Shania Twain admitted that her relationship with her ex-husband Mutt Lange is very limited after he left her for her then-best friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud back in 2008 in a new interview with Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast. The singer gave an update on where she stands with both her former best friend and ex-husband in the episode, released on Monday, February 27.
The country star, 57, and producer, 74, were married from 1993, until 2008 when Mutt admitted that he had been having an affair with Shania’s friend, and they split up. After the divorce was finalized in 2010, Shania got engaged to Marie’s former husband Frédéric Thiébaud, and the pair wed in 2011, and they’ve been together ever since. At one point, Shania spoke about how infuriated she was when everything happened. “I was angry, though. The anger comes a lot from my childhood too,” 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.”
Later in the interview, the singer revealed that Mutt and Marie were still together all these years later. Shania said that she and her ex only have a texting relationship now, because of their son Eja, 21. “Mutt and I parent well together for people who don’t talk to each other,” she said. “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.”
Earlier in the interview, she admitted that the scandal was a shock to her and “hit [her] hard” and affected her even afterward. “Once life was going so well, I settled too well into that almost forgetting that you never know what’s around the next corner,” she said. “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.”
Besides opening up about her relationship with Mutt, Shania also revealed that she hadn’t been very close with Fred before she split up with Mutt. She admitted that her now-husband was “smarter” about the way he went about the breakup from his ex. “I guess it was a beautiful surprise to then see how gracefully and graciously he was dealing with navigating the same pain,” she said. “Fred’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know [and] he didn’t know either. That helped me feel better.”
Besides the affair, Shania also detailed how she first met Mutt when he helped her work on her second album The Woman In Me, while also speaking about her career. All these years later, Shania and Fred are still together, and it’s clear their relationship is going strong.