Gossip Girl: Gabrielle UnionActress Gabrielle Union comes clean about her painful divorce, why men are scared to ask her out and those pesky Derek Jeter romance rumors.

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There is nothing a mom hates more than being left out on news about her kids. So you can’t blame Gabrielle Union’s mother for calling her up a few months ago to ask about her new boyfriend, Derek Jeter—after all, Mom needed to know if she should set a place for the Yankee at the Easter dinner table. “I said, ‘Mom, how many times have I told you that I would love to say I’m having an amazing relationship with Mr. Jeter, but it’s just not true?’ ” says Gabrielle. Ah, the gossips strike again. But at least Derek is actually a friend of Gabrielle’s—unlike Kid Rock, who she’s also been linked to. “The poor thing just sat next to me at a dinner on his birthday and the next thing you know, we’re supposedly having this love affair.”

Hey, take the rumors as a side effect of just how successful this actress is. ­Gabrielle is at the top of her game: The Neutrogena spokesmodel with the flawless skin and pearly whites holds her own beside Eddie Murphy in the new alien comedy Meet Dave (out July 11). She also recently wrapped the much-hyped music bio Cadillac Records, co-starring Beyoncé Knowles and Adrien Brody, and had a memorable run last season as Wilhelmina’s crazy, fire-starting sister on Ugly Betty.

Still, “I’d rather they circle my cellulite than say I’m hooking up with someone I’m not,” Gabrielle, 35, says with a laugh. “I haven’t had a serious relationship in two years, but to read these blogs and gossip columns, you’d think I have a very illustrious dating history. I think it’s scaring off regular guys because they believe they can’t compete with a World Series winner or a rock star. I just want to tell them there’s nothing to compete with.”

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Well, her ex-husband was a 220-pound pro football player. Gabrielle and Chris Howard, former running back for the Jacksonville Jaguars, divorced in April 2006, a month shy of their fifth anniversary. “In Hollywood, marriages are kind of expected to fail. The fact we made it nearly five years was seen as a victory,” she says with an air of incredulity. “But failure has never been in my vocabulary, so to fail on a personal level, and in such a public way, was terrible. I couldn’t help but feel like I failed myself, my family and Chris.”

Even though her divorce from Chris, 33, was a trying time, she admits it could have been much worse. “Chris and I became closer than we were when we were a couple,” she says. “We never turned on each other, like a lot of couples do, either. Instead, we had these painfully brutal conversations about what we each did wrong. It’s so easy to point the finger at someone else, but you also have to accept blame for the messed-up things you did. We were both like, ‘Damn, I really jacked this up!’ ”

Gabrielle faults the end of their marriage on the two of them “forgetting about basic kindness,” she says. “It’s as simple as remembering what you were taught in kindergarten: be nice, share, compromise. But all of that flew out the window.”

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Now the actress, who isn’t dating anyone seriously, says she’s just looking for a nice guy—someone she could watch a game with when she’s hanging at her favorite Manhattan sports bar, the 40/40 Club, when she’s in town every couple of months, or someone who shares her love of Red Lobster, which is right down the street from her L.A. home.

Remaining positive, Gabrielle says she is definitely open to getting married again. “I’m not anti-marriage. I was just anti that marriage,” she explains. And, even though Gabrielle, a middle child, has never been one to ooh and aww over babies, she sees them in her future, too. “In the next five years,” she clarifies. “Right now, I don’t have the same urges as other women when they see a baby. When I see children, I see responsibilities, which I don’t think I’m quite ready for. I feel the same about puppies. They’re cute for a second, but there’s a lot of responsibility involved.”

However, she does have three dogs: Bubba, a mastiff–American bulldog mix; Pink, a pit bull–Dalmatian mix; and Bobby Hurley (named for the basketball player), a Maltese. “The difference is, they’re at the kennel right now,” she says. “When you want a break from dogs, and you take them to the kennel to the stars, no one thinks you’re a bad pet owner. But when you have kids, you can’t drop them off for three weeks without someone calling Child Protective Services!” Seriously, though, Gabrielle feels that she’ll be a hands-on mom one day. No nanny for her. “Basically, because no one can do anything as good as I can—at least in my eyes,” says Gabrielle. “Of course, I’d play the martyr every step of the way, too.”

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She makes jokes about her strength and what she is and isn’t capable of, but Gabrielle’s been through a lot in her 35 years—including a devastating attack. As a 19-year-old college student, she was raped at gunpoint and beaten beyond recognition during a night shift working at a Payless ShoeSource. “I blanked out and had an out-of-body experience, like I was hovering above seeing this ­horrible thing happen to someone else—not me,” says Gabrielle, who got through the trauma partly because of an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show she had seen days before on victims of violent crimes. After her ordeal, she immediately turned to UCLA’s Rape Treatment Center. “It gave me my life back,” she says. “My dignity and self-esteem were gone and they helped me find them again. That’s why I now lobby for state legislatures across the country to help raise funds and awareness for rape crisis centers, and I speak to college girls about what happened to me. My goal is to never hear the words ‘me too’ from someone after I say ‘I was raped.’ ”