Shania Twain doesn’t ‘hate’ ex-husband for affair: ‘It’s his mistake’

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Shania Twain insists she doesn’t “hate” her ex-husband Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange for having an affair with her onetime close friend Marie-Anne Thiebaud in 2008.

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Speaking about Lange’s betrayal during the latest episode of the Great Company with Jamie Laing podcast, Twain, 58, said she has learned to forgive her former partner.

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“Do I hate my ex-husband for making a mistake? No. It’s his mistake. Not my mistake,” said Twain, who shares a 22-year-old son with Lange.  “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.”

Twain and Lange were married from 1993 to 2008 with the Canadian country star breaking things off with him when she discovered he had been unfaithful with Thiebaud.

The five-time Grammy winner eventually moved on, marrying Thiebaud’s jilted hubby, Frederic Thiebaud, in 2011.

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When Laing asked Twain about forgiveness, she said the emotion “is not about forgetting.”

“Forgiveness is in the family of letting go. 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,” she replied.

Twain went on to add that her stepfather, Jerry, who was abusive emotionally and physically to her as a child, is someone she can “totally forgive.”

“My father’s a better example, OK, because this is someone that I totally forgive,” Twain said. “I understand that he wasn’t well, that you don’t act certain ways unless there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong with your stability. I feel bad that he had those problems … So, it’s very hard to hate or not be able to forgive somebody that you believe.”

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In a 2020 interview with Postmedia, Twain credited Lange with helping take her career to new heights when they worked together on 1995’s The Woman in Me record.

“I had never met anyone like Mutt before and he took (my) songwriting to a whole other level. He was very demanding, but in a very good way for me,” she said at the time. “He saw the potential in the songs. When I think about making this album, it was the real launch of Shania Twain — the singer-songwriter.”

That same year, she told PEOPLE she was “grateful I found the faith and courage to love again.”

“When you have a great loss, you lose faith; you get very discouraged. I’m sure a lot of people say, ‘I’m never going to love again. I never want to fall in love again.’ Songs have been written about that. I’m really glad that that got turned around for me, and that’s what this relationship is.”

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Last year, the You’re Still The One singer told Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast that she had no attraction to Frederic while she was with Lange.

“I did not get close to Fred at all, we didn’t have each other’s numbers,” Twain said (per PEOPLE). “He was not really part of our daily lives because he was 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 told Shepard and his co-host Monica Padman that Frederic handled the news of his wife’s treachery much better than she did at the time.

“He was so thoughtful about it all… It was not cool with him, but he was smarter about it. I was uncontrollably fragile over it, which I had never felt before ever because I thought for once I was stable. I really believe that I’m safe, so that really devastated me I think more than any other instability I’ve ever felt.”

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Navigating that pain with her now husband made the experience of Lange’s betrayal easier to manage.

“Fred’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know, he didn’t know either,” said Twain. “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,” she said.

Twain said the hardest thing to let go of in the years following their split was her anger.

“I was angry … The anger comes a lot from my childhood too because I’m thinking, ‘Man, you can do anything to me, but if you f—ing lie, like, right to my f—ing 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.”

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But 16 years after their breakup, the two have very little communication, speaking only via text over matters involving their son Eja.

“Mutt and I parent well together — for people who don’t talk to each other,” she 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.”

Twain said her story with Lange ended the way it was meant to. “I think everyone gets what they deserve … I got what I deserve, I got the greatest man on the planet.”

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