Latest on Arnie, Maria and the woman: the wife suspected for a long time

On May 9, 2011, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced they were separating after 25 years of marriage. Eight days later, the Los Angeles Times revealed why: Schwarzenegger had fathered a child with Mildred Patricia Baena, a member of the household staff for two decades. The boy, Joseph, was born in October 1997 — and was 13 when the story broke.

What emerged in the days that followed was that Shriver had not been blindsided so much as confirmed in a suspicion she had carried for a long time. According to a RadarOnline report widely picked up on May 20, Shriver had grown doubtful about who the father of Baena's son really was, confronted the housekeeper directly, and got a confession — then took it to Schwarzenegger, who admitted the truth. Years later, in his Netflix documentary, Schwarzenegger himself recalled the moment Shriver put the question to him in a 2011 marriage counseling session: "She wants to know if you're the father of Joseph." He said he told the truth.

Shriver's public statement at the time was brief and dignified: "This is a painful and heartbreaking time. As a mother, my concern is for the children. I ask for compassion, respect and privacy as my children and I try to rebuild our lives and heal."

She hired divorce attorney Laura Wasser. The divorce, filed that summer, would not be finalized until 2021 — a decade of unwinding one of America's most prominent political-celebrity marriages, ended by a secret kept for fourteen years and a wife who, by most accounts, had suspected it for much of that time.