Liberty at last: Liberty Ross on moving on and falling in love again after THAT affair

Two summers ago British model Liberty Ross’ world fell apart. Pictures were published of her film director husband Rupert Sanders caught on a secret tryst with actress Kristen Stewart. Their divorce was finalised a few weeks ago, and this month Ross launches herself as a designer with a capsule jeans collection for LA’s Genetic Denim.

‘I think God signed me up for a cleanse two years ago, but forgot to tell me about it,’ jokes Ross, 35, sitting by the pool at the beautiful ranch home she is renting, deep in a secluded canyon in Bel Air, Los Angeles. Friendly and relaxed, she wears ripped black jeans and a plaid shirt, her bare feet tucked up on the chair beneath her.

If anything, she says, her life is better than it was before. ‘What I went through was extreme and extraordinary and shocking and very traumatic. I think I’m still in bits of trauma obviously, but in a funny way I think it was all very much meant to be.’ It is Ross who introduces the topic of Sanders into the conversation, perhaps the strongest sign that she has put the past behind her. ‘I’ve been mute deliberately for two years. But now everything is great.’

These days, she says, she feels nothing but compassion for her former husband, whom she met as a teenager and who is the father of her two children, Skyla, who is about to turn ten, and Tennyson (or Sonny as he is known), who has just turned eight. ‘Rupert and I are really close. I married my first boyfriend, which is probably not the wisest of choices, but I was young and in love. I have no regrets, we’re the best of friends and we always will be and we have two amazing children.’

A few days before we meet, she and Sanders held their son’s eighth birthday party together at her house. Birthday cards are clustered on a surface in her bright open-plan kitchen and outside are his new hockey goals: ‘We still do everything together,’ says Ross. ‘We tag-team just like any other couple; one of us will take the kids to soccer, the other takes them to dance. It’s exactly like it was, just healthier.’

In their divorce settlement, Sanders kept their Malibu home while Ross kept their two London homes and the LA one. In addition she reportedly receives £18,000 a month in spousal support for the next four years, £10,000 a month in child support for their two children, 15 per cent of profits Sanders gets from movies, with the exception of Snow White and the Huntsman (his breakthrough film), and half of their bank accounts and retirement funds.

She now has a new boyfriend, Jimmy Iovine, 61, a record and film producer who was a recording engineer for artists such as John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen and then a producer for U2 and Dire Straits before co-founding Interscope Records, which has Lady Gaga and Eminem on its slate: ‘I wasn’t expecting to be with someone ever again; it all came out of the blue. We started off very much as friends. I’d never even heard of him and had no idea what he did. I think he loved that.’ She does not know if Sanders is seeing anyone else: ‘I could be wrong, but we haven’t been introduced to anyone so I don’t think there’s anyone serious.’

For the first few months, she and Iovine kept their relationship secret: ‘I didn’t want to tell anyone until I knew this was a decent, real person. He’s a remarkable human being, I couldn’t be more lucky. He’s been incredible with me and my kids and he’s very respectful of Rupert. Bizarrely we’re very similar; he thinks I’m funnier than him, which I love because I think he’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He’s Italian Brooklyn and he’s very clever and witty. We have a lot of fun.’

She met Iovine when she was at her lowest ebb. ‘At my most raw, I didn’t have the energy to pretend I was anything other than what I really was. Having been married once, it’s great because you know exactly what you need and you cut through the crap. I knew I wasn’t putting up with anything less than exactly what I wanted. And his friends are so happy for him because he’d been single for seven years. He didn’t want to put his children [he has four, all adult] through anything that wasn’t real so I’m the first girlfriend they’d met.’

I ask if she would consider getting married again. ‘Absolutely, yes. I believe in love and I have no trouble with commitment or loyalty, that’s never been a problem for me.’ Although she had hoped to emulate her parents’ long and happy marriage, she is philosophical about her own divorce. ‘I think in this day and age you’re lucky if you’re with someone the whole of your life; it’s very hard, very unusual.’

Ross had a peripatetic childhood. She is the fifth child of Ian Ross, who founded the 1960s pirate radio station Radio Caroline, and Roxana ‘Bunty’ Lampson, daughter of Lord Killearn, the wartime high commissioner and ambassador to Egypt. When Liberty was a baby, the family moved to LA, where her father set up Flippers, a gold-domed roller disco that for a few years was the place to be — until it closed down and he had to reinvent himself as a butler. ‘It was one adventure after another and then my mum, who had always rolled with it with very little money and six kids, finally said she’d had enough.’ So when Ross was seven, the family moved back to London. She went to school in Notting Hill before winning a scholarship to Queen’s College, Harley Street.

Her parents still run a market stall on Portobello Road and Ross describes herself as ‘a mix of both their madness’. Her mother (who famously turned up to her debutante ball wearing a pair of white shorts) is here today, ready to step in when Ross leaves later in the week to launch her collection in London with a dinner at Selfridges. ‘I’m an international babysitter,’ jokes Bunty, who has 16 grandchildren and looks like an older version of Liberty.