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True fact: when I was in primary school, I was scheduled to give a speech at a school assembly that just so happened to be on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign trail when he was running for governor. I didn’t really understand who he was, all I knew was that someone Famous and Interesting was coming to hear me speak. But Arnold did not show up, and I was very sad. I guess he had more important things going on. It did make me very biased against him when I was young, and I still think he has some shady things in his past, even if he’s been on the right side of history in recent years. So I wouldn’t call myself a fan overall, even if there are aspects of his legacy I respect. But now he has a docuseries on Netflix coming out and I just might watch it. Mostly because in the docuseries, he is sharing stories about his personal life, including the jaw-dropping moment when Maria Shriver, his wife, confronted him about whether or not he had fathered a son with the family housekeeper, Mildred Baena. People Magazine reveals how it went down:
Maria confronted him in a counseling session: “Maria and I went to counseling once a week,” he remembered in the docuseries, “and in one of the sessions the counselor said, ‘I think today Maria wants to be very specific about something. She wants to know if you are the father of Joseph.’ And I was like— I thought my heart stopped, and then I told the truth.”
“‘Yes, Maria, Joseph is my son,'” he recalled telling her. “She was crushed because of that. I had an affair in ’96. In the beginning I really didn’t know. I just started feeling the older he got the more it became clear to me and then it was really just a matter of how do you keep this quiet? How do you keep this a secret?”
Talking about it brings up old wounds: Schwarzenegger said he feels “reluctant talking about it is because every time I do it opens up the wounds again.”I think that I have caused enough pain for my family because of my f— up. Everyone had to suffer. Maria had to suffer. The kids had to suffer. Joseph. His mother. Everyone,” he said in the Netflix doc.
Arnold loves his son Joseph: “It was wrong what I did. But I don’t want to make Joseph feel that he is not welcomed in this world — because he is very much welcomed in this world,” he said. “I love him and he has turned out to be an extraordinary young man.”
Credit where credit is due: I’m glad that Arnold told the truth when Maria confronted him. Keeping the affair and his son a secret for fourteen years was terrible, which he acknowledges. But it could have been much worse if he had denied everything, and a lot of people do, even when the truth is undeniable. When all of this was initially in the news, I missed out on the details. I was in college and much more invested in gossip relating to One Direction, truthfully.
Anyway, this story made me think of the Caroline Calloway quote from last week about how if you have one scandal, it defines you, but if you have many scandals, people forget them all. In addition to his family drama, Arnold has also had political scandals ranging from conflicts of interest to sexual assault allegations. He also didn’t have the best voting record as governor–though compared to the people currently running the Republican Party he seems remarkably sane. But I feel like a lot of people have forgotten about the unsavory aspects of his legacy.
The fact that Arnold owns up to the pain he caused everyone around him with the affair makes me think he is either smart enough to say the right things, or truly feels bad about what he did. That’s why I want to watch this series now–I wonder if we’ll be able to tell how sincere he is.
photos credit: Netflix, Dennis Van Tine / Avalon and Getty
I mean, the kid looked just like him, absolute dead ringer. I don’t think he “got away with it” for very long, Maria just didn’t want to acknowledge it until she was ready. But everyone with eyes had to know.
💯
Yeah, didn’t the housekeeper live on their property, and thus Joseph was raised there? HOW could he possibly have thought no one would notice, he looks so much like his father. I can’t believe he made Maria ask, but good for him that he didn’t lie, I guess.
I wonder if Arnold’s docuseries will be labeled attention seeking and word salad like the Sussex’s?
The rotten thing about cheating isn’t the sex, it’s that you’re tricking someone who you supposedly love. Perpetrating that sort of deception in a person’s own home seems especially cruel.
…well, it’s the sex too, at least when it’s unprotected.
Conceiving a child outside your marriage means you’ve also potentially exposed your wife to STI’s that could literally end her life or fertility and permanently alter her body (even the “treatable” ones can lead to life-threatening infections if you don’t have symptoms and didn’t know you should’ve been testing; ask me how I know).
Lying and tricking is awful too, but it’s the callous disregard for your partner’s bodily autonomy and physical health is unforgivable.
Good observations, all of the above.
Here’s another thought to throw on the pile: did the housekeeper really consent to Arnold’s advances and the sex? Just because he did right by his son in the end doesn’t mean the details around his son’s conception aren’t worthy of critical examination.
No kidding. It seems like quite an power imbalance there.
She did consent and it was multiple times, like three or four from memory. She gave an interview with a photo spread with Joseph when the story first broke, after the media attention had settled down. Before that she never tried to sell her story and actually they went into hiding with relatives outside LA when the story first broke.
Maria confronted her (think it was before she confronted Arnold) and she admitted it and they both cried and Mildred got to her knees and begged for forgiveness. Mildred never asked for money but they gave her a house in a not very expensive suburb in the outskirts of LA or something as a retirement gift. She did do that one spread in Hello or whatever it was and I think it was just to get her perspective out there for the record. She could have sold her story multiple times or coerced Arnold for money but she never did. That’s why Arnold said she’s a good person. He did apparently give her money over the years without actually saying anything about it, as people in and around the family started commenting on Joseph’s resemblance to Arnold. Mildred never said anything about Joseph’s parenthood to Arnold either.
Also, Arnold denied it multiple times before Maria and the therapist finally got him to admit it.
He has told this story before. I’m a huge fan of Arnold (despite all his flaws; he’s just lived a very interesting life as a businessperson and outsider) and bought and read his autobio.
Some psychologist or therapist said he could have a narcissistic thing going on where he is attracted to women who are not considered conventionally attractive and having them fawn over his body.
I liked that he made sure to emphasize that Joseph was welcome and is an excellent person. For Arnold to think ahead about how Joseph would take this discussion seems to me to be the thoughtful act of a good parent. All of his kids seem to have a good relationship with Arnold so he may be a good parent, if a s”$t partner.
I agree. Arnold has always seemed to value Joseph (once it was in the open) and I like that. I’m not an affair baby, but I am an accident baby, and watching Joseph not get invited to his own sister’s wedding was painful to watch. After a lifetime of being shunned by my Dad’s “real” family I have very little patience for it. Katherine called Joseph a “reminder” of her Dad’s affair. Why is Arnold not the reminder?? I am glad that Arnold at least always shows him love.
Well, that is awful and yet another reason to dislike faux-Christian Katherine.
Well, it is her wedding, no one has a right to an invitation…
I wouldn’t have invited him either- as unchristian as that is…
None of us are perfect and I am only loyal to my mother…
None of the kids are obligated to have a relationship with each other. Only Arnold has to treat the affair child as his son, but the other kids do not have to treat him like a sibling. (And he doesn’t have to treat them that way, either.) They may share the same father, but that doesn’t make them family.
I agree. It isn’t Joseph’s fault. This leads me to believe that she is a very small person. Where is that Christian goodness we hear so much about?
I agree. Nobody should ever feel they were unwanted. Arnold handled this the best way he could. I have no idea whether Joseph is welcomed by his half siblings, though.
He has been photographed working out with his two half brothers, I believe.
He’s certainly an interesting case study. I read a profile of him a few months back, and he certainly comes across as someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but high-functioning — not like OFP, who is the malignant type. Ahnold exhibits similar delusions of grandeur but is able to acknowledge reality and function within it; whereas the Mold Orange Turd fully recreates reality in order to live in it. Ahnold can excuse his own behavior as being perfectly fine, but he recognizes the damage he has done. Interesting.
Yeah I always admired that he really loves Joseph and is not afraid to show it.
While he and Joseph seem very close, I’m fascinated/appalled at how his kids with Maria appear to shun him.
A sister we didn’t know we had appeared in our life late last year. Our parents gave her up for adoption at 10 days, and she found us through a DNA site. I can’t wait to meet her this summer, but my sister(the one I grew up with) won’t. My sister is so, so angry at our mom and dad and incredibly hurt by their actions. I’m a little puzzled by her reaction, but there is no doubt it is genuine. She’s outraged about the adoption and our new sister. Apparently they look almost identical. I can’t believe there’s two of them.
I had a similar experience. My Mum had a child she put up for adoption (before she met my Dad – she was quite young) and while my brother visits our half-sister occasionally, I don’t have much of a relationship with her. Part of my issue is that I really struggled with not being my Mum’s first child and only daughter (I was 16, had a lot of feelings, felt like my place in the world got shuffled around and I lost my footing), but also my half-sister and I don’t get along very well.
I’m not a big fan of Katherine S-P, but I honestly don’t think I’d invite my half-sister to my wedding, either. Just because we don’t have much of a relationship and I genuinely don’t think it would even occur to me to do so.
50+ years ago my mother gave my half-sister up for adoption. And that was her only option. Abortion or keeping the baby was not allowed. The entire time she was pregnant her parents never looked at her or talked to her. No one was allowed to talk about the pregnancy, birth, or the baby. If that was the way your mothers were treated, it’s not surprising they never said anything to you about it.
My husband is adopted and his biological half-brother found him in the summer of 2021 through their match via an ancestry DNA kit he did several years ago. We always knew it was a possibility, and when they reached out, I worried that we didn’t know them and didn’t know what their motives might be. He actually has 3 biological siblings, and it really wound up being such a gift. They are wonderful people, we’ve traveled to meet them, we chat via Zoom and my new sister-in-law and I talk often via text. Our kids have cousins!! And they get along like a house on fire. It’s a crazy story for a lot of reasons, but I am so glad that they embraced him/us and have become a part of our family (and us part of theirs!)
I don’t know, I give them a little bit of grace because I imagine that is a very, very complicated position to be in. While I know it was not Joseph’s fault, I’m sure they feel very protective of their mother and how it could make her feel to see them being a big happy family. I do know one of the sons (Patrick I think?) has been photographed working out with Joseph, so I think there is a little bit of slow reaching out. But that has got to be very complicated. I’m not saying shunning him is right, but I acknowledge that it’s a very tough spot to be in, and I could see where it could take a very long time to work through it.
He had to tell her. The young man looks exactly like him. I read the other kids played with him all the time. It’s not like he was hidden
People are weird
He could have told her but didn’t until they were in therapy and he was asked.
Yeah, though all the headlines say “this is when he told her” or “this is how he told her” which implies that at some point he proactively decided to sit down and tell her, what actually happened is she asked/confronted him about it during counseling, with a witness present and he admitted it. So he reacted to her after she already suspected for who knows how long. And *how old* was the boy by that point? And how much emotional, psychological harm had his actions and deception caused at that point to Maria, Joseph and his other children? (Because there is no way to have an affair like that without hiding some of yourself and spending time, money, effort and emotional energy on planning your hook ups, looking forward to your hookups and weaseling your way around the lies)
Nope, not going to give him any brownie points for coming clean when he no longer had any easy option to deny / ignore the situation he caused.
The housekeeper used to bring him to work with her, all the time. Maria used to give her hand-me-down clothing from her youngest son. This article was a few years ago, when the affair was outed, but it also mentioned the housekeeper trying on Maria’s clothes and jewelry while she was out.
I don’t know much about the story, but what most strikes me is the lack of acknowledgement of the inherent power imbalance between Arnold and Joseph’s mother, Mildred. It seems not unreasonable to ask if she felt she had to sleep with him because she worked for him. So while I appreciate Arnold’s attempt to say he doesn’t want Joseph to feel unwelcome, what about Mildred, both then and now?