Inside Jennie Garth’s Love Life: From Peter Facinelli to Dave Abrams and Beyond
Three marriages, one tell-all: Jennie Garth is putting her past on the page in I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention, out April 14, 2026, promising never-before-shared revelations from her first union with musician Daniel B. Clark to the romances that followed.
Jennie Garth has a new memoir landing April 14, 2026, and she is not shy about digging into her love life. If you grew up with Beverly Hills, 90210, you probably think you know the beats. You do not. She fills in a lot of blanks, and a few of them are surprising.
The quick version
- Early 90s: On-screen sparks with Luke Perry on 90210; they never dated, but she now calls him her first love.
- 1994–1996: First marriage to musician Daniel B. Clark.
- 1996: Meets Peter Facinelli while filming An Unfinished Affair.
- 1997: First daughter, Luca Bella, is born (yes, before they got married).
- January 2001: Marries Peter Facinelli.
- 2002 and 2006: Daughters Lola Ray and Fiona arrive.
- 2012: They announce their split; 2013: divorce finalized with joint custody.
- 2012–2013: Dates Big Gigantic drummer Jeremy Salken.
- 2014: Meets Dave Abrams on a blind date; 2015: they get married.
- 2017: Separate after fertility struggles and miscarriages; he files for divorce.
- 2019: Reconcile and dismiss the divorce; they have stayed together since.
- 2026: Memoir I Choose Me: Chasing Joy, Finding Purpose, and Embracing Reinvention arrives April 14.
Luke Perry
Garth and Luke Perry never officially dated, but their Kelly-and-Dylan era on 90210 bled into real feelings for her. She says their on-screen intimacy tricked her heart a bit back then, and looking back, she still thinks there was something genuine between them beyond the scripts.
"I do think he was my first true love," she told People in April 2026. "Now looking back, I'm like, 'You were just like every other girl in the world.' Everyone imagined him as their first true love."
Daniel B. Clark
Marriage number one was short and quiet by Hollywood standards: Garth married musician Daniel B. Clark in 1994; they split in 1996.
Peter Facinelli
Garth met Peter Facinelli on the 1996 TV movie An Unfinished Affair. They welcomed their first daughter, Luca Bella, in 1997, married in January 2001, then had Lola Ray in 2002 and Fiona in 2006. After more than a decade married, they announced their separation in 2012 and finalized the divorce in 2013, agreeing to joint custody.
In her April 2026 People interview, Garth is candid about how hard that breakup hit her. She says she carried the pain for years until she realized it was bleeding into everything else. Letting go meant choosing to forgive him, not because it erased the past, but because she was tired of living inside it.
Jeremy Salken
Post-split, pre-divorce-final, Garth dated Jeremy Salken, the drummer for Big Gigantic, from 2012 to 2013.
Dave Abrams
Garth met actor Dave Abrams on a blind date in 2014 and married him in 2015. Things went sideways in 2017 after multiple rounds of IVF and miscarriages. She admits she pushed hard to have a child with him because he was younger and everyone around him seemed to be starting families. The stress broke them; they separated, and he moved to file for divorce. She says she found out about his plan from a TMZ article, which is a very modern kind of heartbreak. Two years later, they worked their way back to each other, reconciled in 2019, and tossed the divorce filing.
Where this all lands now
The memoir ties all of this together: the crash-and-burns, the reconciliations, the kids, the nostalgia, and the stuff she says she has never shared before. If you watched her grow up on your TV, the timeline finally gets a proper, human-sized explanation.