Justin Trudeau’s Father Also Divorced While in Office After His Wife’s Affair With a Kennedy

Justin Trudeau‘s recent announcement that he is separating from his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, makes him only the second Canadian Prime Minister to separate from their partner while in office. Notably, the first was his own father, Pierre Trudeau, who separated from the current Prime Minister’s mother, Margaret, in 1979. They then divorced in 1984 during the elder Trudeau’s final year in office. And while the younger Trudeau’s wife has also been accused of having an affair in a bizarre internet theory, the real affair that rocked the Trudeau family happened decades ago.

Margaret met Pierre when she was just 18 years old while he was 47. After a secret romance, they wed in 1971, while Pierre was already in office. Justin was born nine months later. Margaret, now 74, revealed in her 2015 memoir The Time of Your Life that she had a brief romance with Ted Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy sibling and brother of former president John F. Kennedy. Of their first meeting, Margaret wrote: “Sex is a basic instinct, and sexual attraction can be incredibly powerful. I remember the first time I met Teddy Kennedy. We were at a state dinner in New York. I would later come to know him as a very kind, thoughtful person. But that evening, I felt such a pull toward him that we couldn’t even stand within a couple meters of one another. Pierre was not amused.”

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Margaret, who was battling a not-yet-diagnosed mental illness, also wrote that during a 1977 Washington D.C. visit with her husband, she sat listening to Pierre’s speech before congress and felt “torn between an intense need for him and a longing for Ted Kennedy.” She later set up a “discreet meeting with Teddy” in his office, where they drank wine. With her marriage dissolving she told Kennedy he “had not destroyed my marriage but that I had used him to help me destroy a marriage that was already over.” Weeks later, Margaret left her husband to party with The Rolling Stones in Toronto and her marriage ended soon after.

Margaret’s memoir also revealed a fling with actor Jack Nicholson about a year after separating from Pierre. “The only man I ever dated who enjoyed freedom as much as I did was Jack Nicholson. He was a wonderful, funny, truly free man. He understood that marriage and monogamy were simply not ideally suited to his life as a movie star. How I loved my time with him,” she wrote of their fling.

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Before you go, click here to learn more about celebrities who’ve opened up about dating after divorce.

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