’90 Day Fiancé’: Michael and His Ex-Wife Sarah Reveal Why They Divorced, Discuss Infidelity
Michael Jessen and his ex-wife, Sarah Jessen, seem to co-parent their children Max and CeCe well on TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé Season 7.
Sarah even gets along well with Michael’s much younger wife, 23-year-old Brazilian model Juliana Custodio. Their relationship is so close that Sarah officiated Juliana and Michael’s wedding, which shocked many viewers.
But why did Michael and Sarah get divorced in the first place? On Part 1 of the Feb. 16 90 Day Fiancé Tell-All with host Shaun Robinson, the 42-year-old Connecticut dad opened up about his divorce from his ex-wife of 12 years.
Sarah objected to Michael’s statement that he didn’t feel ‘free’ in their marriage
Robinson asked why Sarah and Michael ultimately divorced after two children and over a decade of marriage.
“I’ll let Michael answer that,” Sarah answered, looking a little uncomfortable.
“It wasn’t one thing,” Michael explained. “But I was definitely getting a little crazy with traveling, partying, just trying to escape. I wasn’t feeling very free in life. I was definitely in a very bad downward spiral.”
Sarah had a bit of a bone to pick with Michael’s reasoning, saying she’d given him all the freedom in the world. Bristling at his comments, she told Robinson, “I always gave him a lot of latitude. He did a lot of traveling our entire marriage, and relationship even, when we were dating. And so it just kind of surprised me that he would say he felt like he didn’t have freedom, when from my point of view, he did.”
Robinson asked if Michael was unfaithful during his marriage to Sarah
The conversation then turned to infidelity, as Robinson asked whether Michael was unfaithful to Sarah during their marriage.
“Not before divorce was filed,” the 90 Day Fiancé star responded after an awkward pause.
But once again, Sarah didn’t completely agree. “I think I guess it depends on how you would define infidelity,” she clarified.
“How do you define it?” Robinson questioned.
“Relationships that go beyond friendship,” Michael’s ex-wife replied after thinking for a minute, seeming to imply that Michael was unfaithful to her without getting into a full-blown affair.
The ’90 Day Fiancé’ star admitted to emotional infidelity
Michael didn’t dispute that he was inappropriate with other women over the course of his marriage to Sarah, even if things didn’t ever get physical.
“I will admit to emotional infidelity, if you put it that way,” the 90 Day Fiancé star said on the reunion.
When Robinson asked him what that entailed, he admitted he’d allowed himself to flirt and form more-than-platonic connections with women he met at parties and during his travels.
“Just in the course of partying with friends, like WhatsApp, texting,” Michael explained. “And it would be relatively friendly, but you could tell that it wasn’t just, ‘Oh hey, nice to meet you.’ It would be flirting.”
Next, the Tell-All host wanted to know if Michael had confessed his past emotional infidelity to Juliana.
“It’s weird if I ask him,” Juliana responded. “I ask her,” she admitted, indicating she got some of her inside info from Sarah herself, since the two women formed a deep bond after Juliana moved to the U.S. “He don’t like to talk about the divorce.”
