Teri Copley dismisses John Stamos’ claims she cheated with Tony Danza

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Teri Copley is setting the record straight after John Stamos’ claim that she cheated on him with Tony Danza.

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In his recently released memoir If You Would Have Told Me, the Full House alum, 60, writes about his heartbreak after discovering Copley, 62, in bed with Danza, 72, while they were in a relationship in the 1980s.

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“She’s everything I’m looking for in a woman,” he writes about their relationship in the book (per Entertainment Weekly). “She has an adorable daughter, Ashley, from a former relationship, and I love the idea of stepfatherhood. I’m starting to imagine our little family coming together. I’m dumbstruck and goofy in love. I could spend the rest of my life with her. Who knows if I’ll ever find love again? Why not take a chance?”

But Stamos wrote that their romance took a turn for the worst when the model-turned-actress started behaving differently. One day, he decided to surprise the We Got It Made star when he discovered her in bed with the Who’s the Boss alum, calling the moment “my worst nightmare.”

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Stamos initially didn’t recognize the man sleeping with his girlfriend.

“Do I pull him out of the bed by his hair, kick him in the nuts, and beat his a**?” he wondered in his book. “She’s my girlfriend. Who is this piece of s***? He looks familiar. Content bastard. He rolls over, exposing his ripped abs and muscular body.”

It wasn’t until he left that he recalled “the name of my rival.”

Stamos went on to describe the incident to PEOPLE as “physically painful” and “worse than anything.”

“I can’t explain it, but I would’ve rather been punched in the nose again or something because the pain is so overwhelming,” he told the outlet. “Looking back, it’s like, probably, she wasn’t the right girl for me. So seeing him, realizing it was him and stuff, it was hard. I mean, it was awful.”

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But in a 19-minute video posted to YouTube, Copley says that she and Stamos were kaput when she hooked up with Danza, revealing that they split because the actor’s mom, Loretta, told her he had no plans to marry her.

“‘Teri, I know that you love John, but don’t plan on marrying him because he has no intention of marrying you,’” she recalled hearing from Stamos’ mother.

“I remember like it was yesterday,” Copley said of the conversation. “We had the phones on walls and I was twirling the cords … I thought John told her that. She was a mother looking at me like a daughter-type and thinking, ‘I better warn this girl not to get her hopes up’ … she was trying to protect me.”

Copley said the incident with Danza happened “three or four days” after they broke up, but admitted she regretted how they split.

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“I didn’t know how to communicate with him that his mother told me that he had no intention of marrying me,” Copley said of their breakup. “I couldn’t say that … I left him like that.”

She said that she called Danza, who she had previously dated, when she read an interview with him in TV Guide in which he said “Teri Copley was the only girl that he’d ever loved.”

“Did Tony really love me?” she recalled thinking before inviting him over.

Copley said that when Stamos confronted her, she was fully clothed when he knocked on her door.

“He just looked at me … just shook his head and just looked at me like, ‘How could you?’ Well I looked at him and didn’t say anything either,” she said. “I just looked at him like, ‘What do you care? You don’t love me and we’re broken up.’”

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Copley maintains that Stamos didn’t come in her house. “None of (what he wrote) is true,” she says. “He just left … and we went our separate ways.”

But Copley said her and Stamos got back together later on in life after they “ran into each other” when he had split up with Rebecca Romijn.

“We talked, and then he said, ‘What are you doing? Do you want to come over?’” she remembered.

Decades after they had broken up, Copley said she decided to address the real reason for their split.

“I wanted to because I’d grown up a little bit and I wanted to tell him what happened. And so I went to his house and I sat down and I said, ‘John, did you know that your mother called me and told me that you would never marry me?’

“And he looked at me and he said, ‘I didn’t know that, Teri.’ He said, ‘I would have married you. I was madly in love with you.’”

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The exchange left her “broken hearted.”

“I left him without giving him understanding … I just never communicated this misunderstanding,” she continued, fighting back tears.

They went their separate ways, but she says she thought they had a “mutual friendship … and love as friends.” Copley said that she also confronted Loretta about her comments from long ago. “I never held that against her. As the years went on, I realized that instead of protecting me, she was trying to get rid of me. I understood. I completely understood,” she said.

Still, Copley said she “felt sideswiped” by Stamos’ claims of infidelity in his book and “hearing what was being spoken.”

“Seeing him carelessly throw me out there like a dirty dish rag for people to just make fun of and make all these assumptions that was very far from the truth … was “very hurtful and surprising to me,” she said.

“That’s not the John that I ever knew,” she added.

“I wanted to come on and share my side … from my heart — just from my heart, just transparent — what happened as I lived it, and just to say to John that I forgive you,” she ended her message. “I forgive you, John. I prayed for you to get married and have a beautiful family and I’m so happy. I’m so happy for you and I will continue to pray for you and your family, your beautiful wife, your beautiful son.”

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X: @markhdaniell

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