One more time for those in the back: Michelle Obama and former president Barack Obama are not getting divorced. In an interview on Sophia Bush’s podcast, Work in Progress, published Wednesday, the former first lady clarified that just because she’s not always physically with her husband, she’s still with him.
Alluding to her absence at both the state funeral of former president Jimmy Carter in January and the inauguration of Donald Trump later that same month, which her husband attended solo, Michelle stood beside her decisions to skip the occasions.
“I chose to do what’s best for me, not what I had to do,” she said, not explicitly singling out either event. She has been critical of Trump in the past, and has urged the world not to “normalize” him or his policies.
The skipped engagements have been pointed to by conspiracy theorists, who, for months have claimed the pair are splitting up, sometimes with an also-untrue side of accusations that Barack had an affair with Jennifer Aniston, a rumor that Vanity Fair reported the long tail of, and debunked.
On the podcast, Michelle continued that 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.”
“This couldn’t be a grown woman just making a set of decisions for herself, right?” she said. “But that is what society does to us.”
Next thing you know, she’ll have her own credit card and decide what to wear without her husband’s approval. It’s a slippery slope.
Michelle recently launched a podcast of her own, co-hosted with her brother, Craig Robinson, called IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson. On the show’s first episode, she talked about divorce—her brother’s, and how hurt she was when her sibling didn’t tell her about his split from his wife years ago.
Representatives for Michelle and Barack Obama did not immediately return Vanity Fair’s request for comment.
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