EXCLUSIVE: Dean McDermott describes the final blow up fight with Tori Spelling that ended in his drunken, hateful post announcing their split – traumatizing his wife and leading him to take a handful of sleeping pills

It all began with a shot of grappa – the fiery Italian moonshine that was Dean McDermott’s first drink, given to him by the father of a hockey friend at the end of a celebratory meal.

That would turn out to be the first of many for the father-of-six, who went on to become hooked on booze and drugs and who reveals he has been in and out of AA meetings and rehab for most of the past 30 years.

His addiction would eventually consume him, with Dean, who turns 57 today,  spending every evening drinking tequila and cramming pills while wife Tori Spelling, 50, and their five children sat in another room

In the second part of his emotional world exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Dean told of the night in June he hit rock bottom and announced the end of his marriage via Instagram while drunk and high in the early hours of Saturday June 15.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘My worst memory with Tori is that last fight when I was drunk and angry.

‘It was the night that I raged against her and the children and I saw the light, the final flicker of the flame go out in her eyes.’

Fights about their money woes and his drinking had become frequent, but this time Dean’s rage resulted in a horrific fallout.

He said: ‘I posted that because I was at the end of my rope. I didn’t know what to do. I had burned everything down yet again.

Tori, totally caught off guard, was traumatized by the post and his children were left particularly devastated.  When he realized what he had done he swiftly deleted it and now says it was a cry for help.

Heartbreakingly, he swallowed seven Ambien sleeping tablets as he went to bed in what he now calls a cry for help.

Dean told DailyMail.com: ‘I was literally at my wit’s end. That night, I was drinking and I was into my pills.

‘After I sent the post, I took some more pills, and I took six or seven Ambien in the hopes that I would not wake up.

‘Thank God I did. Thank God I did. Because I would’ve ruined so many lives if I had died.’

The near-death experience and the devastated reaction of his family to the post convinced him that things finally had to change.

‘It wasn’t the right way to do it, but it got people’s attention. The people I needed it to. It fell in the ears of people I wanted it to fall into.

‘I was so full of shame and it was such a horrible idea. And then my kids were really, really hurt.’

Now, after getting clean over the summer, Dean says he has never been happier and hopes both Tori and his children will be proud of how far he has come.

Currently sharing a sober living home with eight other men, Dean says he is broke but loves his new life – laughingly telling DailyMail.com how he is the ‘papa’ of the house because he is so much older than the other residents.

But it was his father David, a Glaswegian, who set the pattern for his own life.

Dean said: ‘My dad was an alcoholic and he had anger and rage issues. And that came from his parents. His dad was an alcoholic and a rager.

‘There’s a pattern here and there’s a progression to generation to generation.’

Due to his boozing, David was rarely around for his wife Doreen and five children and would fly into terrifying rages when he had been drinking.

The young Dean found solace in playing hockey, spending as much time as he could with friends in the Italian neighborhood of Toronto where the family lived.

But it was also through hockey that he got his first taste of booze aged just 12. ‘Our hockey team won the championship,’ Dean remembered.

‘So, we went to one of our friends’ houses and his dad made this great Italian dinner for us. And then he brought us some grappa, which is Italian moonshine.

‘Once I took a shot of that, it was on. I just felt like I was the person I wanted to be, and I chased it ever since.’

But what really turbocharged his drinking was the death of his mother who died in front of him at their modest home in the Toronto suburb of Rexdale just three days before his 16th birthday.

‘It was three days before my 16th birthday, so I was 15 when my mother died,’ Dean said. ‘We were having a conversation and she just sounded like she was snoring.

‘I looked over – she always chewed gum – and her gum was sitting there, and her head was like this [tilted to the side].

‘I went over and tried to get her attention and she wasn’t responding. I performed CPR, but she was gone. My whole world came crashing down because it was just her and I.

‘My older sisters had moved out already. My dad was nowhere to found and my life just came to a screeching halt.

‘My dreams of playing in the National Hockey League were dashed. I quit everything. I didn’t know what to do. I bounced around a couple of my sisters’ places, but they had young kids and were starting their lives and who didn’t really want a teen sort of complicating things for them.

‘So, I found drugs and alcohol. I started off with alcohol and then hallucinogens, acid, weed. And then it just progressed as I got older and more successful, the more money I had, I could buy better drugs. So that’s when I started doing cocaine.’

Despite the upheaval, he continued to play hockey in amateur league and, forced to support himself from the age of 17, began working on his acting career – concocting a ‘bulls*** resume,’ landing an agent and working his way up.

Although increasingly successful, the drinking continued throughout his first marriage and the arrival of his eldest son Jack, 25, and despite sporadic attempts to control it via AA sessions, went on after he met Tori – masked by their glittering social life.

Mother-in-law Candy, with whom he never had much of a relationship, had no idea of the extent of his drinking habits while Tori, eager to please, turned a blind eye.

Dean says it worked for the first few years of their marriage but as life set in, what began as the kind of fight that any couple would have, became violent arguments – boosted by his drinking.

As the years went on, Dean says he found himself turning to booze more and more often to help him cope with the couple’s well-documented financial issues and the challenges of juggling five children with work.

With Candy providing little help, the couple racked up huge debts and were sued by AMEX in 2016 for $87,594.55 in unpaid credit card bills – a case that was only settled in January when the amount was paid off in full.

The same year, the couple were hit by a lawsuit from City National Bank who said they had failed to make payments on a $400,000 loan and owed $188,803.

And Dean himself became embroiled in a public fight with ex-wife Mary Jo Eustace who sued him in 2017 over unpaid child support and alimony totaling $100,000 – with the 56-year-old at one point facing jail for contempt if he didn’t pay up.

As a result, Dean numbed himself with alcohol and says after a few drinks, his and Tori’s arguments would become volcanic.

He said: ‘I would initiate fights, absolutely. There would be arguments about issues that most couples have. Just the day-to-day struggles of being parents and being a couple.

‘There are also our financial issues. Yes. But they would also stem from my depression and self-loathing. Normal fights that couples have would be elevated because of my anger and drinking.’

He added: ‘It takes two, and right now I am hugging the cactus. I’m apologizing and I’m doing all the right things.

‘I’m doing what was asked of me and beyond. I got into treatment because they wanted me to go.

‘When I got into treatment, I wanted to be there for me, and I wanted to be in sober living for me. I want to be sober for me, I want to be a good dad for me.’

He said his drinking also had an effect on his children, telling DailyMail.com that he eventually came to the shattering conclusion that he had become worse than the father who made his own childhood so difficult.

He said: ‘When life starts to sink in, the everyday things you have to do in life sink in, then it’s just like, I can’t deal with this. I’m not equipped to deal with this.

‘Here’s this little being [his children] that’s just full of love, unconditional love, and I don’t love myself enough to love it back. I got to put alcohol and drugs on that. I don’t want to feel that.’

Tearfully he added: ‘My kids have grown up with the father that I had, and I became worse than my father.

‘I always swore I’d never become my father, but I became worse than my father.’

After he and Tori stopped sharing a bed in 2017 due to the constant presence of the family pets in the room, Dean spiraled into depressio, telling DailyMail.com he felt so heartbroken by his situation that he wanted to die.

Although they had previously had couple’s therapy on True Tori, Dean says they couldn’t afford to do it this time due to straitened finances.

Matters finally came to a head when he and Tori had the blowout fight, after which, while drunk, Dean took to Instagram to announce the end of their marriage.

Reflecting on the post now that he is sober, McDermott says he doesn’t know if he truly meant what he said, telling DailyMail.com: ‘I can’t get into that right now.

‘That’s something that is still a discussion. That’s to be private between Tori and I, and she’s not here, so I can’t go into that.’

Painful though it was, that fight and the subsequent fallout finally persuaded Dean he needed to get urgent help.

First, he moved Tori and the children out of the rental home they had been living in and moved them to a friend’s home in Pasadena, where she was photographed on June 22.

Then, canceling the lease on their house due to a mold issue, he spent 15 days detoxing while packing their possessions up.

Dean said: ‘I had made the decision to go to treatment, but I had to move this house. For 15 days I just worked on packing up this house because I had to.

‘My body just went into survival mode, and it happened to be some of the hottest weather we’ve had all year, so I was able to detox, by sweating it all out and being physical.

‘The day after the last thing, the last piece of furniture was moved and that van pulled away, boom, I crashed, and I ended up in the hospital.

‘High blood pressure, dizziness, abdominal pains, and body pains – the typical things that happen when you detox.

‘I was fortunate it was only for one day, day and a half. My detox wasn’t as bad as a lot of other people’s. I was fortunate in that, and that’s what enabled me to jump right into therapy.’

With Tori’s help, he was able to get a spot at Harmony Place – a luxury LA rehab set inside a beautiful neo-classical home decorated with soothing wood paneled walls surrounded by large flower-filled gardens.

There, he shared a room with another addict named Colton – now a close friend – and had intensive therapy sessions with Dr. Haleh Malik who Dean says saved his life.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘Haleh has definitely helped me break the cycle. They say it takes three generations to break the cycle.

‘I’m the third generation and I’m going to break that cycle because I don’t want this for my kids.’

Speaking to DailyMail.com, Dr. Malek said: ‘Dean is really a story of triumph. He came in just desperate, broken, broken into a million pieces.

‘My job was to try to put all those pieces back together for him and we can see the outcome.’

David Cohen, clinical director at Harmony Place, added: ‘Dean spent a lifetime not really liking himself very much, and came in here and began to love the man that he is.

‘To anyone struggling with addiction, my suggestion is to not to compare yourself to anybody else and to just take an honest look at yourself and your relationship with drugs and alcohol and know that recovery is possible.

‘The stigma of addiction is yesterday’s news. People struggle. People struggle with all kinds of things, and this is one of those things where help is readily available.

‘There are people that are trained in getting you sober and we’re keeping the light on for you.’

After 40 days at rehab, Dean, encouraged by Dr. Malik, moved into sober living home Freedom House in the LA suburb of West Hills where he still resides.

Despite sharing the house with eight other men, Dean describes a happy household with all the men mucking in together, helping each other with chores and keeping each other sober.

Finances remain an issue, with Dean photographed signing up for food stamps in September while communication with Tori remains limited and he hasn’t seen his children since June.

Nevertheless, he says he has never been happier and is relishing the freedom of life without booze.

Dean said: ‘It was great going from all the glitz and glamor of a 6,500 square foot house into treatment into a 3,000 square foot house with nine guys and having a roommate,

‘It just showed me how to live, right sized my life and it showed me what’s important. And today I’m broke – you’ve all seen the food stamp pictures and I’m so grateful that that exists, that people can go in their time of need and get assistance with food.

‘I’m so grateful, and I’ve never been happier in my life. I’m in sober living and going to be 57 this month while on food stamps. But I’ve never been happier.’

Part of that is down to new girlfriend Lily who is an account manager at Conscious Community – a wellbeing charity that he now works with.

He said of the two-month-old romance: ‘We just hit it off. The furthest thing from my mind was looking for a relationship and God put her in my path and she’s just a lovely, lovely lady.

‘She supports my journey. She’s there for me. She’s very smart, very wise, very thoughtful, and very helpful to me.’

Tori too has moved on, but although he and Tori only speak via text and have not seen each other since June, the 56-year-old said it hurt when he saw photos of her kissing new boyfriend Ryan Cramer two weeks ago. However, he added that he is happy in his new relationship with Calo, 33.

He said: ‘I did see the photographs of Tori kissing another man, and it hurt, I’m not going to lie, but she saw the same thing with Lily.

‘It made me realize that was really hurtful towards Tori. But seeing Tori with Ryan… I know Ryan, I know him. He’s a really good man.

‘He’s a smart man. He’s a funny man, and she looks so beautiful and healthy and happy in those pictures.’

Cramer has known both Tori and Dean for some time and met the former couple via his children, who are friends with their son Liam and daughter Stella.

Regardless of how Tori’s new romance works out, Dean said: ‘I want her to be happy and my kids like Ryan, and that’s just really important to me.

‘If it continues, I just want happiness for her because she deserves so much happiness in this life because she’s given so much to other people.

‘She’s given it to me for 18 years and I’ve been so hard and brutal on her that I just want her to be loved and happy. She deserves it.’

Dean’s priority now is rebuilding his relationship with Tori and his children and says he believes they will be proud of how far he’s come.

He said: ‘I believe so. I believe so. And the more we work towards co-parenting, I’m sure I’ll find that out.

‘But my kids and Tori love me regardless, even in all the hatred and anger and drinking. They love me and I’m so grateful for that. I can see that now.

‘When I was in the middle of it, I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see any of that. Tori is such a beautiful human being.

‘She’s so kind and compassionate and caring and empathetic, and generous to a fault. I know her. I’ve known her for 18 years, and I know that she’ll be proud.’