A former Starfleet captain’s long-distance relationship with an Ohio commissioner.
A media mogul’s divorce leads to her husband’s coming out.
And one famous sitcom star’s fight over COVID rules in her own home.
You may know these stars, but you’ll be shocked to hear about their political romances.
Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph's second and current husband is Pennsylvania
State Senator Vincent Hughes.
They married in 2005, when Ralph was best known at the time for starring on Moesha as
the title character's stepmother.
When the sitcom hit Netflix in 2020 and found a new audience, Ralph told the Chicago Tribune
that she'd received numerous messages of support from people discovering it for the first time.
As she put it,
"They want to see themselves.
They want to see happy people — they want to see a happy family and a happy Black family,
you better put respect on that part."
As for her husband, Senator Hughes works to support low-income workers in Pennsylvania,
and he co-sponsored a bill that would make universal voter registration a reality in
his state.
As Ralph noted to Essence in 2020,
"Like a lot of marriages, you have your ups, your downs, your ins and your outs.
But, I love my husband."
Hughes agreed, as he added,
"We view our marriage as a blessing.
Life could have been very, very different for the both of us.
God led us to each other right at the absolute perfect time."
When New Jersey Senator Cory Booker ran for president in 2020, he was also beginning a
romance with a celebrity: Rosario Dawson.
They first met at a fundraiser in 2018 and reportedly started dating the following year.
TMZ caught up with Dawson in March 2019, when she admitted,
"I am just grateful to be with someone that I respect and love and admire so much."
"What a good-looking couple you guys are."
The couple moved in together in 2020, though their relationship wasn't without its issues.
For example, the senator was busy dealing with Donald Trump's impeachment at the same
time that he was getting used to having someone else around in his home all the time.
As he told Buzzfeed in October 2020,
"This is the first time in my life I've really lived with somebody — and obviously Rosario
and I are enjoying and adjusting to that, right?"
Booker didn't win the presidency, and Dawson therefore didn't become first lady, but the
two continued dating after the campaign.
She accompanied him to Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021, and she shared a picture of the two
of them embracing on the front steps of the United States Capitol Building on Instagram,
along with a caption referencing Kamala Harris' historic ascent to the vice presidency:
"Grateful for the honor and privilege of witnessing herstory unfold beside my loves."
Booker and Dawson ultimately split the following year, though they've reportedly remained friends.
Tom Hayden was an activist who rose to prominence when he was put on trial as one of the group
of protesters known as the Chicago Seven who demonstrated outside the 1968 Democratic National
Convention.
He went on to become a member of the California State Legislature as an assemblyman from 1982
to 1992 and a state senator from 1993 to 2000.
In January 1973, he married Jane Fonda, and the two embarked on a decades-long commitment
to leftist politics together.
Her legendary home-workout videos were originally produced as a way to make money for their
activism, and the two of them formed the company IFC Films, which produced movies with left-wing
messages like 9 to 5 and The China Syndrome.
In his memoir, Reunion, Hayden wrote,
"The passion of our common involvement no doubt caused our involvement in passion for
each other.
Being able to fight the same hazardous battles daily, and to do so together rather than in
loneliness, was a powerful basis for this love."
Fonda and Hayden had two children together, but their marriage ended in divorce in 1990.
On the occasion of their split, a joint spokesman said,
"Tom and Jane wish each other well and look to the future with enthusiasm and optimism."
You probably know Kate Mulgrew for her turns as Red on Orange Is the New Black and Captain
Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager.
But chances are you don't not know that she was married to Tim Hagan, who was a county
commissioner in Cleveland.
He also ran for governor of Ohio, though he didn't win.
It seems that the pressures of Mulgrew and Hagan splitting their marriage between Los
Angeles and Ohio required some negotiation.
In 1998, she told Star Trek Monthly,
"We agreed that for these next two years, as I fulfill my commitment to Voyager, he
will help and support me completely, so that when this is over we can redefine our lives
and what we're going to do.
And then it will be my turn to support him."
Hagan was just as much a fan of Mulgrew as the Trekkies.
As he told Cleveland Magazine in 2000,
"There was never anyone in my life that I was so mesmerized and captivated by."
"Kate and Tim are spending as much time together as possible, lost in a galaxy all their own."
"I think he's beautiful."
Alas, their marriage didn't last forever, as they divorced in 2014.
Mulgrew told Cleveland.com that no one was to blame except those pesky geographical circumstances.
As she put it,
"I was passionate about my career, and he was so important as a commissioner in Cleveland.
He's rooted there, and I'm not sure I ever fully understood the depth of that or honored
it."
HuffPost founder Arianna Huffington has become a celebrity in her own right, but earlier
in her career, she was married to a man with a much higher profile.
Her millionaire ex-husband Michael Huffington ran for Congress while they were married,
and then he served California as a Republican for a single term from 1993 to 1995.
He then ran for the Senate, though he lost.
The Huffingtons ultimately divorced in 1997.
Michael came out of the closet soon after, as he told Esquire,
"I know now that my sexuality is part of who I am.
I've been through a long process of finding out the truth about me."
The article resulted in a firestorm of controversy, as Michael insisted that despite what the
magazine had written, he wasn't gay but, quote, "probably bisexual" instead.
In 1998, Arianna told the Los Angeles Times,
"I wish Michael well and all that matters to me is that he's a good father to our daughters."
During the 2003 recall election for governor of California, Michael endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger,
who wound up winning.
The only problem was that Arianna was also running.
As Michael explained during an interview on Fox News,
"[Arianna] has no management experience and has no financial experience, either, in any
type of business sense…
I think she would divide the state, rather than unite it."
Iconic actor Elizabeth Taylor was also an iconic bride, having been married eight times
to seven different men.
One of her final husbands was John Warner, a five-term Republican Senator from Virginia.
They met at a dinner with none other than Queen Elizabeth II.
They then met up a few more times, got engaged in Austria, and married in December 1976.
Soon afterwards, Warner ran for senator.
Though Taylor was a Democrat and Warner wanted to run as a Republican, she nevertheless campaigned
for him anyway, drawing massive crowds wherever they went.
When he turned his attention to his senatorial duties, they spent less and less time together.
As Taylor later wrote in her book Elizabeth Takes Off,
"John wasn't doing anything more or less than what any other senator did.
I just couldn't bear the intense loneliness, the lack of sharing with the person with whom
I most wanted to share."
"The life of a political wife can be very lonely.
Are you prepared for that?"
"Well, I tag along."
"Hmm."
Taylor and Warner divorced in 1982 but stayed in touch.
As Warner revealed to People Magazine,
"We always used to sign off, 'Hey man, till we talk again.'"
Rita Hayworth stunned Hollywood when she married into royalty in 1949, becoming the wife of
Prince Aly Khan, who was at the time serving as the Pakistani representative to the United
Nations.
As recounted by the book Throne of Gold, he fell in love when he saw her as the title
character in the 1946 film Gilda.
He pursued her while they were both in the French Riviera, but it seems that he didn't
exactly sweep her off her feet, at least not at first.
Nevertheless, Hayworth and Khan soon married, and a British Movietone Newsreel delivered
footage of their nuptials to audiences worldwide.
As the announcer noted,
"Privacy was impossible, but then that's always the lot of a film star, especially if she
marries a prince."
The marriage ultimately was not the fairytale that it may have seemed like, as the couple
divorced in 1953, agreeing that the prince would pay Hayworth $8,000 each year and would
give their daughter back each time she went to visit him.
Splash star Daryl Hannah once dated John F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late president.
When they first got together in 1993, a People Magazine cover announced, "America's most
eligible bachelor finally meets his match."
The magazine had previously named him Sexiest Man Alive in 1988, while admonishing readers,
"Get your eyes off that man's derriere!
[...] He has a mind too!"
Like his similarly initialed cousin, JFK Jr. served as an assistant district attorney.
He and Hannah were unsurprisingly a sensation with the paparazzi.
They were once famously spotted dancing on a rooftop together, with Hannah reportedly
wearing a nightgown.
The couple were on-and-off for five years, but as a friend of Kennedy's once told InStyle,
"John just found Daryl so self-absorbed."
Evidently, after Kennedy's mother died, all Hannah could talk about was her sick dog.
Kennedy ultimately died in a plane crash in 1999, and a source later told OK! that Hannah's
lost love still causes problems in her current marriage to musician Neil Young.
As the source claimed,
"She seems haunted by her memories and wonders what could have been had their romance endured
a bit longer."
Cheryl Hines is probably best known for her starring role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO's
sitcom about the misadventures of Larry David.
But offscreen, she's married to a member of a political American dynasty: Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., son of the late presidential candidate and former attorney general.
Kennedy formerly served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, but he now works as
a political lobbyist for anti-vaccine causes.
This has caused friction in his marriage, to say the least.
When invitations to a 2021 Christmas party at the couple's house asked that all guests
be vaccinated against COVID-19, Kennedy blamed his wife.
As he told Politico,
"I guess I'm not always the boss at my own house."
The following month, Kennedy told an audience at a rally that COVID-19 restrictions aimed
at slowing the spread of the pandemic were reminiscent of the horrors of the Holocaust.
He later apologized on Twitter, while Hines spoke for herself by tweeting,
"My husband's reference to Anne Frank at a mandate rally in D.C. was reprehensible and
insensitive.
The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to
anyone or anything.
His opinions are not a reflection of my own."
"People change, and maybe the man that she married in 2014 may not be the same man that
she's with today."
Hungarian-American actor and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor was married a grand total of nine
different times.
Her third husband was even Conrad Hilton, father of Elizabeth Taylor's first husband,
Conrad Hilton Jr.!
Of her romantic trials and tribulations, Gabor famously quipped,
"I am a marvelous housekeeper.
Every time I leave a man, I keep his house."
Gabor's first husband was Turkish politician Burhan Asaf Belge.
They married in 1937 and divorced in 1941.
Several marriages later, she had a fling with playboy and diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa.
They didn't marry, but they carried on an affair during his marriage to actor Barbara
Hutton.
Gabor's last marriage began in 1986 to German-American businessman Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, whom
she stayed with until her passing in 2016.
Their later years were the subject of intense interest from the press, as allegations abounded
that he was keeping her prisoner and carrying on affairs.
When Vanity Fair visited her in 2007, she described the simple details of their courtship,
as she admitted,
"I liked how he looked; I liked how he talked.
I liked everything about him."
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