Maria Shriver just got real about her heartache after her 2011 split from Terminator icon Arnold Schwarzenegger. The journalist told Hoda Kotb about an encounter she had at a convent, and the advice a reverend mother gave her as she sobbed over the split. “I went to a convent, a cloistered convent, and to be in silence and look for advice,” the former First Lady of California, 67, said during the Monday, Feb. 6 podcast episode of Making Space. “And the reverend mother there … I actually have written about this but I haven’t shared it, she said, ‘I think you came here looking for permission.'”
Maria didn’t exactly get the answer she expected. “[She said], ‘You can’t come live here … but you do have permission to go out and become Maria.'” The acclaimed journalist revealed that the experience was emotional. “I was, like, sobbing,” she said. “I had never given myself permission to feel, to be vulnerable, to be weak, to be brought to my knees. And the world did it to me. And then I was like, ‘OK, God, let’s go.'”
It was back in 2011 that Arnold and Maria’s relationship crumbled amid a public scandal. They’d been married 25 years before news hit that the Twins actor had fathered a son with the famous family’s former housekeeper, Mildred Patricia Baena. By the time anyone knew, however, Joseph Baena was already a teenager. Arnold and Maria went their separate ways over the affair, but their divorce wasn’t finalized until 2021.
“Arnold and Maria’s divorce is finally done,” an insider told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY as their ten-year divorce finally wrapped up. “Their lives moved on so long ago, and now that their divorce is officially finalized, there isn’t any specific relief or party to come with it. They have been working with a private judge on all of it. Their family knows what has been going on and that part of their lives is over. They still respect each other, but now they will continue to have their own lives and that’s pretty much it. There is limited to no drama.”