Where Is Carolyn Bessette’s Ex, Michael Bergin, Today?

FX’s Love Story imagines the private side of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s headline-making relationship, starting when they were both seeing other people. As seen in the Feb. 12 season premiere, Bessette was previously linked to the model Michael Bergin, who was first described on the show as a “sexy doorman.”

“Can we please stop calling him that? He’s actually an aspiring model,” Bessette protests to her friends. And indeed, those aspirations worked out. Bergin would go on to become a Calvin Klein underwear model and soon landed a role playing JD on Baywatch. But in the decades that followed, Bergin would make a career pivot — as well as make some bold allegations about his time with Bessette.

His Shocking Claims

Five years after Bessette was killed in a plane crash alongside her husband and sister, Lauren, Bergin published a book titled The Other Man: A Love Story. In the 2004 memoir, Bergin claimed that he had an affair with Bessette while she was married, in addition to other personal assertions.

“I just wanted closure ... I’m the only one left in this, like, love triangle still living, and I want to just move on with my life, with my kids, with my fiancée, and get on with my life,” he said on CNN at the time. “And I wanted John and Carolyn to just finally rest in peace, and I wanted their families to stop hurting.”

However, his claims were met with skepticism, especially as Bessette couldn’t answer them in death. CNN’s Paula Zahn called the book an “invasion of her privacy.” And in Elizabeth Beller’s 2024 book Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the late publicist’s friends refuted the claim that she had an affair during marriage, per E! News.

Here’s Where Michael Bergin Is Today

More than two decades after his controversial book, Bergin works as a real estate agent in Southern California.

He shares two children with his wife, Joy — a son who is a pitcher with Pensacola’s Blue Wahoos, and a daughter who’s followed in Bergin’s model footsteps. In fact, the proud dad often shares side-by-side photos of the pair posing decades apart.

As Bergin told Digital Journal for a Baywatch doc in 2024, “I’ve been out of the spotlight for a while, and that’s because I chose to be out of it. I’ve been doing real estate now for the past 15 years, and I am not much into the acting world anymore. My real estate team is growing, and it is really awesome to work side by side with my wife, Joy, who I love.”