Risky emails, naughty DMs, and
4000 sexual partners. Seems these celebs just can't get no satisfaction.
Johnny Cash wrote his hit song "I Walk the Line" for his first wife,
Vivian Liberto, whom he married in 1954. The song promised his wife that he wouldn't stray,
but it turned out to be a promise he couldn't keep.
In her book, "I Walked the Line: My Life with Johnny," Liberto admitted to still loving her
husband in spite of his alcohol and drug abuse and an affair with singer June Carter. She wrote:
"All the things that Johnny had called 'filthy and dirty' and had
insisted would destroy our lives were things he began to embrace."
In 1966, Liberto filed for divorce from her husband. Two years later,
Cash married Carter, but their romance wasn't smooth sailing.
"Johnny Cash: The Life" writer Robert Hilburn told Esquire that Cash cheated on Carter while
she was pregnant with their son. The country icon would have many women in his life,
but what was most shocking was learning that Cash had an affair with Carter's
sister. The couple worked through their relationship challenges, however,
and Carter helped her husband through his drug addiction. As Cash told Rolling Stone in 2000:
"When it gets dark, and everybody's gone home, and the lights are turned off, it's just me and her."
Usher's romance with TLC's Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas might have seemed like a match made in
music heaven, but the two superstars couldn't make it work. The pair dated from 2001 to 2003, but as
Chilli later claimed on Atlanta's Q100, there was apparently trouble in paradise. She said:
"Usher did the ultimate no-no to me. I will never be with him again, and that's that."
While she didn't explicitly say he stepped out on her, she did make it clear she wasn't
interested in giving cheaters a second chance. The speculation regarding the pair's relationship
only intensified when Usher released the 2004 album "Confessions." Though the lyrics addressed
infidelity and getting another woman pregnant, Chilli told Us Weekly that the songs were about
Jermaine Dupri's experiences, not Usher's. She also insisted Usher didn't cheat on her.
Usher's relationship timeline with his first wife, Tameka Foster,
wasn't so neat and tidy. They married in late 2007, only to get divorced in 2009. In 2012,
he was asked by Oprah Winfrey if he had been with other women during their marriage.
"I was faithful at heart, but not faithful all the way."
That same year, Foster told ET that her ex-husband had an affair with
one of her bridesmaids before their 2007 wedding.
Usher went on to marry his long-term girlfriend Grace Miguel in 2015,
but the pair divorced in 2018. Since 2019, the singer has been dating Jenn Goicoechea.
Ne-Yo and Crystal Renay had a rollercoaster relationship involving two trips down the
aisle and plenty of scandal. The couple wed in February 2016, but in 2020,
the singer announced that he and his wife were splitting. However, the couple worked
out their differences, with the "So Sick" artist thanking the quarantine for saving
his marriage. Ne-Yo and Renay renewed their vows in April 2022, but in July, Renay shared
shocking news when she claimed her husband had been cheating on her throughout their marriage.
In a lengthy Instagram post, Renay shared:
"8 years. 8 years of lies and deception. 8 years of unknowingly sharing my life
with my husband and numerous women. [...] To say I'm heartbroken and disgusted is
an understatement. To ask me to stay and accept it is absolutely insane."
Renay also asked her followers to stop sending her proof of her
husband's many infidelities. Ne-Yo responded to Renay's accusations
in a tweet asking fans to respect their privacy, but it was too late.
In August 2022, Renay filed for divorce, alleging that Ne-Yo
had fathered a child by another woman. Their divorce was finalized in January.
Diddy and Kim Porter's relationship had its fair share of ups and downs. The pair
began to date in 1994 and welcomed a son in 1998. That same year, however,
all eyes were on Diddy and a new lady on his arm: Jennifer Lopez. Apparently,
Porter and Diddy never really broke things off, with the model telling Essence:
"That relationship wasn't real. The world just saw the bright lights and
the camera. But I knew what was really going on. He was still in love with me."
Diddy and Lopez called it quits in 2000, and the rapper and Porter mended their relationship.
Things went south again in 2006 when, while Porter was pregnant with the couple's twins,
she learned Diddy had fathered a baby with another woman. In 2007, Porter told Essence:
"It's not an original script. He's not the first man who's cheated.
He's not the first man who's had a baby outside of his relationship. He's not the
originator of this. But at this point in my life [...] it's a different program."
In May 2016, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne revealed they were splitting after 33 years of marriage
when word got out that the rocker had a four-year affair with his hairstylist, Michelle Pugh. After
the Black Sabbath star's infidelity was revealed, Sharon returned to her co-hosting duties on
"The Talk" and walked out on stage holding a glass of lemonade as a nod to Beyoncé's album.
"I honestly, at this point today,
have no idea what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life."
Pugh was just one of many women the rocker had alleged affairs with,
and he sought therapy for sex addiction. Even in the wake of these cheating scandals,
Ozzy and Sharon decided to work on their marriage, and by July, they were back
together. The couple even renewed their vows in May 2017. Ozzy spoke with Rolling Stone that same
year and shared that love and forgiveness helped the couple navigate difficult times.
"We worked it out, after I got him glasses and said,
'My god, you do need glasses! Who would do that with that?'"
During an interview with British GQ in 2020, Ozzy spoke about his infidelity and said:
"I've done some pretty outrageous things. I regret cheating on my wife. I don't do
it anymore. I got my reality check, and I'm lucky she didn't leave me.
I'm not proud of that. I was pissed off with myself. But I broke her heart."
In 2009, Adam Levine told Cosmopolitan:
"Instinctively, monogamy is not in our genetic makeup. People cheat.
I have cheated. And you know what? There is nothing worse than the feeling of doing it."
More than a decade later, in September 2022, Victoria's Secret model Behati
Prinsloo announced on Instagram that she and Levine were expecting their third
child. Model Sumner Stroh followed up this announcement with a revelation of her own:
she claimed to have had a year-long affair with the Maroon 5 frontman. In a video on TikTok,
Stroh shared screenshots of DMs that Levine had allegedly sent her on Instagram.
"I was young, I was naive, and I mean quite frankly I feel exploited,
I wasn't in the scene like I am now."
Levine at one point asked Stroh if he could name his baby Sumner.
The singer addressed Stroh's allegations, telling TMZ that he engaged in inappropriate
behavior but denied having an affair. Meanwhile, Prinsloo stayed quiet about the cheating scandal,
despite other women claiming that they also received flirtatious messages from
Levine. By the time Prinsloo welcomed the couple's third child in January 2023,
the affair speculation surrounding her husband had died down. They even enjoyed
a date night when they stepped out together for the Vanity Fair Oscars Party in May.
Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker may be faithful to Kourtney Kardashian,
but he has admitted to cheating in the past. Before Kardashian came into the picture,
Barker married model Shanna Moakler in 2004. They divorced in February 2008,
but reconciled following his near-death plane crash later that year. In Barker's 2015 memoir,
"Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums," he recounted the moment
Moakler found inappropriate messages on his laptop while he recovered from his injuries.
"She saw all my e-mails from the previous three or four years, including messages from about thirteen
different girls I had been messing around with in the year before the plane crash. [...] There were
plenty of girls she wondered about and some she knew nothing about. [...] I was f---ed."
Barker also revealed in his autobiography that he wasn't faithful to his first wife,
Melissa Kennedy, either. In one instance, the rock star admitted
to cheating on her at his bachelor party. They divorced a year after they married.
John Legend and Chrissy Teigen haven't been in the thick of a cheating scandal,
but once upon a time, the musician wasn't above stepping out on a significant other.
During a 2020 episode of the "Armchair Expert" podcast, Legend admitted to being a serial
cheater. He changed his ways, however, after finding love with Teigen. He said:
"I have a horrendous history of cheating. [...] Part of it, I escaped technically
cheating by kind of keeping my relationships ill-defined, but it was really cheating. I
definitely was dishonest and selfish... and it was happening before I was famous."
The singer entered into a monogamous relationship with Teigen after the
two met in 2006. As far as Legend is concerned,
that's when things clicked into place for him, and he felt ready to settle down. He shared:
"But at a certain point, you just realize like you're happier being honest, you're happier being
faithful and being in love with one person. And at a certain point, I just decided that
that person was Chrissy, and I just decided I wasn't going to mess with anybody else anymore."
"I thought we were just gonna trust each other."
"No."
"Oh."
In 2012, biographer Christopher Anderson made a stunning revelation when he proclaimed
that Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger had an estimated 4,000 sexual partners.
Many, if not all, of Jagger's high profile romances began as affairs. He's been in
relationships with models, actors, and singers, including Chrissie Shrimpton,
Marianne Faithfull, and Marsha Hunt. Jagger and Hunt welcomed a daughter in 1970,
but by the time of her birth, Jagger had already set his sights on Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias – soon
to become Bianca Jagger. They married in 1971 and welcomed a daughter that same year,
but divorced in 1978 following Jagger's affair with Jerry Hall.
Jagger's longest relationship would be with Hall, but it ended in 1999 after she discovered he had
fathered a child with model Luciana Gimenez. In a 2010 chat with The Guardian, Hall shared
that she was aware of Jagger's many infidelities but eventually reached her limit. She recalled:
"After the fourth child, I thought, 'Right, done that, he's served his purpose.'"
Jagger's philandering days appear to be over,
as he settled down with Melanie Hamrick in 2014. The couple welcomed a son in 2016.
Whether he meant to reveal it or not, Chris Brown once shared that he dated his now exes,
Rihanna and Karrueche Tran, simultaneously at one
point. During an interview with Power 105.1's "The Breakfast Club," the R&B
artist admitted that there was an overlap in the relationships between the two women.
Brown and Rihanna's relationship began sometime around 2007, but things ended
when Brown physically assaulted Rihanna on the night of the 2009 Grammys. In 2011,
Brown started dating Tran, but the two had an on-again,
off-again relationship and broke up in 2012 when Brown and Rihanna reunited later that
year. Brown and Rihanna were over for good in 2013, and Brown got back together with Tran.
In March 2015, Tran tweeted that she was no longer with Brown after learning he had a
child with another woman. The actor found out her boyfriend was having a baby via TMZ. She
told Real 92.3's "Big Boy's Morning Show" that the baby news was the tipping point.
"After the whole Rihanna thing, it's been like a year or whatever,
we've been trying to fix what was broken. And that was just the icing on the cake."
In 2009, Kelis filed for divorce from Nas following a four-year marriage. At the
time of the filing, the "Milkshake" singer was seven months pregnant with their son,
giving birth in July 2009. In an interview with VH1 in 2012,
Nas acknowledged he was unfaithful while they were married, saying:
"The biggest lesson I learned is respect... trust... no infidelity. I, at some point,
got pissed off during the relationship and strayed,
and I wouldn't do that again. I would be all good."
The couple's divorce was finalized in May 2010.
Kelis certainly wasn't surprised when Nas shared
this revelation with VH1. She told Hollywood Unlocked:
"He'd been cheating for two years, and I knew that."
"It was because, on top of all the other stuff, and then
you're gonna cheat? Okay. This was too much."
Kelis alleged that Nas had physically and mentally abused her throughout
their marriage. The rapper fired back at his ex-wife's allegations
in a since-deleted seven-part post on Instagram. He wrote:
"The altercation you speak of are no more different from what most normal couples go thru,
but your exaggerated version is UNJUST. [...] Everything with her is a plot and a scheme."
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.