In an interview with Howard Stern, new father Anderson Cooper revealed that he will co-parent his newborn son, Wyatt, with his ex-partner Benjamin Maisani.
When Cooper revealed the news, Stern asked him: “Don’t you want a clean break from this guy?” Cooper said his own upbringing influenced the decision.
“I don’t really have a family, so my friends become my family,” Cooper explained. “And this is somebody that I was involved with for ten years. He’s a great guy. We didn’t work out as a couple…but when I was a little kid, it was just my mom and my brother. But it was my mom, and she was not the most parental person.”
“I wish some adult, after my dad died, had stepped in, and just been like, ‘You know what? I’ll take you to a ball game, or let’s go out to lunch every now and then, and let’s just talk,’” he continued. “No one ever did that.”
Cooper’s father died when he was only ten years old, and his brother died of suicide at the age of 23. Cooper’s mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, died in 2019 at the age of 95.
“So, I thought if something happens to me or even if something didn’t happen to me, if more people love my son and are in his life, I’m all for that,” he concluded. “My ex is a great guy, and it’s good to have two parents, if you can.”
Cooper and Maisani split after a decade together in 2018. While he didn’t extrapolate on the reasons for the break up, he told People that they “remain[ed] the best of friend, and [would] continue to share much of our lives together.”