Shania Twain may have forgiven ex-husband Robert “Mutt” Lange for his affair, but she hasn’t completely forgotten.
The singer, 58, opened up during a recent episode of the “Great Company With Jamie Laing” podcast about how she dealt with Lange, 75, cheating on her with her friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud. Twain and Lange tied the knot in 1993 before their 2010 divorce.
“Forgiveness is in the family of letting go,” Twain explained. “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.”
Despite the drama, Twain insisted that she doesn’t “hate” her ex, with whom she shares 22-year-old son Eja. “It’s his mistake. Not my mistake,” she explained. “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 … that’s not my weight.”
Twain and the producer were once one of the music industry’s biggest power couples before their marriage imploded in 2008. Both Lange and Thiébaud denied affair accusations at the time, but they continued dating after the scandal.
During a 2011 interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Twain revealed that Marie-Anne’s then-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, was the person who told her about the infidelity. “I didn’t believe him and I thought for sure he was making it up,” Twain recalled. “I was obviously just in denial on my part.”
Twain and Frédéric’s shared experience ultimately led to the pair developing a romantic connection. “We slowly became very, very good friends,” the “Come on Over” singer told DeGeneres. “We had many months of just trying to make sense of everything, holding each other up. It was a very difficult time emotionally for both of us. I would say he was probably stronger than I was. He was a tremendous support — we were a support to each other — and really found something beautiful in the end and unexpected.”
The duo got engaged in 2010, exchanging vows the following year. Looking back on the ordeal more than a decade later, Twain felt grateful that the difficult experience led her to finding love with Frédéric.
“Mutt and I parent well together — for people who don’t talk to each other,” Twain said on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in February 2023. “We’ll just text. We both love our son so much, so we don’t play any games like that. We have the same priority, we share spaces for him. No nonsense there. … I think everyone gets what they deserve. … I got what I deserve — I got the greatest man on the planet.”
