Andrea Yates’s Ex: I’ve Never Blamed Her for Drowning Our Five Children
On Saturday’s episode of Oprah: Where Are They Now?, Oprah described Rusty Yates as “a living, breathing example of being able to move forward when the most horrific thing occurs.” He is also one of the most forgiving people on the planet—Yates’s ex-wife Andrea drowned their five children one-by-one in 2001. She was diagnosed with postpartum depression and psychosis, and after being convicted of capital murder, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity on appeal. She is currently at a state mental hospital in Kerville, Texas.
Rusty says Andrea is “wonderful” and that he cares about her still. (They divorced in 2024.)
“It was a horrific act but I’ve Never Blamed her for it,” Rusty told Oprah. “Because I think of it as akin to…suppose I’m driving down the street in our Suburban with our Five Children and I have a heart attack and slide over into oncoming traffic and get in this horrible car accident and I’m the only survivor. Should I be prosecuted for that? Should I be Blamed for that?”
Rusty says that he hasn’t concerned himself too much with exactly what Andrea was thinking while performing the drownings. “For me, it’s sufficient to know she was in a delusional state,” he told Oprah. Andrea reportedly told psychiatrists that she thought Satan was inside of her and that by killing her children, she was also saving them.
Rusty believes that their deep faith somewhat complicated the situation. “We were a pretty religious family, and I think that it’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “It’s like, you kind of want that in a way, you want to develop spiritually, you want to grow, but on the flip side…it can be a heavy burden for some people…I think about her delusions, I think well she was concerned about her own spiritual development, her own standing before God. I think she was more concerned about those things than she would have been otherwise because of that influence.”
Rusty says that he sees Andrea once a year and talks to her by phone once a month.
This asshole has got to be kidding. How kind of him to forgive her but not acknowledge how his actions set this in motion.