In July 2020, a few weeks after her last TV show ended, Pauley Perrette sent fans a short, happy note that sounded a lot like a door closing for good.
“Actually I retired after NCIS but BROKE was important, beautiful,” she wrote on Twitter on July 7, 2020. “I did my last dance & am proud of it! Everyone that knows me knew I was retiring right after. I’m proud of my work. I love you guys! I AM FREE!!! (To be the tiny little simple human I am!)”
She signed off with three hashtags: #Plants, #RescuePets and #Books. More than six years later, that still describes her life pretty well.
The short answer: Pauley Perrette‘s life after NCIS is a quiet one, and that’s by choice. She played Abby Sciuto on NCIS from 2003 to 2018 and retired from acting in 2020 after one season of the CBS sitcom Broke. She survived a stroke in 2021, now works behind the camera on documentaries, and shares her home with three rescue dogs. She has said she will never act again.
One Last Dance on CBS
Abby’s goodbye aired in May 2018, after 15 seasons. Pauley could have stopped there. Instead she said yes to one more show, and it turned out to mean a lot to her.
In Broke, she played Jackie, a single mom and bartender whose life gets turned upside down when her sister (Natasha Leggero) and her brother-in-law (Jaime Camil) move in after he’s cut off by his rich father. It aired from April to June 2020, and CBS cancelled it after one season, 13 episodes in all.
Pauley wasn’t bitter about it. When the news broke, she told fans the show “restored my faith in people, in this industry. SO GRATEFUL I worked with this cast & crew Best people I’ve EVER worked with. Healed me. Changed me. Made me whole. So Blessed.”
She was proudest of one episode in particular, “Losing My Religion,” a half-hour about faith in the middle of a primetime sitcom. She called it “the most important half-hour of television that I’ve ever done and the thing I am most proud of.”
Her NCIS exit hadn’t been a happy one behind the scenes. In 2018 she posted that she’d left after what she called “multiple physical assaults” and in 2019 she said she was “terrified” of Mark Harmon. CBS said at the time it had worked with her to resolve a “workplace concern,” and Entertainment Weekly noted in 2024 that Harmon has not commented publicly on the conflict.
Why She Says She’s Done With Acting
For years fans kept asking if she’d come back, and in 2024 she finally explained why the answer is no.
She told HELLO! in a rare interview that acting had been a way to hide. “Being an actor, especially at certain points in my life, was a great escape; it’s like a drug because I didn’t have to be me, I could be somebody else,” she said. “My character didn’t have all of the problems that I was having.”
These days she wants the opposite. “It’s why I only watch documentaries, I want the truth,” she said. “For me, going back to being an actor would be taking away from this life of true authenticity that I’m living 100% of the time.”
She was careful not to sound ungrateful. “I’m not ungrateful for the benefits that it gave to me,” she said. “But I’m a different person now and I want to be here for it – the good and the bad and the painful.”
The Morning She Couldn’t Feel Her Right Side
Part of that “painful” came in September 2021, and she kept it private for a whole year.
On September 2, 2022, she told fans that exactly one year earlier she’d had a massive stroke. She wrote that before it she had lost “so many beloved family and friends, And daddy And then Cousin Wayne,” but she was still standing. “And still so grateful, Still so full of faith, And STILL HERE!” she posted.
A few days later she told Entertainment Tonight how it started. “I woke up and had no feeling on the entire right side of my body,” she said. “At first I thought I had just slept funny.”
She couldn’t feel her own finger touching her face. She called her doctor, who told her to go to the emergency room immediately. She wanted to wait for a phone appointment later that day, but he warned her it was doubtful she’d even live that long.
“Walked into the ER and said, ‘Hey, I can’t feel the right hand side of my body and…’ BAM! OMG! I was on a gurney with a million things stuck in my arms and a bunch of medical people rushing me somewhere,” she remembered. She said she dealt with a few months of “lingering effects” but came through it well because she got help fast.
Her reason for sharing it was simple. “I am doing great and am super healthy now,” she said in a statement to PEOPLE. “Also that you can have a stroke AT ANY AGE, which I did not know. Teenagers can have a stroke. Let’s all learn from this and take good care of ourselves and others.”
Rosie, Bug and Grace
The center of her days now is a house full of rescue dogs. In April 2023 she shared a birthday post for all three of them, Rosie, Bug and Grace. She jokingly calls them her “#NotoriousRBG” rescues.
Bug and Grace are twins, born at the rescue after their pregnant mother was dumped there. Rosie came through the Amanda Foundation as a baby with what Pauley called “a billion health problems,” and Pauley took her back and forth to surgeries (“still am!” she added). “So Happy Birthday to my #rescuedog ANGELS!” she wrote.
Not every goodbye of these years was easy. Donna Bell’s Bake Shop, the Southern-style bakery in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen she started in 2011 with her two best friends and named for her late mother, closed for good in December 2020 after struggling through the pandemic.
Behind the Camera Now
Retired from acting doesn’t mean she stopped working. Pauley is an executive producer on Studio One Forever, a 2023 documentary about the history of a famous gay nightclub in West Hollywood. It fits what she told HELLO!: she only wants the truth now, and documentaries are where she finds it.
She has stayed active in the causes she has cared about for years, too, especially LGBTQ+ rights. She has turned up at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s gala, and in October 2024 she posed with director Marc Saltarelli at a special Studio One Forever screening in West Hollywood.
Still Part of the NCIS Family
She doesn’t do much in public anymore, so when she does show up, fans notice. In June 2026, Brian Dietzen, NCIS’s Jimmy Palmer, posted a photo of the two of them after a night of live music in Los Angeles. “That’s two shows we saw together in a week! Music is the best. So are good friends,” he wrote. (We covered that reunion photo here.)
And Abby hasn’t gone anywhere either. Before she left the lab, Pauley set up two scholarships in Abby’s name, so young people inspired by a goth scientist in pigtails could go and become the real thing. That story is in The Abby Effect.
The Tiny Little Simple Human
Pauley Perrette was born on March 27, 1969, which makes her 57 now. She spent 15 years as one of the most-loved faces on TV. She traded it for plants, books, dogs who need surgeries and the odd concert with an old friend.
It isn’t the comeback story some fans still hope for. By her own account, though, it’s the life she wanted. “I want to be me all the time,” she said, “and it takes a good amount of courage for me to say that to myself but it’s authentically how I feel.”
