18 Celebrities Whose Partners Betrayed Them In Absolutely Heartbreaking Ways

Building a life with someone is a brave thing. You have to be vulnerable and put so much trust in your better half. So, a betrayal from your partner is worse than a knife in your back — it cuts straight through the heart.

Most of us might bury that kind of pain deep inside, but some celebrities have opened up about the worst betrayals they’ve experienced in relationships. Here are 18 of their stories:

1. In 2004, Anne Hathaway was swept off her feet by an Italian man named Raffaello Follieri. He founded the Follieri Group, which aimed to aid the Catholic Church in selling off its real estate properties in the wake of the child sex abuse scandal. Raffaello claimed that he had a personal connection to the Vatican, and he was so committed to the bit that he put an altar and ceremonial robes in his office and hired a nun to work the reception desk. However, there was just one problem — it was all a massive ruse, as he had no connection to the Vatican!

Anne was completely unaware that her boyfriend’s lavish lifestyle was funded with investors’ money as he racked up serious debt. He was a big spender — $107,000 on a jet to take her to Oscar de la Renta’s NYE party in the Dominican Republic, $37,000 a month on his Olympic Tower apartment, and even more on a yacht to take her to the Mediterranean with John McCain. How did Raffaello’s scam work? He made friends in high places, such as Bill Clinton, Doug Band (former president Clinton’s close associate), Ron Burkle (Clinton’s business partner), and Carlos Slim (the richest man in the world at the time). Then, he convinced his wealthy associates to become his investors. However, in 2007, Ron sued him for misappropriating $1.3 million in funds, and the jig was up.

Likely smelling a rat, Anne wisely broke up with Raffaello in 2008. Just 10 days later, the FBI arrested him in the Trump Tower penthouse he’d bought for his parents (he’d been crashing in their guest room since losing his apartment). Though Anne wasn’t involved in his scam, her private journals were seized after his indictment. Ultimately, he was sentenced to four and a half years behind bars, then deported to Italy. A source told Vanity Fair, “Looking back, I think it was all done to impress Anne.”

2. Late actor Shannen Doherty married Kurt Iswarienko in 2011. She allegedly discovered his infidelity shortly before having her brain tumor removed. On the podcast Let’s Be Clear With Shannen Doherty, she said, “I went into that surgery early in the morning, and I went in after I found out that my marriage was essentially over, that my husband had been carrying on an affair for two years. To not go in that surgery, even though, being very clear, he wanted to go, I couldn’t go into that surgery with him there. I felt so betrayed.”

Her brother, her mother, and her best friends stayed by her side during the operation, but the heartbreak still added to her pain. She said, “At the end of the day, I just felt so incredibly unloved by someone I was with for 14 years, by someone I loved with all my heart. … Just to have to go through all of that while trying to figure out if you’re going to get a fucking divorce and trying to get to the truth of that.”

Shannen then became “obsessed” with uncovering the full truth “through conversations, expecting someone to be honest with [her].” She “spoke to the girlfriend of two years that he cheated on [her] with.” However, initially, she “couldn’t” walk away from her marriage. She said, “I was so confused, and I was also on steroids and a lot of stuff from brain surgery because they didn’t want my brain to swell. And honestly, it’s still really hard. Yes, I made the decision to file for divorce, but I have a lot of memories with this person.”

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An alleged source told TMZ that Shannen and Kurt were separated for two years before her surgery and that he informed her of his new relationship. The source claimed that, a few days after he told her about his girlfriend, Shannen fell and got an MRI that revealed her brain tumor. Shannen called this version of events “an absolute lie.” Shannen and Kurt’s divorce was finalized one day before she died of cancer in 2024.

3. Tristan Thompson and Khloé Kardashian’s long-term on-and-off relationship began in 2016. They welcomed their first child in 2018. Throughout their relationship, Tristan was at the center of multiple cheating rumors, but his 2021 paternity scandal put the final nail in the coffin of their secret engagement.

He and Khloé reportedly split in June 2021, but then in December, his former personal trainer, Maralee Nichols, alleged that he was the father of her baby and sued him for child support. It was later confirmed that, on Tristan’s birthday in March — the very day he and Khloé debuted their rekindled romance in public — he left the lavish party she threw him, flew to Texas, and had sex with Maralee, resulting in her pregnancy.

After a paternity test proved Tristan was the father of Maralee’s child, he released this statement on his Instagram story: “I take full responsibility for my actions. Now that a paternity test has been established I look forward to amicably raising our son. I sincerely apologize to everyone I’ve hurt or disappointed throughout this ordeal both publicly and privately. Khloé, you don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve the heartache and humiliation I have caused you. You don’t deserve the way I have treated you over the years. My actions certainly have not lined up with the way I view you. I have the utmost respect and love for you. Regardless of what you may think. Again, I am so incredibly sorry.”

Khloé and Tristan were quietly engaged the month before he cheated, and they were reportedly still engaged until December 2021, when his paternity scandal came to light. Khloé found out about his affair through the tabloids. At the time, she and Tristan were already planning to have another child together through surrogacy, and their surrogate’s embryo transfer was done a few days before Khloé learned he had another child on the way. Their son was born in 2022.

4. Iliza Shlesinger’s former boyfriend allegedly fabricated his finances, his educational background, and claims about ill family members. She told People, “The last time I spoke to this person was probably 2015. I didn’t fully learn the extent of the lies until I had met with some friends of his, and that’s when I found out that the mom didn’t have cancer, and the extent of how much debt he was in and all this stuff.”

Describing the ordeal as a “freak thing,” she continued, “Once I share the story, I learn how many people have lived through something similar. People are like, ‘Oh, don’t you look for red flags?’ but the things he lied about, these are not things that we as humans are trained to question. Someone says where they live, where they went to school, and what they do, these are basic intro things — especially you meet someone for the first time, they tell you those things like an info dump, why would you question it? It’s not like he said, ‘I’m the Prince of Mars, and I only ride golden ponies.’ I prefer to take people at face value, and then, you know, take it from there.”

Iliza channeled her experience into her Netflix movie Good on Paper. She said, “That happened so that I could write this movie, and I can actually say this from the highest place of light, and when I think of that event, I only think of [costars] Ryan Hansen and Margaret Cho and [director] Kimmy Gatewood. I don’t think of that pain because it turned itself into something beautiful.”

5. In 1968, Charlie’s Angels actor Jaclyn Smith met Roger Davis at a commercial casting call, and within months, they were married. Two years later, on her way to view an apartment they were considering in NYC, Jaclyn ran into Warren Beatty. He encouraged her to audition for a movie he was working on, but before she could respond, Roger popped out of nowhere and told Warren that Jaclyn only did commercials. Later on, Jaclyn heard what Roger had been up to during her conversation with Warren — allegedly, he’d been in the apartment having sex with their real estate agent!

The real estate agent, Laura, was also married, and it was her husband who told Jaclyn about the affair. So, Jaclyn confronted Laura. In her memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, Jaclyn wrote, “I couldn’t imagine how two people I trusted could have betrayed me, and for so long. Laura was telling me to my face what she’d done, but I still couldn’t believe it.”

She claimed that when she confronted Roger, he denied the affair. She continued, “Denial, I discovered, can be seductive. At that moment, blind belief was easier than truth. And some truths must be seen to be believed. My options were to leave Roger then, after only two years of marriage, and feel humiliated by my own naïveté, or to give the man I loved the benefit of the doubt and hope I’d made the right decision. I chose the latter.”

They stayed together until their fourth anniversary, when Jaclyn allegedly caught him with another woman. They officially divorced in 1975. She told People, “I mean, I was pretty naive and in love with love, but there’s a line. When the paint starts to peel, get out, because it doesn’t change.”

Roger hasn’t publicly responded to Jaclyn’s claims.

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6. In 2015, The Goldbergs actor Hayley Orrantia met Brandon Pelletier, a former Marine who was touring her sitcom set with a group of veterans. She “found him very charming,” and they struck up a long-distance relationship. However, she claims that, after a year and a half together, she discovered that he’d stolen $9K from her through bank withdrawals and fraudulent credit card charges. She told People, “It was heartbreaking. I thought we were going to get married one day.”

After being alerted by her bank, Hayley confronted Brandon, then filed a police report. In 2017, he was arrested, released on bond, and sentenced to four years of deferred probation. Hayley processed the situation by writing music. She said, “He didn’t spend any time in jail, but he has to pay me restitution. So I got that. I kept asking myself, ‘Why do I need to do this?’ And really, it’s for myself. It’s the fact that I’ve always been a truth teller. … It’s taken a lot of therapy and a lot of time to reevaluate how to trust people, how to trust myself to know the difference between a person with good intentions and a person with bad intentions.”

Brandon’s attorney declined to comment to People at the time.

7. After reportedly ending things with Isabelle Adjani, who was seven months pregnant, via fax, Daniel Day-Lewis moved on with a fitness trainer named Deya Pichardo. The new couple even lived together. However, to Deya’s astonishment, Daniel SECRETLY MARRIED Rebecca Miller in 1996!

Deya claimed that she found out her boyfriend had married someone else when a friend called to read her an article about it. She told the Independent, “He said he moved to New York to be with me. Now I know it must have been for Rebecca. … He must have been cheating on me with Rebecca. I can’t understand what Daniel sees in her. For somebody who likes exotic women, she’s pretty plain.”

8. Perhaps Billy Bob Thornton took inspiration from Daniel Day-Lewis when he pulled a similar stunt with Laura Dern. The couple met in 1997, and within two years, they were engaged. However, while she was away from home shooting a new movie, he grew closer to his Pushing Tin costar Angelina Jolie. Rather than calling Laura to tell her he met someone else, he seemingly ghosted her and then married Angelina before she returned!

In 2000, Laura told Talk magazine, “I left our home to work on a movie, and while I was away, my boyfriend got married, and I’ve never heard from him again. It’s like a sudden death. For no one has there been any closure or clarity.”

9. In 2024, TikToker and author of What TF Do I Do Now? Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson took the internet by storm with her incredibly viral 50-part video series about her ex-husband, whom she called “a pathological liar.” In “Who the Fuck Did I Marry,” she claimed that, when she and “Legion” had their first phone call after matching on two dating apps, he said that he was a former arena football player-turned-regional manager at a condiment company.

Quickly, their relationship became serious, and they started looking for a house. He claimed he was pre-approved for $700K, which later turned out to be doctored. She also said that he lied about having $750K in an offshore account, and he promised to buy her a car and take her to London, but never did.

Reesa said that, as she continued investigating, she discovered that he’d already been married more than once, was in jail multiple times, and used a fake Social Security number on their marriage license. She also said that Legion lied to his “aunt” and other people that they had a newborn and accepted “gifts” for the baby, when in actuality, Reesa had a miscarriage. According to Reesa, Legion told her that he needed to give his ex-wife $2K to help cover her daughter’s funeral, but a quick call to said ex-wife proved the daughter was alive and well. He also purportedly brought Reesa to visit his grandparents’ burial site, which actually belonged to strangers who shared his last name.

In her videos, Reesa said, “[When] I made the decision to tell this story, my motive was, I just want to help one person. If there’s a woman out there who’s like, ‘I want to be married, and I met this guy, but something don’t seem right…but maybe it’s not that bad.’ My advice is, honey, just go ahead and do your research. Being single sucks, in my opinion. Sometimes it sucks. But, being married to the wrong person is a type of hell no one should have to go through.”

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10. Princess Diana was only 20 years old when she married King Charles. Her royal romance was far from a fairy tale. Charles reportedly first met Camilla Parker Bowles at a polo match and experienced love at first sight when she delivered this, um, unique pickup line: “My great-grandmother was the mistress of your great-great-grandfather, so how about it?” They dated, but the relationship didn’t last as outside forces pulled them apart. In 1973, she married Andrew Parker Bowles, but she and Charles seemingly never forgot each other. In 1981, just days before her wedding, Diana found a special present that Charles had commissioned for Camilla — a gold bracelet that had a charm bearing the initials F and G. The letters stood for Charles and Camilla’s pet names, Fred and Gladys.

Charles reportedly rekindled his romance with Camilla as an affair in 1986. However, Diana wasn’t oblivious. In 1989, she confronted Camilla about it at a birthday party. She told journalist Andrew Morton, “I said, ‘I know what’s going on between you and Charles, and I just want you to know that.’ She said to me, ‘You’ve got everything you ever wanted. All the men in the world fall in love with you, and you’ve got two beautiful children, what more do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want my husband.'” Diana and Charles separated in 1992.

Soon, the entire nation would know what Diana knew. In 1993, Charles and Camilla’s affair exploded across the British tabloids in a scandal known as “Tampongate” (or “Camillagate”). The press published the full transcript of a very intimate phone call between Charles and Camilla where he said that he wanted to “live inside [her] trousers” and joked about being reincarnated as her tampon.

Charles admitted to the affair on a TV documentary in 1994. He said that he was “absolutely” faithful and honorable to Diana “until [the marriage] became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.” Camilla and her husband divorced in 1995, and Charles and Diana’s divorce was finalized the following year. Charles and Camilla planned to slowly launch their relationship, but following Diana’s tragic death in 1997, they decided to hold off. Charles and Camilla were first photographed as a couple in 1999. They got married in 2005.

11. Debbie Reynolds experienced a real one-two punch of being stabbed in the back after the loss of a close friend. She married Eddie Fisher in 1955. The couple, who shared two children, became close friends with Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband, Mike Todd. The foursome was often photographed together. However, in 1958, only one year into Elizabeth and Mike’s marriage, tragedy struck — he was killed in a plane crash. In the midst of their grieving, the friendship group fractured as Elizabeth sought comfort in the arms of her best friend’s husband.

Per Vogue, Eddie said, “I divorced Debbie and married Elizabeth the day I finished my run at the Tropicana [in 1959]. … It was a typical two-rabbi Jewish ceremony. As usual, Elizabeth was late for her own wedding. … We were married under the chuppah, a canopy, and as is traditional, at the end of the ceremony, I stomped on a wineglass.”

However, how you get ’em is how you lose ’em, and Elizabeth famously had an affair with costar Richard Burton (who was married to Sybil Williams at the time) on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra. In her 2013 memoir Unsinkable, Debbie wrote, “Elizabeth fell in love with … Richard Burton, and I warned Eddie that she’d kick him out in a year and a half — and that’s exactly what happened, which gave me at least a little comfort… He’s not a strong enough personality for Elizabeth, who preferred her men to be, well, Richard Burton.”

Elizabeth divorced Eddie in 1964, but later, the women decided to let bygones be bygones. Debbie reportedly said, “We got on the same boat to go to Europe — the Queen Elizabeth. I sent a note to her, and she sent a note to me in passing, and then we had dinner together. She was married to Richard Burton by then. I had been remarried at that point. And we just said, ‘Let’s call it a day.’ And we got smashed. And we had a great evening and stayed friends since then.” They later costarred in These Old Broads, which was co-written by Debbie’s daughter, Carrie Fisher.

12. In 2020, Laverne Cox matched with a MAGA Republican NYC cop who was 22 years younger than her on Tinder, and they went on to date for 3.5 years. However, he initially lied about his career. On The View, she said, “People show you who they are eventually. When it started out, there was a beautiful, amazing guy who treated me better than anyone I’d ever met. I discovered his job; he’d lied to me about what he did for a living.”

She continued, “The political affiliation became obvious, but I’d already had feelings for him, and I wanted to see him as a human being beyond that. His politics and his unexamined life became clear after three and a half years. I was like, ‘I love him, but I love myself more.’ And staying in this relationship betrayed myself. In theory, I’d like to believe we can have relationships across political differences…but there was a value difference…in the personal as well as political.”

13. Arnold Schwarzenegger cheated on Maria Shriver, whom he married in 1986, with their household employee! Ahead of the release of his memoir, he addressed his affair with the family’s housekeeper, telling 60 Minutes that he fathered her son, Joseph Baena, who was born in 1997 (Joseph arrived a few days after Christopher, Arnold’s fourth child with Maria). However, Arnold didn’t realize that Joseph was his until the boy was around 7 or 8 and started to look like him. The actor denied the truth until Maria confronted him during marriage counseling.

In the book, he wrote, “The minute we sat down, the therapist turned to me and said, ‘Maria wanted to come here today and to ask about a child — whether you fathered a child with your housekeeper Mildred.’ I told the therapist, ‘It’s true.'” He admitted to Maria that he “screwed up,” and he told her that she was the “perfect wife” and promised he was still “turned on” by her. However, Maria chose to separate from him after 25 years of marriage. Divulging that he kept the affair a secret because he was embarrassed and didn’t want to face the Kennedys (Maria’s family), he wrote, “Instead of doing the right thing, I’d just put the truth away in a mental compartment and locked it up where I didn’t deal with it every day.” Their divorce was finalized in 2021.

14. Shania Twain and Mutt Lange got married in 1993, but they separated in 2008 amidst his affair with her close friend, Marie-Anne Thiébaud (who’d also been the manager of the couple’s Swiss château since the ’90s). In her 2011 OWN show Why Not? With Shania Twain, the singer said, “I was definitely shocked. Mutt was my partner in every sense. It really hurt. First, I found out my marriage was over. The next day, I found out about the affair. My own friend, who I had confided in, had an affair with my husband. I still can’t get my head around that. I really lost my sense of trust, compassion…honesty, forget that. That’s all gone. That’s dead. I crashed down into what I consider an emotional mess.”

And four years later, she told the New York Post, “When that happened, I thought, ‘Forget it, this is more than I can handle — I’m never going to sing again.’ I had to grieve through it… I don’t see [Marie-Anne], ever. I don’t invite that trigger into my life… She’s not my future — she’s my past.”

In an interesting twist of fate, Shania married Marie-Anne’s ex, Frédéric Thiébaud, in 2011. As of 2023, Mutt and Marie-Anne were still together.

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15. Singer Tomi Rae Hynie married a man named Javed Ahmed in 1997. After the wedding, he revealed that she wasn’t his first wife — or even his only wife! Javed was already married to three other women back in Pakistan. He allegedly only married Tomi for US citizenship and vanished from her life without consummating the marriage.

Javed’s vanishing act later came back to haunt Tomi. In 2001, she married James Brown, and they welcomed a son, James Brown II, together. But there was a problem — she hadn’t told James about Javed, whom she was technically still married to. Tomi and Javed’s marriage was annulled in 2004. The same year, she and James separated after he was arrested for domestic assault. He tried to get an annulment, and she tried to get a divorce. However, the legality of their marriage wasn’t resolved, and they settled out of court, with her agreeing to waive any common-law marriage claim. Tomi claimed that she and James reconciled and lived together until his death in 2006.

After his passing, the twists and turns kept coming. Tomi wasn’t named in his will because he didn’t update it, so she petitioned for a correction. After nearly a decade of legal battles between Tomi and James’s other children, the Court of Appeals ruled that she was James’s wife and therefore his widow. However, in 2020, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that Tomi and James’s marriage was invalid. She reached a settlement with his estate.

16. Iggy Azalea and Nick Young got engaged in 2015. But the following year, Nick’s Lakers teammate D’Angelo Russell posted a Snapchat video of him admitting to cheating on his fiancé. D’Angelo reportedly thought he could upload the video as a prank, then quickly delete it, and didn’t realize others would see it or save it. However, the video leaked to the public, where plenty of people — including Iggy — saw it.

While the video definitely caused problems for the couple, it wasn’t his worst betrayal. A few months later, Iggy called off the engagement after she checked the security cameras and allegedly caught Nick bringing other women into their house. She tweeted, “This is just like a second shot to the chest. And I feel like I don’t even know who the hell it is I’ve been loving all this time.”

17. Alfie costars Jude Law and Sienna Miller started dating in 2003 and got engaged a year later. However, in 2005, his affair with Daisy Wright — his kids’ nanny — became public. Daisy published her diary pages about the affair. She claimed that, after attending a concert with Jude and one of his kids, she and the actor drank wine and talked for a long time. After she said goodnight, he kissed her, which stretched into 10 minutes of kissing. She wrote, “The next thing I know, we are dragging each other upstairs to his bedroom, kissing and then, in the bedroom, ripping off each other’s clothes. We threw ourselves onto the giant bed and ripped off our remaining clothes. … It was mind-blowing rampant sex.”

In a statement to the British Press Association, Jude said, “Following the reports in today’s papers, I just want to say I am deeply ashamed and upset that I’ve hurt Sienna and the people most close to us. I want to publicly apologize to Sienna and our respective families for the pain that I have caused. There is no defense for my actions which I sincerely regret and I ask that you respect our privacy at this very difficult time.”

Sienna performed in As You Like It on the West End seven times a week while her then-fiancé’s cheating scandal played out across the tabloids. In 2020, she told the Daily Beast, “That was one of the most challenging moments I hope I’ll ever have to experience. Because with that level of public heartbreak, to have to get out of a bed let alone stand in front of 800 people every night, it’s just the last thing you want to do. It was really hard. And the other thing was, it was at the height of all that paparazzi madness, and in London, where there was an epidemic of bad behavior. They knew where I would be every night.”

She also said that she was in such a state of “shock” that she can’t recall six weeks of that period of her life. However, she channeled her energy into taking legal action against invasive photographers. She continued, “I’m pretty resilient. There were moments where it came close to making me really feel crazy, and it was incredibly aggressive. The way I managed it was to get really litigious, start suing. I secretly recorded paparazzi on a lighter that was a camera and got a privacy act taken to a high court to get the law changed in England, which essentially means that if I’m anywhere or coming out of anywhere where I can expect privacy, they’re not allowed to take my photo. It was a long battle, and I think I was really paranoid. There was so much noise that it was hard to think straight and focus on my work, which I always took very seriously. It ate everything else. I look back on it and wonder how I did get through it — but I did.”

Jude and Sienna broke up at the time, but they later reconciled. However, they called it quits for good in 2011. She told Esquire UK, “I had to [reconcile with him because the relationship was] a huge part of my life and his life, and it ended in a way that was awful. When something ends in a way like that, it’s important if you can, in a way, go back and revisit it and either shut that door or create a new room. So it was a very healthy, cathartic experience.”

18. And finally, in 2023, Vanderpump Rules costars Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix’s nine-year relationship came crashing down after she allegedly found a sexual video of Tom and their fellow costar, Raquel Leviss, on his phone during his concert. She also read their texts. At the time, a source told People, “This [affair] has been going on for upwards of six months — all the while, Tom was sleeping next to Ariana in bed. She was completely blindsided by this; devastated doesn’t even scratch the surface of how she feels.” The scandal blew up into a massive pop culture moment dubbed “Scandoval.”

Initially, Tom responded to the backlash by asking fans not to boycott the restaurant he co-owns, as his three partners and employees “did nothing wrong.” Then, a few days later, he released a full apology on Instagram, writing, “I want to first and foremost apologize to everyone I’ve hurt through this process. Most of all, I want to apologize to Ariana. I made mistakes, I was selfish, and made reckless decisions that hurt somebody I love. No one deserves to feel that pain so traumatically and publicly.”

Raquel also publicly apologized. In a statement to Entertainment Tonight, she said, “I want to apologize for my actions and my choices foremost to Ariana, and to my friends and the fans so invested in our relationships. There is no excuse, I am not a victim, and I must own my actions, and I deeply regret hurting Ariana.”

At the Season 10 reunion, Tom admitted that he was “still in love” with Raquel. Ariana told him, “Honestly, that’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard. This is a joke.” Addressing the immense public support she received, she said, “It’s what kept me going. My friends and my family, you guys and strangers I’ve never met, it’s honestly what kept me going. I had a week and a half where I didn’t eat and lost, like, eight pounds. I couldn’t do anything. I had someone stay with me every night because I felt like I needed to be babysat, honestly. I just can’t think of two worse people, I can’t.”

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