net. When in that place, she reads all of my posts, centers herself in them, takes offense over wholly imagined slights, and then lashes out angrily with a ‘response’ to things that were neither to her or about her.”
Valerie Bertinelli is opening up about why her marriage to ex-husband Tom Vitale ended in divorce. “I can’t just blame my ex-husband for a toxic, horrible marriage,” Bertinelli, 63, said on the Monday, April 15, episode of The Drew Barrymore Show. The One Day at a Time star got engaged to Vitale, now 60, in […]
Goodnough claimed that Bertinelli’s behavior has “created the impression” to users who follow them that the exes are “going back-and-forth.” However, Goodnough clarified, “We are not.”
“I am not communicating with Valerie via my posts,” he wrote. “I am not engaging with the things she posts. While I am disappointed in the array of hostile, dishonest, and uncalled for backhanded swipes she continues to take at me, there is no war between us. She just won’t stop shooting. Valerie is in a war with her ghosts. I’m just the guy who catches the bullets. And that isn’t new.”
Alongside the caption, Goodnough shared a quote that read, “One of the healthiest habits to learn: Take nothing personally.”
Us Weekly reached out to Bertinelli’s rep for comment.
Being transparent. Evan Bass and Carly Waddell split in December 2020 and have been candid about their relationship ever since. The pair first formed a connection during season 3 of Bachelor in Paradise in 2016. Following an on-and-off relationship, Bass and Waddell got engaged during the finale. They got married in 2017 after they returned […]
Bertinelli, 64, and Goodnough went public with their relationship in April 2024. (Bertinelli was previously married to Tom Vitale, whom she divorced in 2022, and Eddie Van Halen, who died in 2020 after a battle with throat cancer. The pair shared son Wolfgang, 33.)
While it was reported that Bertinelli and Goodnough split in November 2024, she addressed their breakup for the first time in March.
“I’m irreversibly changed by him for the better,” Bertinelli said via Instagram. “I know I am becoming a much stronger and more benevolent human for having met him and spent time with him.”
“Before I had the pleasure of meeting Mike, I was initially and immediately attracted to his writing. It’s heartfelt, authentic, smart, funny, sensitive, caring, and from the soul. And the way he puts words together is just sooo ridiculously beautiful. 
I’m a big fan, can you tell?” she continued. “And as luck would have it, the human being in person is exactly as heartfelt, authentic, sensitive and caring as his writing. And wickedly witty.”
Bertinelli gushed that she’s “so lucky” to have crossed paths with Goodnough and to “soak up his insights.”
