He might be one of the most beloved elder statesmen Hollywood has to offer, but the life and times of Arnold Schwarzenegger haven’t been without controversy.
There was of course the bombshell news that he’d fathered a son with his housekeeper that he kept secret for 13 years, which eventually served as the catalyst to his divorce from Maria Shriver. There were also many unsavory allegations of groping that arose when he was running for Governor of California, which he was very defensive about at the time.
He called it untrue, blamed the media for trying to undermine his campaign, and then issued several vague and half-hearted apologies that didn’t see him claim ownership of his misdeeds. However, in Netflix’s incoming documentary Arnold (via Rolling Stone), the Terminator icon comes clean and accepts blame and responsibility for his actions.
“My reaction in the beginning, I was kind of… defensive. Today, I can look at it and kind of say, it doesn’t really matter what time it is. If it’s the Muscle Beach days of 40 years ago, or today, that this was wrong. It was bullsh*t. Forget all the excuses, it was wrong.”
It took him a while to get there, but Schwarzenegger has taken on his burdens at long last. Of course, he’s addressed it openly before, but when a total of 15 women came forward with allegations and he tried largely to discredit them and shift the blame elsewhere, which soured his reputation in the eyes of many. At 75 years old, the Austrian Oak is still capable of owning his mistakes, which something.