Celebrity News September 21, 2022
Shakira Talks Gerard Piqué Split, Calls This the ‘Darkest Hour of My Life’
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Shakira is opening up about her split with Gerard Piqué, tax fraud claims, and more in a candid interview for Elle’s October 22 digital cover story.
The singer and the Spanish football player split earlier this year after more than 10 years together, and she says it is hard to talk about and something she’s trying to help their sons Milan, 9, and Sasha, 7, cope with.
“Oh, this is really hard to talk about personally, especially as this is the first time I’ve ever addressed this situation in an interview,” she said of the split. “I’ve remained quiet and just tried to process it all. Um, and yeah, it’s hard to talk about it, especially because I’m still going through it, and because I’m in the public eye and because our separation is not like a regular separation. And so it’s been tough not only for me, but also for my kids. Incredibly difficult.”
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Shakira said it feels like a “bad dream,” explaining, “I try to conceal the situation from [the kids] as much as I can. It’s really upsetting for two kids who are trying to process their parents’ separation. And sometimes I just feel like this is all a bad dream and that I’m going to wake up at some point. But no, it’s real. And what’s also real is the disappointment to see something as sacred and as special as I thought was the relationship I had with my kids’ father and see that turned into something vulgarized and cheapened by the media. And all of this while my dad has been in the ICU and I’ve been fighting on different fronts. Like I said, this is probably the darkest hour of my life.”
She insists “women, we are resilient,” adding, “So you ask me how I manage this. And I just manage, I guess, reminding myself that I need to become an example for my kids, that I need to be what they want, what I want them to become. And I want to be there, also, for all the people who have shown me their love and support. That is my biggest strength. That’s my most powerful engine right now.”
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The former “Voice” coach says writing music has helped her heal.
“I think everyone has their own processes or their own mechanisms to process grief or stress or anxiety. We all go through stuff in life. But in my case, I think that writing music is like going to the shrink, only cheaper [Laughs]. It just helps me process my emotions and make sense of them. And it helps me to heal. I think it’s the best medicine, and along with the love of my family and my kids that sustains me, music and writing music is definitely one of those tools — one of the few tools I have for survival in extreme conditions…There have been days when I had to pick up the pieces of me from the floor. And the only way to do that, to actually do that, has been through music. You know, to really, like, put myself back together and to see myself in the mirror and know that I am a mom and my kids depend on me. But also that I have so many things to say. And on those days when I felt that my strength was escaping me, like I didn’t have legs, those days I wrote songs, and I felt like I was revitalized and invigorated after a writing session.”
She added, “And I feel like in this moment of my life, which is probably one of the most difficult, darkest hours of my life, music has brought light.”
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Opening up about new music on the way, she shared, “Yeah, I have a full album’s worth of music that I’m so excited about. And some songs you’ll hear imminently, some are collaborations. Some are in English and some in Spanish, different genres. But I’m really, really thrilled about not only the body of work that I have right now to share with the people who are waiting for it, but also how gratifying the whole process has been for me. How therapeutic as well. I thought I was done with my album. But every time I get in the studio to do, like, one line or something, or to mix a song that’s almost ready to come out, then I end up with new music because I feel creative right now, and I feel that is an incredible outlet for me to make sense of things.”
The star also hit back at Spanish tax authority claims that she was a resident of Spain from 2011-2014.
Shakira said she’s fighting back because “I have to fight for what I believe; because these are false accusations. First of all, I didn’t spend 183 days per year at that time at all. I was busy fulfilling my professional commitments around the world. Second, I’ve paid everything they claimed I owed, even before they filed a lawsuit. So as of today, I owe zero to them. And finally, I was advised by one of the four biggest tax specialist firms in the world, PricewaterhouseCoopers, so I was confident that I was doing things correctly and transparently from day one. However, even without evidence to support these fictional claims, as they usually do, they’ve resorted to a salacious press campaign to try to sway people, and apply pressure in the media along with the threat of reputational damage in order to coerce settlement agreements.”
