Arnold Schwarzenegger Opens Up About His Affair: I ‘Do Think About it Every So Often’

Twenty years after secretly fathering a child with the family housekeeper, Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’s still working to put the mistake behind him.

“You do think about it every so often,” The Celebrity Apprentice host reveals in Men’s Journal, adding, “And I can beat myself up as much as I want — it’s not gonna change the situation. So the key thing is, how do you move forward? How do you have a great relationship with your kids?”

The affair came to light the day after he left the California governor’s office in 2011. In a therapy session with his wife Maria Shriver and their four children, the actor confirmed he fathered a son with their maid Mildred Baena. Their child, Joseph, was 14 at the time. Shriver filed for divorce shortly after the revelation.

“You can’t go back — if I could, in reality, be Terminator, of course I would go back in time and would say, ‘Arnold … no,'” he tells the magazine. “You know, it’s always easy to be smart in hindsight. That’s not the way it works.”

In a 2012 interview with 60 Minutes, Schwarzenegger declined to speak about his youngest son, saying only, “The important thing that everyone should know is that I take care of him and I take care of [his mother]. And I fulfill my responsibility and I’m glad to do that.”

Now, Schwarzenegger maintains a strong relationship with his children, including Baena, who attends college at Pepperdine. “He’s terrific and he totally understands the situation,” the actor told Howard Stern in 2015. “So, it all has worked out. It’s a very tough situation for him. It’s a very tough situation for my kids, very tough situation for my family. It was tough for everybody. But it has happened and now we have to figure it out, right?”

Speaking about how they were able to move forward as a family, his daughter Katherine told The Talk, “My parents were very, very big on making sure that we remained a family unit no matter what happened and they did a really good job at that.”

She added, “We’ve remained very very normal and we just have a lot of love for each other. We’re overly obsessed with each other … they did a great job, both my parents …maintaining our family unit.”