Eve Buckland
The former spouses of TJ Holmes and Amy Robach are now dating – one year after the TV stars sparked uproar with their scandalous romance.
But, the shock spouse switch-up is not the first time betrayed partners have found comfort in one another – as Shania Twain‘s lasting love with husband Frédéric Thiébaud has proved.
The pair sparked up a surprise relationship in 2008 after Shania’s husband Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange had an affair with her former best friend Marie-Anne Thiébaud – the wife of Frédéric.
The pair subsequently tied the knot in 2011 and have been happily wed ever since.
Now, as Marilee Fiebig, the ex-wife of Holmes, and Robach’s former husband Andrew Shue, grow closer in the wake of their heartbreak, DailyMail.com looks back at Shania’s shock romance…
Shania Twain, 58, wed music producer Robert ‘Mutt’ Lange, 75, back in 1993 – after he heard her original songs from her debut album.
He offered to work with her and the pair cultivated a relationship on the phone for months before their fateful first meeting in June 1993 at Nashville’s Fan Fair.
Just six months later they wed on December 28 1993 and were considered one of Hollywood’s strongest couples.
They went onto welcome a son, Eja, in 2001.
However, cracks began to appear in the marriage. The couple had moved to Switzerland for a simpler life away from the limelight after the country star had seen her career sky-rocket to become a best selling cross-over artist.
Shania and Marie-Anne were very close friends. They had met when Marie-Anne was employed to be the assistant and interpreter of Lange.
Shania found out about the affair between Lange and her best friend the day after he asked her for a divorce.
She previously said of the moment: ‘I had a total panic attack. I just told her that she was a bad person – that’s all I could get out!’
‘When I left her, I thought, “You’re such a wimp, you coward!”‘
In the days following the split in 2008, Shania said she went into a tailspin.
‘I was ready to die’, she wrote in her memoir From This Moment On and said she barely ate or slept.
She says she even wrote an email to Marie-Anne to beg for her husband back writing: ‘I am dying, and I can’t take it any more. This is killing me. Have mercy’.
But although she pleaded – she never got an explanation or any details about the relationship from either her husband or Marie-Anne.
What had made the pain worse is that she had confided in Marie-Anne about the trouble in her marriage and her fears that she thought Lange was having an affair.
But Marie-Anne dismissed Shania’s concerns and told her she had nothing to worry about, making her feel ‘foolish’ for even suggesting it.
When she finally plucked up the courage to ask her if something was going on between her and her husband Marie-Anne said to her tearfully: ‘I’m heartbroken that you would even think that I was hiding something from you.’
But Frederic was the one to finally tell Shania the truth.
He informed her that he had found phone bills, hotel information and receipts and had remembered seeing a garter belt and lingerie in luggage for a trip she was taking to be ‘alone’.
In the book Shania wrote: ‘I was disgusted that another woman’s lust for a lifestyle upgrade was worth the devastation of my family’.
In the book Shania wrote: ‘I was disgusted that another woman’s lust for a lifestyle upgrade was worth the devastation of my family’.
But in what has turned out to be a ‘twisted’ piece of irony. Shania and Marie-Anne’s ex-husband turned to each other during their time of need, finding friendship which turned into love.
The couple eventually married in January 2011 in an intimate beach ceremony in Puerto Rico – six months after Shania’s divorce was finalized.
She said: ‘I don’t take any day for granted any more. Fred has give me a new lease on love.’
Shania said she was initially dubious about getting together with her love rival’s ex-huband and ‘worried about what people would think of the relationship’.
But Thiebaud won over Shania little by little and calls his bride, ‘Sunshine’.
He has surprised her with romantic gestures like flying her to a Swiss glacier and renting out a movie theatre for a intimate dinner for two.
‘To express my love, words are not enough. I’m more in love with her every day’, Thiebaud said.
Earlier this year Shania revealed Lange is still in a relationship with Thiébaud – 15 years after their affair was exposed.
Speaking on the Armchair Expert podcast with co-hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, the Man! I Feel Like A Woman songstress said she and Lange co-parent son Eja, now 22, but never speak.
She said: ‘Mutt and I parent well together — for people who don’t talk to each other. 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.
Confirming Lange was still with Thiébaud, she spoke about the beginning of her relationship with Frédéric, branding the romance a ‘beautiful surprise’ and ‘what she deserved.’
She quipped about the couple ‘playing musical chairs’ when they swapped, but said she ‘didn’t really know Fréd very well’ before their respective splits.
She said she saw ‘how gracefully and graciously he was dealing with navigating the same pain’ after the affair was exposed, and while she felt ‘fragile’, he seemed ‘thoughtful.’
She said: ‘Fréd’s so smart. This is one of the smartest people I know, [and] he didn’t know [about the affair] either. That helped me feel better. I got what I deserve. I got the greatest man on the planet.’
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