Shania Twain’s capacity for forgiveness is still going strong: Asked whether she hates her ex-husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange, for cheating on her with a close friend, the 58-year-old singer said, “Do I hate my ex-husband for making a mistake? No. It’s his mistake. Not my mistake.”
Twain appeared on an episode of Great Company with Jaime Laing podcast released May 28 and opened up about the circumstances around her 2008 divorce, spurred on by the infidelity.
Lange, now 75, was revealed to be having an affair with Marie-Anne Thiébaud, who began working for the country singer as an assistant before they became close friends. Marie-Anne and her then-husband Frédéric Thiébaud spent time socially with Twain and Lange as a group as well.
After the demise of both marriages, Marie-Anne Thiébaud and Lange eventually tied the knot, and Frédéric Thiébaud and Twain became close and eventually began a romantic relationship, marrying in 2011. Both reconfigured couples are still married today.
Twain said in a March 2024 appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that after learning of Lange’s infidelity, she was “uncontrollably fragile.” While commiserating with Frédéric, however, she found he was “so thoughtful about it all … It was not cool with him, but he was smarter about it.”
“Neither of us saw it coming,” she said of the double affair.
Now, she says, she’s learned to forgive her ex-husband for the pain his actions caused her, and moreover, has assigned the blame where it belongs.
“Do I hate my ex-husband for making a mistake? No. It’s his mistake. Not my mistake,” she said. “So sad for him that he made such a great mistake that he has to live with. And I don’t know what that is, but it’s not … That’s not my weight.”
“Forgiveness is in the family of letting go,” she said. “But forgiveness, more specifically for me, anyway, is not about forgetting, necessarily. It’s about understanding the other person, and that might mean that they’re wrong … Maybe you believe forever that whatever they did was wrong.”
It took time to get to that place, though. On the Armchair Expert episode, she admitted that she was furious in the affair’s aftermath.
“The anger comes a lot from my childhood too because I’m thinking, ‘Man, you can do anything to me, but if you fucking lie, like, right to my fucking face? Now, I’m so angry,’” she said. “It wasn’t just, ‘Infidelity happens.’ That was not me. I spun around in that for quite a while. That was the hardest part to let go of really, the anger.”
A representative for Shania Twain did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair‘s request for comment.