14 DAY TRIAL // In 2011, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 25-year marriage to Maria Shriver, the mother of his 4 children, imploded when news broke that he had been having an extramarital affair with the family’s housekeeper, with whom he also had a child.
It was one of the biggest scandals in showbiz that year, tarnishing Schwarzenegger’s reputation more than anything else he’d done before. Looking back, the only thing he regrets is putting Maria through this, deceiving her and tossing their marriage down the drain.
Divorce was Arnold’s “biggest setback and failure”
Now that his political career is over, Arnold is back to work as an action movie star. Given the interest in aging action heroes, he can’t complain of not getting enough work, though, truth be told, he could probably benefit from more box office success and more critical praise of his endeavors.
His next outing in theaters is “Terminator: Genisys,” which will hopefully reboot the iconic franchise. He reprises his old and very famous role, but he also appears in it as a digitally youngified version of it.
So Arnold has been very busy promoting this film: the other day, he stopped by Howard Stern’s radio talk show, with TooFab reporting that things took a very serious and personal turn.
Since the 2011 scandal, Arnold has rarely spoken about what happened, and never went into too many details. He’s taken a severe beating in the press for it, so who can really blame him for not wanting to open that old can of worms again?
As it turns out, he blames himself too for everything that happened - though, for the record, he believes seeing a couples’ therapist at Maria’s suggestion was perhaps a bad idea because it drove the final nail in their marriage’s coffin.
“I had personal setbacks, but this was, without any doubt, the biggest setback and the biggest failure,” he says of the divorce. “Without any doubt. Not only failure, but you feel like, ‘I'm to blame for it. It was me that screwed up.’ And you can't point the finger at anyone else. So yeah, I was disappointed in it. It's always easy to be smart in hindsight. The thing was how do you make the best of that situation?”
He and Maria have found a way and it consisted in focusing on their 4 children and trying to put their best interest above their own.
Arnold and his 5 kids have a “special” relationship
Even though he put his family through hell, Arnold has managed to rebuild whatever bridges were burned in the cheating scandal. All his 4 children with Maria sent him handwritten notes and personalized gifts on Father’s Day this year, so yes, he is a very lucky man. He knows it.
As for his 5th child, the boy he has with Mildred the housekeeper, Arnold doesn’t say much. Still, it’s a known fact that they are in contact, and he swears he’s doing the best he can to do right by him.
The boy is “terrific” and very understanding, the Hollywood star tells Stern. He got caught in a very bad situation, but they’re working it out one day at a time.