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A year ago, attorney Nicole Shanahan became unexpectedly famous after being named in an alleged love-triangle scandal with two of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Google founder Sergey Brin, her husband of four years. On Wednesday, in her first interview on the controversy, Shanahan sought to set the record straight, strongly denying that she and Musk had an affair and detailing the decline of her marriage to Brin.
Shanahan insisted in the interview—which was published by People—that her relationship with Musk was innocuous. “Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,” she said. “Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”
Instead, she said, they discussed “how I might think about helping my daughter with her autism treatment, given his background with Neuralink”—Musk’s brain-implant startup that hopes to modify humans’ brains. “To be painted with such a massive scarlet letter for it just seems so unfair,” she said