Over the past few months, rumors have been swirling that Barack and Michelle Obama are heading for divorce. These claims allege that Barack and Michelle have been living “separate lives” for quite some time.
Barack and Michelle’s oldest daughter Malia, 26, recently shocked everyone by dropping her last name Obama from her professional film projects. Now, Michelle is breaking her silence about this as her divorce rumors continue to spread.
Michelle Sounds Off On Malia
For her 2024 movie The Heart, which she both wrote and directed, Malia used her middle name Ann as her last name in the credits. Indeed, she was billed as Malia Ann rather than as Malia Obama.
This raised some eyebrows, as it indicated that Malia might be trying to distance herself from her famous family. On Monday, Michelle gave her thoughts on this publicly for the first time while being interviewed on the “Sibling Revelry” podcast.
“I mean, it is very important for my kids to feel like they’ve earned what they are getting in the world, and they don’t want people to assume that they don’t work hard, that they’re just naturally, just handed things,” Michelle said. “They’re very sensitive to that — they want to be their own people.
“Malia, who started in film, I mean, her first project — she took off her last name, and we were like, they’re still going to know it’s you, Malia,” she continued. “But we respected the fact that she’s trying to make her way.”
Related: Malia Obama Hit With Damning Accusation Amidst Rumors Her Parents Are Divorcing
Michelle Doubles Down – Barack Weighs In
Michelle went on to say that both Malia and her younger sister Sasha, 23, have a better understanding of the decisions that their parents made when they were younger now that they’re grown up.
“As they’re older, I think they are embracing our parenting principles,” Michelle explained. “They have a clearer understanding of why we did a lot of what we did.”
“They understand us as full human beings now, in the same way that I think I discovered that about my parents when I went away to college,” she added.
This comes months after Barack addressed Malia dropping her last name in a separate interview.
“[Malia’s] first film went to Sundance and all these fancy film festivals, and she didn’t use Obama as director on the credits,” Barack said back in October.
“‘You do know they’ll know who you are,'” he continued. “And she’s all like, ‘You know what? I want them to watch it that first time and not in any way have that association [with the Obama last name].’ So I think our daughters go out of their way to not try to leverage that.”
Related: Michelle Obama Opens Up About Malia And Sasha ‘Nightmare’ Amidst Rumors She’s Divorcing Barack
Obama Divorce Rumors
This comes at a difficult time for the entire Obama family. Indeed, they’ve spent months being plagued by rumors that Michelle and Barack, 63, are divorcing.
These divorce rumors escalated back in January, when Michelle skipped both the funeral of Jimmy Carter and the inauguration of Donald Trump. She was the only living former First Lady to miss both of these events.
“I have been hearing this rumor that the Obamas are getting a divorce by reputable people,” political commentator Meghan McCain said on reporter Tara Palmeri’s podcast back in January. “I’m not talking about TMZ, I’m not talking about Perez Hilton, although I love him, he’s my friend.”
“I’m talking about like very serious journalists telling me that they’re hearing that the Obama divorce rumors are true,” she added.
“We’ve heard that for a long time,” replied Tara, who has long covered Washington politics. “Like I just heard that they live separate lives.”
Listen to Meghan and Tara talk more about this in the clip below.
Michelle has been trying to shoot down these divorce rumors as of late. According to her, there is no truth to them. However, she has frequently bashed Barack on her new podcast IMO as of late. Michelle has also used her podcast to complain about life in the White House. This has only continued to add fuel to the rumors that she really is divorcing Barack.
It certainly seems like things are extremely tumultuous in the entire Obama family right now. Only time will tell how all of this turns out for them!
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