What Happened to Jennie Garth? Podcasts and a Raw Memoir in 2026

If you came of age in the ’90s, Jennie Garth was Kelly Taylor — the girl-next-door with the perm and the complicated love life who anchored “Beverly Hills, 90210” for an entire decade. Then the show ended, the tabloid decade came, and she quietly slipped out of the weekly headlines. So whatever happened to Kelly Taylor? As it turns out, Garth never really left — she just reinvented herself, and in 2026 she’s telling the messiest, most honest version of her own story yet. Here’s where Jennie Garth is now.

01Profile

Full name

Jennifer Eve Garth

Born

April 3, 1972 (54 years old)

Birthplace

Urbana, Illinois, USA

Occupation

Actress, podcaster, author

Best known for

"Beverly Hills, 90210" (1990–2000), "What I Like About You" (2002–2006)

Family

Married to Dave Abrams; three daughters with ex-husband Peter Facinelli

She grew up on a farm in Illinois before her family moved to Arizona, where she was discovered at a talent competition as a teenager. It’s an origin story that fits her — a Midwestern kid who landed in the middle of the most glamorous zip code on television and spent the next thirty years figuring out how to stay herself inside it.

02The Rise: Becoming Kelly Taylor

The show that defined a decade

In 1990, an 18-year-old Garth was cast as Kelly Taylor on a new Aaron Spelling teen drama called “Beverly Hills, 90210.” Nobody expected much. Instead, the show became a cultural phenomenon — appointment television for a generation of teenagers who organized their weeks around it. Garth stayed with the series for its entire run, from 1990 to 2000, making Kelly one of the longest-serving and most beloved characters on the show.

Kelly Taylor wasn’t a one-note character, either. Over ten seasons she survived a house fire, an addiction storyline, an assault, and roughly every love triangle the writers could dream up. That longevity turned Garth into one of the faces of ’90s teen TV, alongside co-stars like Shannen Doherty, Tori Spelling, Luke Perry, and Jason Priestley.

From 90210 to sitcom star

When “90210” wrapped, Garth didn’t disappear. In 2002 she landed the lead in The WB sitcom “What I Like About You,” playing the responsible older sister to Amanda Bynes’s chaotic teen. The show ran for four seasons through 2006 and proved Garth had comic timing to go with her drama résumé — a reminder that she was more versatile than the Kelly Taylor image suggested.

She also competed on “Dancing with the Stars” in 2007, finishing in the top four, and moved into reality and lifestyle projects. For much of the 2000s, she was one of those reassuringly familiar TV faces who never fully left the screen — even as the biggest storms of her life were happening off camera.

03The Hard Years

Behind the steady career, Garth’s personal life went through a wrenching stretch. She married actor Peter Facinelli in 2001, and the couple had three daughters together. When they announced their split in 2012 and divorced in 2013, it played out as tabloid fodder. What the public didn’t see was how hard she fell.

• 2001Marries actor Peter Facinelli; the couple go on to have three daughters.
• 2012–2013Garth and Facinelli announce their separation and divorce, ending an 11-year marriage.
• 2015Marries actor Dave Abrams, whom she met on a blind date in 2014.
• 2019Returns to the "90210" world for Fox's meta reboot "BH90210," playing a heightened version of herself.
• 2024Launches the "I Choose Me" podcast, which becomes the seed of her memoir.

The divorce from Facinelli, she would later reveal, sent her into the darkest period of her life. The reboot years, meanwhile, were more complicated than they looked. Garth has said publicly that she regretted taking part in the 2019 “BH90210” revival, telling The Hollywood Reporter she wished she “hadn’t done it” — a rare admission that not every nostalgia project is worth revisiting. But the story she had been keeping quietest was the one she finally chose to tell in 2026.

04The Memoir: I Choose Me

On April 14, 2026, Garth published her memoir, “I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose & Embracing Reinvention” (Park Row Books). Billed as half memoir, half self-help and narrated by Garth herself on the audiobook, it grew out of her podcast of the same name. And in it, she disclosed a low point she had never spoken about publicly.

In her memoir, Garth wrote that after realizing her marriage to Facinelli was ending, she spiraled during a stay at an Arizona hotel. She wrote about “the little bottles of liquor from the mini bar, how easy it was to drink one adorable bottle in two swigs before moving on to the next,” and about “the anxiety pills that my doctor had given me” that she thought “would help take the edge off my desperate, broken heart,” according to passages reported by People and Us Weekly.

She wrote that she did not remember a phone call with her best friend in which she voiced dark thoughts. Alarmed, the friend alerted Garth’s assistant, who found her, as she put it, “unconscious on the floor.” As Garth described it in the book, “She called 911 and I was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where I had to get my stomach pumped.” She wrote that she later spent time at Canyon Ranch to begin her recovery.

Garth has framed all of this as her own story of survival, not spectacle. In a statement to People about why she wrote the book, she said it was “the culmination of everything I’ve lived, lost, and learned.”

“I wanted to share the messy, beautiful truth of what it takes to rediscover yourself — through motherhood, heartbreak, aging and reinvention.” — Jennie Garth, to People, on her memoir “I Choose Me” (2026)

That’s the throughline of the memoir: not the rock bottom itself, but the choice to climb back out and rebuild on her own terms.

05What She Is Doing Now

A second career in podcasting

These days, Garth’s main stage isn’t a soundstage — it’s a microphone. She hosts “I Choose Me with Jennie Garth,” a conversational show about self-care, reinvention, and choosing yourself, which she launched in 2024 and which gave the memoir its title. She also co-hosts “9021OMG,” a rewatch podcast in which she and former castmates revisit old “90210” episodes for fans who never stopped loving the show.

The podcast has grown into a small brand of its own. In 2026, Garth and iHeartPodcasts brought back the “I Choose Me Live Summit” for a second year — a live event built around the show’s themes of self-worth and reinvention — cementing her transition from ’90s TV star to wellness-minded media host.

Family, marriage, and staying in L.A.

Garth married actor Dave Abrams in 2015. She has been candid that the relationship weathered a near-divorce before the couple reconciled, and she’s spoken openly about the challenges of their age gap rather than pretending everything was perfect — the same honesty that runs through her memoir.

That openness was on public display in January 2025, when the Los Angeles wildfires forced Garth and Abrams to evacuate their home. In an emotional video shared with fans, she said her family was safe and, in a detail that surprised a lot of people, revealed that her ex-husband Peter Facinelli had taken her, Abrams, and her daughters in during the crisis, as reported by TMZ and other outlets. Her home was ultimately spared. It was a striking, real-life illustration of the blended-family peace she says she’s worked hard to build in the years since her divorce.

Still acting, still Kelly at heart

Garth hasn’t walked away from acting, either. She’s continued to take television and film roles — including holiday and family movies — while building her podcast and author career around them. But if you ask fans, her most important 2026 project is the book. After decades of playing characters, Garth is finally the narrator of her own story.

“In that moment, everything inside me felt like it was cracking open.” — Jennie Garth, from “I Choose Me,” describing the turning point that preceded her recovery (2026)

06Summary

Jennie Garth’s story isn’t the cautionary tale the tabloids kept trying to write. It’s a slower, truer arc — a ’90s TV icon who went through the hardest years of her life largely in private, got help, and came out the other side as one of the more grounded voices of her generation of stars.

More than thirty years after she first pulled up to West Beverly High, Jennie Garth has stopped waiting for a script to tell her who she is. She wrote her own — messy parts and all — and that, more than any reboot, is the comeback that counts.