Schumacher’s gay revelation was dagger to my heart, says ex-wife

Four weeks ago, Ralf Schumacher, the former Formula 1 driver, became one of the few prominent figures in motorsport to have come out as gay.
He was widely praised for his candour in revealing that he was in love with his French personal assistant, Étienne Bousquet-Cassagne.
Now, however, Schumacher’s former wife of 14 years said she had been wholly unaware of the relationship until he announced it in public.
Cora Schumacher, 47, was married to Ralf, 49, brother of the record-breaking racing driver Michael Schumacher, from 2001 to 2015.
“How should I deal with the fact that Ralf did not speak to me before he came out or say, for example, ‘Watch out, Cora. I’m sorry’?” Or, ‘I didn’t know how to tell you’. Or, ‘I really loved you’,” she said to Der Spiegel in a tearful interview. “[But he said] nothing. It was like a dagger to my heart.”
As Schumacher became an elite driver in the early 2000s, winning six grands prix, his wife established a career as a glamour model and celebrity in her own right and was nicknamed the queen of the pit lane by the German tabloids. They had a son, David, six months after their wedding.
Throughout their marriage, Ms Schumacher repeatedly rejected suggestions that her husband was concealing his sexual orientation. She told an interviewer in 2007: “If anyone can testify that Ralf is anything but gay, it is probably me. Sometimes he comes after me like a real skirt-chaser.”
In her first substantial public remarks since her former husband’s disclosure, Ms Schumacher said she had long suppressed suspicions because of her wish to preserve a sense of normality.
“I think there are sometimes doubts or uncertainties in every marriage,” she told Der Spiegel. “I just said to myself, ‘It’s all great, you have a wonderful life, a good status. You have a roof over your head, you have a man by your side, you have a child.’ I think I simply closed my eyes.”
She said she had confronted Schumacher about the claims many times during their relationship but that he had always been evasive. “Over the years these rumours kept getting worse,” she said.
“So of course I felt increasingly torn, because I had no idea any more whether my mind was playing tricks on me. But Ralf was always my most important counsellor. I trusted him, I trusted him blindly. And for that reason his word was my law.”
She alleged that she had found out about Schumacher’s relationship with Bousquet-Cassagne, 33, through media reports, “like a stranger”. She asked: “Did he think for even one moment about the consequences for me?”
Schumacher responded to the interview by posting on his Instagram page what he said were screenshots of a WhatsApp exchange between his former wife and his partner to suggest that she had known about their relationship as far back as last September.