14 DAY TRIAL // Hollywood was stunned to learn that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver were divorcing after 26 years as husband and wife, but even more so when word got out that he’d fathered a child with the family’s housekeeper. More details on the dissolution of the marriage have now emerged online.
Arnold is now getting ready to promote his new book, “Total Recall: My Unbelievable True Life Story” but also to make his comeback to action films.
As such, he’s expected to do the media rounds soon enough and, hopefully, he’ll also take questions on his divorce and how he and Maria decided it was the only option left for them.
The Daily Beast has a very damning piece on how things played out in the Schwarzenegger household at the time, including how Arnold refused to do therapy to see if divorce could be avoided, and how he bragged to friends he’d be getting a new, younger girlfriend now that he’s single.
“Family members and friends say Maria told them that despite Arnold’s betrayal, she loved her husband still and she believed in marriage. Maria was a Kennedy, and she was a Shriver, brought up never to bring shame to the family. Beyond that, she was a shrewd political woman. Like Hillary Clinton at the time of Monica Lewinsky, Maria was willing to consider standing by Arnold’s side,” The Beast writes.
Maria told Arnold that she wanted to weather the storm together but he would hear nothing of it. He refused to go to therapy and even asked her to move out of the house.
In a matter of days, Maria had moved into a hotel room, where her children would visit often – but never Arnold, who acted as if getting caught with the affair and illegitimate child had sealed the fate of his marriage for good.
“If he had character, he would have done what had to be done,” a family member says for the aforementioned publication.
“He would have gone to therapy and truly faced what he had done. He probably would have gotten Maria back if he had done that stuff. She truly loved him. She was looking for a basis to go back, but he was incapable of giving it to her,” the same insider explains.
If anything, Arnold was happy (for lack of a better term) that he finally got caught.
“I think things will work out OK with Maria, but if they don’t, I’m getting me a 20-year-old honey,” one of his friends says he heard him say in the aftermath of the cheating scandal.
The Beast goes on to paint Arnold as an aging star who still believes comeback is possible after becoming the epitome of extramarital affairs, a delusional man who thinks he can just sweep the scandal under the rug and pick up where he left.
The entire piece is here.