Brian Wilson's Wife Melinda Ledbetter Dead At 77

Melinda Ledbetter, Brian Wilson’s second wife, died Tuesday morning, Wilson announced on social media. Ledbetter was 77.

“My heart is broken,” the Beach Boys co-founder wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Melinda, my beloved wife of 28 years, passed away this morning. Our five children and I are just in tears. We are lost. Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career.”

“She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart. She was my anchor. She was everything for us. Please say a prayer for her,” he said in another post.

Wilson married Ledbetter in 1995 after they met while she was working at a car dealership. They went on to adopt five children while they were together.

“I remember meeting her at her dealership, Cadillac, and I said, ‘God, she’s a pretty girl. That’s a pretty girl,’” Wilson told “Nightline” in 2015. “I just said to myself, ‘God, I think I’ll see her again sometime.’”

Ledbetter, who became Wilson’s manager in 1999, is often credited with getting him healthy and out of the controversial “24-hour therapy” care he was under with his psychotherapist, Eugene Landy.

In the 2014 biopic “Love and Mercy,” which is about Wilson and his struggles with mental illness, Ledbetter was portrayed by Elizabeth Banks.