Jesse James: I Can't Cry Over Louis Anymore

Things didn't go so smoothly for Jesse James after he cheated on America's sweetheart Sandra Bullock. He became a pariah in the press, shuttered his West Coast Choppers shop and, although they had begun adopting baby Louis together, Sandra took Jesse's name off of the adoption papers. But Jesse, who's currently plugging his book, American Outlaw, says he's forgiven himself and is determined to move forward for the sake of his three kids Chandler, Jesse Jr. and Sunny.

"I could only cry so much about [Louis] until I have to suck it up and keep a stiff upper lip and realize, Hey, [there are] three kids that I do have," he says in a Nightline interview airing tonight (May 4). "I need to take care of them and not worry about the one that I don't, you know, and I think that's the lesson," he says, adding, "I've never seen Louis since everything [happened]."

In his book, which certainly won't make him any more popular with Sandra's fans, Jesse says he felt trapped in his marriage and that cheating was the only way out. He recalls a simple incident on a trip to Cabo San Lucas with the Blindside actress that triggered his feelings of entrapment – Sandra had asked him to turn down the radio.

“I lowered it. Of course I did,” he writes. “That’s what any husband would do for his high-class wife. She wasn’t some whore in the back of a Daytona nightclub: She was a lady, with gentler tastes,” he continued. “But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help but feel kind of cheated. It was like I was Huckleberry Finn or something, when Widow Douglas decides to adopt him. They were ‘sivilizing’ me, and I didn’t know how to make them stop."

“I couldn’t escape. Not even for an instant. Mentally at a loss, desperate for something to make me feel like I had some sense of freedom, I ran through the list of things I could do to assert my independence over my life. Infidelity, unfortunately, was at the top of the list.”