Shania Twain is willing to forgive, but that doesn’t mean she will forget. In a chat with the Great Company with Jamie Laing podcast this week, the “That Don’t Impress Me Much” singer revealed that she doesn’t hate her ex-husband — reclusive producer Robert “Mutt” Lange (Celine Dion, AC/DC) — for his affair with her close friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud, but she also has not forgotten the betrayal.
Twain, 58, was married to Lange, 75, from 1993 until 2008 before they split and she later married Thiébaud’s then-husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, in 2011.
“Forgiveness is in the family of letting go. But forgiveness, more specifically for me anyway, is not about forgetting necessarily,” said Twain, who has a 22-year-old son, Eja, D’Angelo Lange, with her ex. “It’s about understanding the other person, and that might mean that they’re wrong. Maybe you believe forever that whatever they did was wrong.”
So, Twain said, she doesn’t hate Lange for his mistake. “It’s his mistake, not my mistake,” she said. “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 also talked about the effects of Lyme disease on her vocal cords and the experimental surgery she underwent to deal with the atrophy caused by the incurable disorder, as well as the abusive household she grew up in that drove her to flee her childhood home at 13. She said that her late stepfather, Jerry Twain, is someone she can forgive, understanding that he was “not well.”
“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,” she said. “I feel bad that he had those problems. So, it’s not for him, not for, you know … So, it’s very hard to hate or not be able to forgive somebody that you believe.” Jerry Twain and the singer’s mother, Sharon, died in a car accident in 1987.
Listen to Twain on Great Company (forgiveness talk begins at 33:40 mark) below.