Lori Loughlin filed for divorce from Mossimo Giannulli on September 4 in Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences after nearly 28 years of marriage, according to NBC News reporting on the filing. The split comes roughly a year after the couple reportedly separated, and it closes out a marriage that had already survived one of the more public scandals of the last decade. That timing is exactly what makes the case worth looking at closely: surviving a crisis as a team and staying in love are not automatically the same skill.
Key Points
- Loughlin filed September 4, 2026, after roughly 28 years of marriage that began in 1997.
- The couple has a prenuptial agreement, amended in 2015, and the filing asks that assets and debts be divided according to its terms.
- Spousal support has not yet been determined, per Today.com’s coverage of the court documents.
- The couple sold their Bel-Air mansion for $12.65 million within the past year.
- They share two adult daughters, Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose Giannulli.
- The marriage survived the 2019 college admissions scandal, in which both pleaded guilty to fraud charges tied to falsely presenting their daughters as USC crew recruits.
Surviving a scandal is a different job than staying close
The admissions scandal forced Loughlin and Giannulli into a shared foxhole: federal charges, prison time, a fine each, hundreds of hours of community service, and years of relentless public scrutiny. Loughlin served two months and paid $150,000; Giannulli served five months and paid $250,000. Getting through that kind of ordeal together requires coordination, legal strategy, and a united front. It does not require the small, daily maintenance that keeps a marriage’s emotional core intact.
That distinction is exactly what the Gottman Institute’s own published research on marital stability has spent decades documenting. Its long-running studies of couples could predict divorce with over 90% accuracy, and the strongest signal was not whether a couple faced hardship, but how they treated each other inside ordinary, low-stakes moments. Couples who kept “turning toward” each other’s small bids for attention and stayed friends day to day were the ones who lasted. Couples who let contempt, criticism, or emotional withdrawal creep into everyday interaction tended to drift apart even when nothing dramatic was happening at all.
The Gottman research also found that roughly 69% of relationship conflicts are never fully resolved; they’re “perpetual” problems rooted in basic personality differences that couples either learn to manage with humor and affection, or don’t. A scandal gives a couple something urgent and external to unite against. It doesn’t automatically fix how two people talk to each other on an unremarkable Tuesday, years later, once the cameras and the courtroom are gone.
Loughlin and Giannulli’s divorce isn’t proof that surviving hardship together means nothing. It’s a reminder that it isn’t the whole equation, either. A marriage can make it through a genuine crisis and still run out of the quieter, less dramatic thing that was supposed to hold it together in the first place.
