Michelle Obama addresses divorce rumours and public absences
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
In a recent podcast interview, Mrs Michelle Obama discussed swirling rumours that she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, were headed for divorce.
PHOTO: AFP
Claire Moses
Follow topic:
NEW YORK - It’s not quite an age-old adage, but at this point it has long been true: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Mrs Michelle Obama reminded people of this in a recent podcast interview. In rare public comments about her personal life, she discussed swirling rumours that she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, were headed for divorce, and tacitly explained why she did not attend President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The gossip about a possible split was fuelled by her absence from two major public events in January that her husband attended: former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral and Mr Trump’s inauguration.
While her absence from Mr Carter’s funeral was attributed to a scheduling conflict, a statement about her absence from the inauguration did not include an explanation.
Mrs Obama now has offered at least a partial answer: She is making decisions for herself.
“I chose to do what’s best for me, not what I had to do,” she said this week on an episode of Work In Progress, a podcast hosted by actress Sophia Bush, referencing a “real big example” of something on her calendar that she skipped.
People “couldn’t even fathom that I was making a choice for myself, that they had to assume that my husband and I are divorcing”, she said. “This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right? But that is what society does to us.”
That was as close as Mrs Obama got to directly addressing the rumours of marital discord.
She did not mention Mr Trump by name on the podcast. In the past, she has expressed dislike for the President, who promoted the lie that her husband was not a US citizen.
“Now is the time for me to start asking myself these hard questions of, ‘Who do I truly want to be every day?’” Mrs Obama said. “And that changes.”
On the roughly hour-long episode, Mrs Obama did not waste many words on the rumours, nor did she go into detail. Instead, she emphasised the importance of making her own decisions, especially now that she no longer occupies the White House and her two daughters are adults.
“I learnt that I can really only control me,” she said. NYTIMES
