Arnold Schwarzenegger Has Terminated His Marriage
The marriage between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver has ended! Arnold will not be back.
This article is more than 2 years old
While just about everything must eventually come to an end, many things related to the action star icon Arnold Schwarzenegger tend to have an extended warranty. The Terminator franchise? Still going. Predator? The hunt continues. Expendables? There are still action stars alive, so of course there will be another one. But at least one aspect of Schwarzenegger’s life has met a definitive conclusion — the marriage between Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver has officially come to and end.
The news of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s final split with Maria Shriver comes courtesy of TMZ, who reports that their divorce was finalized in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday. While the settlement of the couple’s property is confidential, TMZ estimates something in the neighborhood of $400 million has been split fifty-fifty between Schwarzenegger and Shriver. All four of their shared children are now adults — according to People their youngest, Christopher, is 24 — so thankfully there were presumably no child custody issues to wrestle with .
The divorce is a long time coming. Maria Shriver first filed for divorce from Arnold Schwarzenegger in July, 2011. The filing came two months after Schwarzenegger publicly admitted he had fathered a child with the couple’s housekeeper Mildred Baena. Speaking about the affair with Men’s Journal in 2017, the actor brought up the example of one of his most well-known characters. “You can’t go back,” Schwarzenegger said. “If I could, in reality, be Terminator, of course I would go back in time and would say, ‘Arnold… no.’ You know, it’s always easy to be smart in hindsight. That’s not the way it works.”
As for why it took over a decade for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver to finalize their divorce, in 2018 TMZ dug into the matter and said there were a number of factors — chiefly the complexity of their settlement and a lack of motivation. The couple reportedly married without a prenuptial agreement, and splitting up $400 million worth of property means a lot of meetings. TMZ also said Schwarzenegger rarely seemed in a hurry to finalize things, whereas Shriver would “waffle” — sometimes pushing as hard as she could to get the divorce sealed, while other times “letting it ride.” In part, their alleged lack of motivation may have been helped by the fact that the last 10 years have been good to the pair of them. TMZ reports that things have been cordial between Shriver and Schwarzenegger through most of the decade, with both getting involved with other people while continuing to see each other and their children.
Regardless of how much Arnold Schwarzenegger may think about correcting his mistakes by jumping into the past like the eponymous cyborg of The Terminator, it seems clear there’s one thing he would never want to change — Joseph Baena, the son he fathered with Mildred Baena. Joseph is now 24 and is looking to become a movie star just like his father. In fact, last month Baena posted a picture of himself on Instagram from the set of his upcoming movie Lava.
Another one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s children was in the news for an Instagram photo recently, but not because she’s starring in a movie. Chris Pratt posted an anniversary message to his wife Katherine — Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s daughter — in early November accompanied by a photo of the couple. Twitter erupted with messages from angry fans who took Pratt’s writing that his current wife had given him a “healthy daughter” as a dig against his ex-wife Anna Faris, whose child with Pratt was born premature and suffered serious health issues.
