Jerry O’Connell Cheating: Actor Addresses Claim From Ex-Girlfriend Giuliana Rancic That He Slept With A Spice Girl

Jerry O’Connell is taking on cheating rumors from ex-girlfriend Giuliana Rancic. However, the actor isn’t offering much of a defense against claims that he slept with one of the Spice Girls.

Rancic made the claim in her new memoir, Going Off Script: How I Survived a Crazy Childhood, Cancer, and Clooney’s 32 On-Screen Rejections. In the book, she recalled the short-lived romance with Jerry O’Connell in the early 2000s, which she said ended with him cheating on her with Spice Girl Geri Halliwell.

In an interview on Watch What Happens Live, Jerry O’Connell didn’t exactly deny the cheating rumors but did have nice things to say about his ex.

“For those of you who don’t know, Giuliana Rancic is a personality on another network,” he said. “And we dated, then we didn’t date.”

O’Connell tried to offer a bit of context for the cheating reports, saying it happened a long time ago.

“She’s a very nice girl,” he reflected. “I don’t want to say anything negative. She’s a very nice girl. We had a very fun time. It was decades ago. I don’t believe cell phones were used then. It was like horse and buggy… It was a while ago.”

While it may all be in the past for O’Connell, it’s clear that the episode still made an impression on his ex-girlfriend. In an excerpt from the memoir published by the New York Post’s Page Six, Rancic recalled the cheating story in detail and threw an insult at Halliwell.

“I was being two-timed for one of the lesser Spices?” Rancic wrote.

She later wrote about confronting Jerry O’Connell about his cheating, saying he didn’t seem to have much emotion about it.

“‘Yeah, I know. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened,'” she quotes him as saying. “He had as much emotion as the customer-service representative who tells you your bags missed the flight.”

But as Giuliana Rancic shared, it was another episode of Jerry O’Connell cheating that led him to where he is today. She recalled that the couple reconciled briefly, but she broke it off again when she caught Jerry flirting with another woman at Maxim’s 100 Hottest Women party in 2004. That woman was Rebecca Romijn, who would later marry Jerry O’Connell and have twin daughters with him.

Giuliana Rancic has moved on nicely from the Jerry O’Connell cheating episode as well. She wed Bill Rancic in September 2007 and the couple have a 2-year-old son, Edward Duke.

[Image via Getty Images/ Vince Bucci]