Let’s do this at the beginning, since some people are repeatedly and consistently confused by the fact that we’re not using the name of John Mulaney’s girlfriend. It’s because of her 2019 bullsh-t, and you can read about it here. We will not use her name in headlines because she Googles herself and attacks & doxxes bloggers. The only reason we’re covering her right now is because she’s in the middle of one of the bigger gossip stories of the year, which is about John Mulaney dumping his wife two seconds after he got out of rehab. As we learned this week, through Mulaney’s interview with Seth Meyers, the timeline of the end of his marriage and the start of his thing with his girlfriend is pretty muddled. Even more muddled? When exactly he got his girlfriend pregnant. His timeline didn’t make much sense and obviously, the NY Post jumped all over it. The Post has a detailed story with insider-y quotes about how no one is buying any of Mulaney’s comments. Some highlights:
The weird timeline: After plummeting into an intense spiral of addiction, Mulaney, 39, spent several months in rehab in 2020, leaving his most recent two-month stay in February, as Page Six reported. Also in February he asked his wife of nearly seven years, Anna Marie Tendler, for a divorce. Mulaney told Seth Meyers on his late-night NBC show Tuesday: “I went to rehab in September, I got out in October, I moved out of my home from my ex-wife,” referencing his split from Tendler. “Then in the spring I went to Los Angeles and met and started to date a wonderful woman named Olivia.”
He doesn’t want to look like a cheater: A celebrity agent who has worked with Munn said: “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that John broke the news of Olivia’s pregnancy the way he did in terms of basically giving a timeline of his past few months — when he moved out of his house, how it was the spring when he fell in love with Olivia. It seems to me that he is going to great lengths to dispute the idea that he cheated… She has a demonstrated history of hanging out with and spending time with ‘SNL’ guys, so no way did their paths not cross, and there is the video of them together back in 2017.”
Anne-Marie Tendler insists that he only asked for a divorce in February: Sources who know Tendler, now living on the West Coast, confirmed that Mulaney had actually asked her for a divorce in February and not after leaving his September-through-October rehab stint, as he said.
The “they met at church” thing: One insider said of a People magazine report that Mulaney and Munn first met at church: “That was BS, and Twitter immediately called Olivia out on it, saying she’s known John for years. It isn’t entirely clear when their relationship started. There have been rumors for months about her being pregnant, and it all just seems like a very tight timeline.”
When did they tell people about the pregnancy? Indeed, Page Six was first told that Munn was talking openly about her pregnancy in July, as were Mulaney’s friends. He made the announcement of their impending arrival days after we published photos of Munn showing off her bump in LA last week.
Tendler knows he was cheating: The Tendler insider said: “Anna Marie knew he was doing things with other women before he went to rehab in December. And his claims to friends that he was trying to protect her before he went away to rehab were rubbish, she didn’t need protecting. John was using Anna Marie to protect himself. But still, she was very heartbroken that he decided to end her marriage, she was heartbroken how it went down, it wasn’t something that she wanted, she wanted to work it out. I am sure this news about the pregnancy will be very difficult for her.”
More on the chaos of 2020: A friend with knowledge of their relationship revealed, “John really suffered through lockdown last year. Anna Marie moved to Washington, DC, to work at the Smithsonian on a project and he was back in NYC and out of control. He was DM’ing women on Instagram for hookups — whether he went through with anything, we don’t know — and by December he’d fallen off the wagon again and was abusing drugs and alcohol. This all followed a pattern — he and Anna Marie would break up and get back together again, he would get wasted and then he’d beg her to take him back. Sometimes, he told friends that he was so wasted that he had no recollection of even talking to these women.”
I mean, we don’t actually need to write out a detailed timeline. People are going to believe what they want to believe and they’re going to give agency to certain people and zero agency to others. My feeling is that Mulaney was in bad shape throughout 2020, and he probably was cheating on Anne-Marie while he was using. And one of those women was his current girlfriend, that’s my guess. That would make more sense than Mulaney getting out of rehab and immediately rushing into a relationship with his current girlfriend and getting her pregnant back in February, out of nowhere. The thing I don’t really get is this: when he got sober, did he understand how badly he got played? When she got pregnant, was he just like “oh well, better put a bow on this mess and call it a day.”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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