Featured Image Credit: nayarivera/Instagram
Topics: Celebrity, Life, Parenting, California
Callum Jones
Topics: Celebrity, Life, Parenting, California
Naya Rivera's ex-husband has detailed the heartbreaking admission her son made after she drowned in a tragic accident some five years ago.
The Glee actor died in July 2020 after she drowned at Lake Piru, near Santa Clarita, California.
Before the tragic incident occurred, Rivera was on a boat with her then four-year-old son, Josey, which she often did during the tough months of the Covid pandemic back then.
After the actor was declared a missing person, an extensive search over a period of five days followed, before a body was found.
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The Ventura County medical examiner released an autopsy report shortly after that stated the actor's cause of death was accidental drowning.
Rivera's ex-husband, actor Ryan Dorsey, now feels the time is right to speak about Rivera nearly five years on from her tragic death.
Josey, who was found asleep on the boat alone as authorities searched for Rivera, made a heartbreaking admission after losing his mom, Dorsey revealed.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with People, Dorsey revealed his son still feels a lot of guilt surrounding his mother's death, and that he felt he could have saved her.
“Something he’s said over and over is that he was trying to find a life raft, and there was a rope, but there was a big spider on the rope, and he was too scared to throw it,” the actor told the outlet.
"I keep reassuring him, ‘Buddy, that rope wasn’t going to be long enough.' That obviously still sticks out in his head because he feels like he could have saved her. I think she just got caught up in a brush — that or a weird undercurrent from the dam. It was just a freak occurrence."
Dorsey admitted he's had many offers to speak out in the time that followed Rivera's death, but that now feels like the right time to speak.
He added: "I've never been one to talk about my life like this. I've turned down so many of these kind of things, because it was too hard. I still can't really look at pictures of her, and it's still hard to talk, but I feel like I'm ready. There's just so much that happened.
"If we’d have lost both Naya and Josey, I don’t know how I would continue on with my life. I don't know what I would've done, but I'm sure it wouldn't have been good."