Actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger Recalls Crushing Moment He Told His Wife About His Secret Son With Their Housekeeper
Actor and Film producer, Arnold Schwarzenegger said he struggled to tell his then wife, Maria Shriver about his secret son with their housekeeper, Mildred Baena.
In a report by The Sun, Schwarzenegger revealed how the bombshell came out that Joseph Baena, now 25, was his son.
According to the report, the “Terminator” star revealed the story in his forthcoming, three-part Netflix docuseries about how he and Shriver had been in marriage counseling during his time as Governor of California.
Schwarzenegger further revealed that his ex-wife was ‘crushed’ when she found out about the actor’s 1996 affair with the couple’s housekeeper.
Schwarzenegger’s affair with Mildred Baena made the actor-turned-politician a father, but Shriver didn’t find out until 2011 during a couple’s counseling session.
“Maria and I went to counseling once a week,” Schwarzenegger recalled in the docuseries, out June 7.
“In one of the sessions the counselor said, ‘I think today Maria wants to be very specific about something. She wants to know if you are the father of Joseph.’
And I was like – I thought my heart stopped, and then I told the truth. She was crushed because of that. I had an affair in ’96. In the beginning I really didn’t know,”
the actor admitted.
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“I just started feeling the older he got the more it became clear to me and then it was really just a matter of how do you keep this quiet? How do you keep this a secret?”
Talking about his “f— up” often “opens up the wounds again.”
“I think that I have caused enough pain for my family because of my f— up. Everyone had to suffer. Maria had to suffer. The kids had to suffer. Joseph. His mother. Everyone,”
he said in the Netflix doc.
After the revelation, the journalist promptly filed for a divorce. However, Shriver and Schwarzenegger’s property settlement kept the divorce from being finalized until 2021.
The former couple, who were married for 25 years before separating, share four children of their own: Katherine, Christina, Patrick and Christopher.
Schwarzenegger said he and Baena believed she was impregnated by her husband, but he began to suspect otherwise as John grew older.
Schwarzenegger said:
“In the beginning I really didn’t know, but the older he got, the more it became clear to me. It was then just a matter of, ‘How do you keep this quiet?’”
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Schwarzenegger added in the docuseries:
“I am going to have to live with it the rest of my life. People will remember my successes and they will also remember my failures.
This is a major failure. I had failures in the past in my career, but this is a whole different ball game, dimension of failure.”