Schwarzenegger and Shriver divorce final after 10 years
LOS ANGELES, Dec 30, (AP): Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage is officially over more than 10 years after the award-winning journalist petitioned to end her then-25-year marriage to the action star and former California governor.
A Los Angeles judge finalized the divorce on Tuesday, court records show.
The pair had been married since 1986 when Shriver filed for divorce in 2011 after Schwarzenegger disclosed he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff years earlier.
The revelation set off a tabloid frenzy, but Schwarzenegger and Shriver handled their divorce quietly and without lobbing accusations in court or in public.
It’s not clear why the process took so long. There were virtually no public actions taken in the case between the initial flurry of filings in 2011 and a resumption of court moves in June.
Financial details of the settlement were kept confidential. Because the couple’s four children together are now all adults, there is no child support or custody arrangement.
Settlement papers say that neither owes the other any spousal support, but both reserve the right to seek it through the court in the future.
Messages left with the former couple’s lawyers seeking comment were not immediately returned.
Schwarzenegger amassed a fortune playing action roles in the “Terminator” and “Conan” film franchises after a successful career as a bodybuilder. After California suffered economic problems and widespread power outages under the administration of then-Governor Gray Davis, voters recalled the Democratic incumbent and elected Schwarzenegger, a Republican, to the governorship in a free-for-all election in 2003.
Schwarzenegger put his film career aside and served two terms as governor. Within a year of leaving office, he admitted fathering a child, Joseph Baena, who is now 24, with a member of his household staff in the late 1990s. Shriver filed for divorce in July 2011.
He has returned to acting sporadically since, with roles in “Terminator” and “Expendables” films.
Shriver was forced to resign from her position as a correspondent on the NBC show “Dateline” when her husband announced he was running for governor.
She resumed her work as a television journalist after her husband left office, producing stories for NBC while remaining active promoting women’s rights issues and reporting on and advocating for people with Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2018 she authored the bestseller, “I’ve Been Thinking...: Reflections Prayers and Meditations for a Meaningful Life.”
Shriver is the daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was the sister of President John F. Kennedy, and of Sargent Shriver, the first head of the Peace Corps and a vice presidential candidate in 1972.
Shriver and Schwarzenegger’s children range in age from 24 to 32. The eldest, Katherine Schwarzenegger, is an author who is married to actor Chris Pratt.
Amanda Gorman
❑ ❑ ❑ is ending her extraordinary year on a hopeful note.
The 23-year-old poet, whose reading of her own “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration made her an international sensation, posted a new work and accompanying video Wednesday on Instagram to mark the end of 2021. “New Day’s Lyric” is a fivestanza, 48-line resolution with themes of struggle and healing known to admirers of “The Hill We Climb” and of her bestselling collection “Call Us What We Carry,” which came out in early December: “What was cursed, we will cure.
What was plagued, we will prove pure.
Where we tend to argue, we will try to agree,
Those fortunes we forswore, now the future we foresee, Where we weren’t aware, we’re now awake;
Those moments we missed
Are now these moments we make,
The moments we meet,
And our hearts, once all together beaten,
Now all together beat.”
Poets rarely enjoy the kind of attention Gorman received in 2021, but in an email to The Associated Press she reflected less on her own success than on the state of the country. Gorman wrote that the “chaos and instability” of the past year had made her reject the idea of going “back to normal” and instead fight to “move beyond it.” She mentioned Maya Angelou’s poem “Human Family” and added, “To be a family, a country, doesn’t necessitate that we be the same or agree on everything, only that we continue to try to see the best in each other and move forward into a shared future. Whether we like it or not, we are in this together.”