Shania Twain shared a candid look into her relationship with former husband Robert “Mutt” Lange and long-time friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud after the couple’s affair made headlines and ended her marriage 15 years ago. In Monday’s episode of Armchair Expert, co-hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman acknowledged to their podcast listeners that they were “really nervous” when discussing Lange’s infamous infidelity with Twain. However, the singer reassured them that she wasn’t embarrassed by the scandal that broke in 2008. “It’s not embarrassing,” Twain said. “Once life was going so well, I settled too well into that almost forgetting that you never know what’s around the next corner. That hit me hard,” she continued. “I don’t think that a lot of things that happened to me since my divorce should have been so hard on me. I should have been less naive about life’s ups and downs. Maybe I’m too much, like, ‘That’s all behind me.’” Lange, 74, and Twain, 57, who collaborated on several of her best-selling albums, split in 2008 after the affair allegations surfaced. Following her high-profile divorce from Lange, Twain married Marie-Anne’s ex-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, in 2011.
According to Shepard, 48, the former couple played “musical chairs” by swapping partners, but Twain clarified that she “didn’t really know Fred very well” before the cheating happened. In the aftermath of the betrayal, she found it “a beautiful surprise” to see “how gracefully and graciously he was dealing with navigating the same pain.” In contrast to Twain, who felt “fragile” over the deception, the businessman, 52, seemed “thoughtful. “I did not get close to Fred at all, we didn’t have each other’s numbers. He was not really part of our daily lives because he’s working these crazy hours. A lot of travel [for his] very high-profile company, just suit and tie and so he would be around, like, weekend dinners and stuff like that — we would all eat together and that was it,” she recalled about her relationship with Frédéric before they learned of the cheating. “And then it would be mostly him and Mutt chatting, so I didn’t really know Fred very well. I guess it was a beautiful surprise to then see how gracefully and graciously he was dealing with navigating the same pain.”
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Twain couldn’t believe she was being “so stupid,” but she felt better seeing the same thing happening to Frédéric. “Fred’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know [and] he didn’t know either. That helped me feel better. … Neither of us saw it coming. … I allowed myself to trust too much. … I did let my guard down too much,” the singer continued. “I was angry, though. The anger comes a lot from my childhood too because I’m thinking, ‘Man, you can do anything to me, but if you f— lie, like, right to my f— face? Now, I’m so angry.’ 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.” Adding that “everyone gets what they deserve,” Twain gushed, “I got what I deserve. I got the greatest man on the planet.” According to Twain, Lange, and Marie-Anne are still together, but they do not communicate except to text about their 21-year-old son, Eja. “I never have. I mean, Mutt and I parent well together — for people who don’t talk to each other,” Twain said. “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.”
