Cassandra Thorburn lost friends after her divorce from Karl Stefanovic

Karl Stefanovic’s ex-wife, Cassandra Thorburn, has admitted she lost friends after separating from the Today show host four years ago.

The children’s author, 48, said on the Divorce Story podcast this week that the break-up in June 2016 had resulted in a ‘sudden change’ in her friendship group.

She explained: ‘You’re in a relationship that you’ve been in for a long time and you have all similar friends. So all of a sudden there is a change in the friendship group.’

She came to rely on her ‘support network’ of close female friends, with whom she would discuss her feelings of abandonment. 

‘The support network becomes even more important because they’re the ones you can talk to about that [the loss of friends],’ she said. 

The former Today show producer also credited her loyal girlfriends with being there for her during her divorce.

‘If I hadn’t had my really close girlfriends… I could’ve gone days where I wouldn’t have communicated with anyone and I don’t think that would have been healthy at all,’ she said. 

In August 2018, Cassandra spoke to The Australian Women’s Weekly about the harsh reality of losing contact with her ex-husband’s family

‘Last year, I declared that Karl really was dead to me, a man I no longer know, but the children still have their father,’ she said.

‘The flip-side of that is I feel like we’re dead to his family and almost anyone from our old life.

‘There has been practically no contact. I feel like we’ve been discarded and disposed of, replaced by a whole new line-up of starters,’ the children’s book author added. 

Cassandra also revealed on this week’s Divorce Story podcast that she was no longer grieving her marriage to Karl.

When asked if she still mourning the loss of their 21 years together, she laughed: ‘No… This is why I’m doing the podcast.’

She continued: ‘Yes, I felt going through the divorce, to me, took longer to grieve because it’s such a painful experience and there’s so much negativity… So for me grieving the process of going through that had been huge.

Cassandra added: ‘My children will always have a father and they only have one father. They also only have one mum. For me that was what got me through my hard moments, knowing that no one can replace who we are to our children.’

Karl remarried shoe designer Jasmine Yarbrough in December 2018, after meeting at a boat party in Sydney two years earlier.

They welcomed their first child, a daughter named Harper May, on May 1.