Actress Admits to Fantasizing About Her Death During ‘Really Toxic’ Marriage

Jamie-Lynn Sigler is looking back on her “really toxic” first marriage.

The Sopranos star, 44, reflects on her short-lived marriage to former manager AJ Discala, 55, in her new memoir, And So It Is…: A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope, ahead of its May 5 release.

“As the relationship evolved, can I look back and see a young girl who was possibly being taken advantage of? Yes, but I also don’t think that he really thought that that was happening either,” Sigler told Us Weekly. “I think we were both caught up in a ride, and I think our relationship was really toxic, and I think that it was really complicated, and it started off really messy.”

Soon after Sigler and Discala tied the knot in 2003, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which left the young actress feeling like “this relationship had to work.”

In her memoir, Sigler writes that she began to feel so “terrified” and “overwhelmed” by her marriage and diagnosis that she began to fantasize about her own death, which she told Us Weekly “wasn’t even really about suicide.”

“It was like a cry for help. I needed someone to know how much pain I was in. I needed somebody to know how terrified I was, how overwhelmed I was, and he was going through his own thing, and he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t share it with anybody else. It was just a desperate cry for help, and I was terrified,” she explained, admitting that while she knew she didn’t want to be with Discala at the time, she was “terrified” to be without him.

“Who would protect me? I had no idea about my finances. I had no idea about anything,” she explained. “Could there have been things that he said back then to make me feel that I would never survive without him, sure, but I also think that I felt that whether he had said that or not, because I was so dependent on him for my survival and to protect me.”

It was a “very complicated and very scary” time for Sigler, who thinks that the situation was “what led to that incredibly painful and dark moment for me of just feeling, like, ‘I can’t feel this much pain anymore.’”

Eventually, Sigler realized she “was not going to survive” if she stayed in her marriage, even if she feared seeming like a “failure” for getting divorced so young, and after two years of marriage, Sigler and Discala split in 2005.

In 2012, Sigler found love again with Cutter Dykstra, whom she married in 2016. Sigler and Dykstra, 36, are now parents to two sons, Beau, 12, and Jack, 8.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline​. The previous Lifeline phone number (1-800-273-8255) will always remain available.