Maria Shriver Breaks Silence on the Affair That Destroyed Her Marriage

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:02]People will remember my successes and they will also remember those failures.

[00:00:08]It was very tough on my marriage, on my relationship with the kids.

[00:00:14]I have caused enough pain for my family.

[00:00:18]I'm going to have to live with it the rest of my life.

[00:00:21]In 2003, 8 years before [music] Arnold ever said those words, Maria Shriver stood at a podium in a blue suit. Her jaw [music] was set. 16 women had just accused her husband of groping them on movie sets. 16.

[00:00:34]>> [music] >> And Maria looked into the cameras and told America those women were wrong. She knew she was lying. She did it anyway.

[00:00:40]But what Maria has finally started saying out loud at 70 years old is [music] not the story you've been told.

[00:00:46]This isn't really a story about what Arnold did. It's a story about what Maria let happen. To understand why Maria stayed for 25 years, you have to understand [music] what kind of woman she was raised to be. Maria was born into the most famous family in America.

[00:01:01]Her mother was Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President John F. Kennedy. Her uncles were Bobby and Ted. Her father, [music] Sargent Shriver, ran the Peace Corps and ran for Vice President. But the Kennedy name carried something else, something the family did not put on Christmas cards. The Kennedy men were notorious. JFK had Marilyn, Bobby had affairs of his own. Ted Kennedy left a young woman to drown in a car at Chappaquiddick. And the Kennedy women of Maria's generation, her [music] mother, her aunts, her cousins, were trained from childhood to do one thing: stand beside their husbands, [music] smile for the cameras, and never question what happened when the men were away. In that family, denial was [music] not weakness.

[00:01:43]Denial was survival. Maria grew up watching her mother do exactly that, [music] and she watched her aunts do it.

[00:01:49]She watched the most influential women in America perfect the art of looking away. So when Maria met Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977 at a charity tennis tournament. [music] She was a 21-year-old Kennedy princess, and he was a 30-year-old Austrian bodybuilder with a thick accent [music] and impossible ambition. Her mother told her this man would embarrass the family, and Maria did something Kennedy women never did.

[00:02:12]She picked him anyway. She thought she was [music] breaking the cycle, choosing differently than her aunts had done before her. But here is what Maria only admitted recently. She didn't break the cycle, she just married a different version of [music] the same man her aunts had married. And the only thing that had really changed was the accent.

[00:02:28][music] Because here is what nobody talks about.

[00:02:31]Maria didn't marry Arnold blind. They dated for 9 years before he proposed, [music] and during those 9 years Maria knew.

[00:02:38]Friends in Hollywood told her, the tabloids printed the rumors. Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold's co-star on Red Sonja in 1985, [music] was sleeping with him while Maria was planning their Kennedy compound wedding. Maria confronted him, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised it was over. She believed him, or she told herself [music] she believed him, which is not the same thing. She walked down the aisle in April 1986 wearing a Dior gown with an 11-foot train. Oprah Winfrey read a poem at the wedding. [music] Andy Warhol was there. Caroline Kennedy was the maid of honor. And on that day, Maria made a private agreement with herself that [music] would define the next 25 years of her life. She would stay. She would manage him. She [music] would smooth over the rumors, deflect the accusations, and trust that the man she married privately [music] was not the man the world kept whispering about.

[00:03:28]For 15 years, she was good at it. She had four children. [music] She won an Emmy. She built a career that did not depend on Arnold's name. But the thing about denial is [music] it works until it doesn't. And in 1997, while Maria was carrying her [music] fourth child, the lie she had been protecting was about to grow into something she could no longer manage.

[00:03:49]You're going to want to sit down for this part. [music] In early 1997, two women in Arnold Schwarzenegger's life were pregnant at the same [music] time.

[00:03:56]The first was Maria, 41 years old, mother of three, Peabody winner, exhausted, hopeful, carrying her fourth [music] and final child. The second was Mildred Baena, the housekeeper. The woman who had cleaned Maria's home for years. The woman who came to the Brentwood mansion every morning, who had watched Maria's children grow up, who had been at birthday parties and holiday dinners. Both women were carrying Arnold's sons. [music] Christopher Schwarzenegger was born on September 27, 1997.

[00:04:25]Joseph Baena was born on October 2, 1997. Five days apart. Both conceived under the same roof. Both mothers carrying [music] their pregnancies through the same hallways. Both babies coming home to the same house.

[00:04:39]>> [music] >> And here is the detail that tells you everything about what kind of marriage this was. Maria threw the housekeeper [music] a baby shower. She celebrated that pregnancy. She bought gifts. She smiled across the table at Mildred while Mildred carried [music] her husband's child. She did not know. For 14 years, she did not know. For 14 years, [music] Joseph ate breakfast in Maria's kitchen.

[00:04:59]He played with her children in her backyard, swam in her pool, went to the same birthday parties as Christopher, the half-brother born five days before him. [music] And neither boy had any idea. Mildred came to work every day, looked Maria in the face, and said nothing. She accepted the Christmas bonuses. She smiled at the family photos. She watched Maria buy her own son birthday presents. And let's be clear about something [music] the audience already knows in their bones.

[00:05:24]Sexual service is not part of cleaning a house. Mildred was not a victim of circumstance. [music] Every single day for 14 years, she made the same choice to stay, [music] to lie, and to take a paycheck from the woman whose husband she was sleeping with. Two people in that house knew the truth. And neither one of them was Maria. But here is the question that haunts this entire story. The one that women who have been through their own versions of this can't [music] stop asking. How did Maria not see it? Because Joseph looked exactly like Arnold. The jawline, the build, the eyes. He looked more like Arnold [music] than her own four children did. Maria looked at that boy hundreds of times.

[00:06:04]She had to have noticed something, right? [music] The answer is more painful than the lie itself. Maria did notice. She started suspecting [music] around 2008 when Joseph was 11 years old. Other people had noticed, too.

[00:06:17]Friends were whispering, [music] tabloid reporters had started asking questions, and the resemblance was getting harder to explain. But Maria had spent 22 years training herself not to see things.

[00:06:27]Remember what she was raised to do.

[00:06:29]Smile through it, [music] deflect the rumors, manage what she couldn't change, don't ask the questions you don't want answered. Because once you know, you can't un-know. And once you can't un-know, the entire architecture of your life collapses. So she pushed it down.

[00:06:43]She told herself she was imagining things, and reminded herself [music] that Mildred was a trusted member of the household who would never betray her in this way. She did what every Kennedy woman of her generation had [music] been trained to do. She looked away, and she did it for three more years. But denial has a shelf life. By early 2011, the boy [music] was 13, and he looked exactly like Arnold's other children. Other people in the household staff had started talking, and Maria [music] had just lost both of her parents. Her mother Eunice in 2009, and her father Sargent in January 2011. And something inside her had shifted.

[00:07:16]>> [music] >> Her parents were gone. The two people whose approval had governed her life since childhood. The two people for whom she had to keep the marriage looking perfect. [music] For the first time in 25 years, Maria Shriver did not have an audience to perform for. In one afternoon, [music] she pulled Mildred aside. Maria asked the question directly. Is Joseph Arnold's son? Mildred didn't lie anymore. She broke down and told Maria the truth that had been hidden [music] for 14 years. She walked upstairs, sat on the edge of her bed, and cried [music] so hard she could not breathe.

[00:07:48]What she was crying about was not the affair. The affair in some buried part of her, she had already accepted years ago. Brigitte Nielsen, the rumors, grope the Kate, the [music] whispers from set after set. Maria had been managing Arnold's infidelity since before they were married. What broke her was the 14 [music] years, the baby shower, the Christmas dinners, the moments she had looked at that boy and felt something strange [music] in her chest she could not name. The voice in her head she had been silencing [music] since 2003. The press conference where she stood in a blue suit and defended a man who already had a son with the woman cleaning their bathrooms.

[00:08:23]>> [music] >> That was what she was crying about. The lie was never Arnold's. The lie was hers. And this is where Maria's story breaks from every celebrity divorce you've ever seen. She did not write a tell-all book. She did not give a vengeful interview to Oprah. She did not turn her four children against their father. She did not destroy Arnold publicly the way every legal expert told her she could. [music] Instead, at 70 years old, she did something almost no public woman ever does. She turned the camera around. She stopped talking about what Arnold had done. And she started telling the truth about herself. In recent interviews and in [music] her writing, Maria has said the part she still cannot forgive herself for is not the [music] marriage. It is the press conference. October 2003, just days before the gubernatorial election, the Los Angeles Times [music] ran the story.

[00:09:10]16 women on the record accusing Arnold of grabbing them, groping them, humiliating them on movie sets going back [music] decades. Maria did not go quiet. She held a press conference, wore that blue suit, looked into the cameras, and she told America that her husband was a good man, and those women were wrong. She helped him win the election.

[00:09:30]She helped him serve [music] two terms as governor. She helped him build the political legacy that he carried into the years he was [music] still sleeping with the housekeeper down the hall. 16 women, many of them were never believed [music] because of what Maria said that day. Maria has never publicly apologized to those 16 women, but people who know her say it is the regret she carries the heaviest, heavier than the affair, heavier than the housekeeper, heavier than the 14 years, because the affair was Arnold's choice. The housekeeper was Mildred's choice. But the press conference, that was Maria's. She knew.

[00:10:03]Some part of her already knew. And she chose her marriage over those women.

[00:10:07]This is the part Maria has finally started saying out loud at 70 years old.

[00:10:12]That the person who lied to her the longest, the [music] worst, in the most damaging way of all, was not Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was the woman she saw in the mirror every morning for 25 years. Maria filed for divorce [music] 3 days after Mildred confessed. The divorce took 10 years to finalize. 10 years. One of the longest celebrity divorces in history. Arnold paid her over $400 million.

[00:10:36]>> [music] >> Half of everything they had built because there was no pre-nup. Under California community property law, every Terminator paycheck and every real estate deal Arnold had touched during their marriage was Maria's [music] too.

[00:10:47]But Maria did not take the public revenge tour she could have taken. She did not write the tell-all. She did not destroy him in court. She did not raise her four children to hate their father.

[00:10:57]Instead, she [music] started the Sunday Paper, a weekly newsletter about gratitude, faith, and starting over. She published two bestselling [music] books, I've Been Thinking in 2018 and Radical Acceptance in 2022, both about the slow work of rebuilding a life after the foundation collapses. She founded the Women's Alzheimer's Movement after her father's death. [music] She returned to NBC as a special anchor.

[00:11:19]She dropped Schwarzenegger from her professional name. She is just Maria Shriver now. Joseph Baena, the boy at the center of the story, grew up to look exactly like his father. [music] He became a fitness trainer and an actor, just like Arnold. He has spoken publicly about the slow process of building relationships with his half siblings, relationships [music] that by all reports exist now in their own quiet way. And in 2023, Arnold finally said the words on camera that Maria had been waiting more than a decade to hear. He said it was the biggest failure of his life. He said he screwed up. He said he was sorry. But Maria's story isn't really about Arnold's apology. [music] It's about something every woman watching this video already understands.

[00:12:02]If you have ever defended a man you suspected was lying, you already know what Maria felt. If you have ever stood beside a husband and [music] smiled for a camera while something inside you screamed, you already know. If you have ever told [music] yourself for years that you were imagining things, that the rumors couldn't be true, that the woman in your house was just a friend, [music] you already know what those 25 years cost her. Maria Shriver was not [music] stupid, and she was not naive. She was a Kennedy woman raised by Kennedy women who had been raised [music] to look away. She did exactly what every woman in her family had done before her. She protected [music] the marriage instead of protecting herself. And the only difference between Maria and her aunts [music] is that Maria eventually stopped. So here is the question I want you to answer in the comments. Should Maria have left him in 2003, [music] the moment those 16 women came forward, or did she leave it exactly the right time on her own terms when she was finally ready? Some of you are going to say she waited way too long, that she enabled him, that 16 women paid the price for her silence. Others are going to say what she did took more strength than leaving, that staying, [music] surviving it, and walking away with her dignity intact at 55 is its own kind of victory. Drop your answer below. I read every comment, and if you want the full picture of what Arnold did during [music] those 25 years, the women before Mildred, the housekeeper revelation Maria saw coming for years, and what Maria privately revealed at 70 about the moment her marriage ended forever. We covered all of it in another video on this channel.

[00:13:33]>> [music] >> It's on screen right now. Click it before you leave. Hit subscribe so the next story lands in your feed.

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