How Vampire Diaries Star Ian Somerhalder Erased 8-Figure Debt With One Bold Move

Ian Somerhalder just explained how a clean-energy moonshot turned a Vampire Diaries payday into an eight-figure mess, and how he and Nikki Reed clawed their way back. It is a wild mix of ambition, bad partners, and the kind of family hustle you do not usually hear about on a red carpet.

"I retired from acting seven years ago... And due to fraud, it put my wife and I into an eight-figure hole."

Where this came out

Somerhalder, 47, laid it all out to E! News at the Beverage Forum in Manhattan Beach, California, on Tuesday, April 28. He says he walked away from what he calls an insanely lucrative TV career because his business life went sideways and needed his full attention.

How it unraveled

While he was still playing Damon on The Vampire Diaries (which ran from 2009 to 2017), Somerhalder built a clean energy company and poured himself into it. By his own account, he invested heavily and personally guaranteed big loans. Then the dominos fell: he says there was greed and fraud inside that company, fraudulent behavior from its biggest customer, and a broader oil-and-gas slump that slammed the market. He had made promises to lenders he could not keep, and, in his words from the new interview, it all came crashing down.

Digging out of an eight-figure hole

• He says the debt was brutal to climb out of, but credits Nikki Reed for negotiating them out of their worst deal.
• They liquidated what they could: houses, paintings, cars, watches — the works.
• He stepped away from acting about seven years ago to focus on fixing the situation.

The candid hindsight

Somerhalder is blunt about his own choices: he thinks he should have been coasting into retirement after one of the biggest TV shows in the world instead of launching companies that might never pay him. That is a tough lesson, and a very Hollywood one, but his description of the business meltdown is unusually specific — not just vague talk about a bad investment, but allegations of internal and customer fraud plus a well-timed industry downturn that made everything worse.

Credit where it is due

He has publicly praised Reed before for stepping into the fire. In an earlier Instagram tribute, he said she refused to watch him wreck his body, mind, and spirit, assembled a team, and went to the negotiating table to pull them out — a fight he says almost killed her. In the new comments, he doubles down on that: without her, they do not get out.

Life now

These days, Somerhalder and Reed are parents to an 8-year-old daughter, Bodhi, and a 2-year-old son. They just hit 11 years married — they tied the knot on April 26, 2015 — and, at least from the way he tells it, they have finally put that financial fire out.