Eva Longoria Opens Up About Tony Parker's Infidelity: 'It Was Definitely Not About Me'

By Suzy Byrne | Yahoo! TV

When Eva Longoria's marriage to Tony Parker ended in 2010, the split was splashed across every celebrity magazine because the NBA basketball player had reportedly cheated on the "Desperate Housewives" star – with their mutual friend. Initially Longoria didn't divulge too much about the dramatic end of the relationship, opting to move on with new boyfriend Eduardo Cruz soon after, but now she offers insight into her divorce.

On Thursday night's episode of Lifetime's "The Conversation With Amanda de Cadenet," Longoria was asked what she would tell her 14-year-old self and she quickly replied: "Don't marry that basketball player!"

The 37-year-old star talked about confronting Parker when she discovered he had sent hundreds of inappropriate text messages to Erin Barry, the wife of his San Antonio Spurs teammate Brent Barry. (Erin denied an affair with Parker, but ended her marriage at around the same time.) "I really wanted to provide a pillow for him to say and express why," she said. "Because I really wanted to know why.' I'm not going to judge you. I'm not going to be mad in this moment. I'll be mad later… People say, 'What grace!' And it wasn't that. I really wanted to know, and if you genuinely want to get something out of somebody, you have to not judge."

Whatever answers Parker provided led Longoria to find closure. "It was definitely not about me," she said about his affair. Knowing the truth "didn't make me feel better, but it helped me understand." Adding, "I am so secure in who I am. I really am. And I'm not conceited. I just think, 'Wow, okay, that's the life you want to live.'"

While the end of her marriage did shake her up, she said it didn't consume her – and she didn't give herself a hard time over it. "It wasn't about who he chose," she told de Cadenet. "I had moments of like: 'OK, I'm not sexy enough? I'm not pretty enough? Am I not smart enough?' Then I immediately stopped. 'No, no, no – don't start doing that.' Because you can get stuck in that cycle and you can carry that on to other things."

After a brief split with Cruz, the younger brother of actress Penelope, they're back on. And Longoria is at a turning point in her career as "Desperate Housewives," the show that catapulted her to stardom, goes off the air after an eight-year run. "I'm in a transitional state where I have no rules and I have no boundaries, and I don't really want to put those back up." Noting, "I feel like I am just getting started."