Nicole Shanahan Addresses Alleged Elon Musk Affair One Year Later

California-based attorney Nicole Shanahan is finally speaking out about her alleged affair with Elon Musk almost a year after the accusations were brought forward.

The affair rumors surfaced as Shanahan was going through her split from Sergey Brin, who is best known for co-founding Google with Larry Page. Shanahan slammed the rumors as false after they surfaced last July and she is still insisting that she never had an affair with the Tesla CEO one year later.

In July 2022, the Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that Sergey Brin filed for divorce from his wife, Nicole Shanahan, in January 2022 because she had an affair with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. The publication alleged that the “brief” affair happened in December 2021, when the couple was separated but still living together.

Last year, her attorney, Bryan Freedman, slammed the allegations as an “outright lie,” saying, “Make no mistake, any suggestion that Nicole had an affair with Elon Musk is not only an outright lie but also defamatory.” Now, one year later, Nicole is explaining how the allegations changed her life in an interview with People magazine.

“My career has been based on academic and intellectual credibility, and I was being shamed internationally for being a cheater,” she said. “To be known because of a sexual act is one of the most humiliating things . . . it was utterly debilitating.”

She reflected on the moments after the news broke when her name was suddenly splashed across headlines around the world. “I remember feeling like everything I had ever worked for was under siege by a press cycle that had no idea what was going on in my life and who I was,” she said.

She insisted that she was never intimate with Musk. She admitted that the two were friendly with one another, as her ex-husband had helped Musk fund Tesla. “Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,” she told the publication. “Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”

She did admit that the two had conversations about her private life, but mostly in regard to her young daughter, Echo, and how one of Musk’s neurotechnology companies, Neuralink, might aid in her autism treatment.

She claimed that, at one party in December 2021, she and Musk talked about “how I might think about helping my daughter with her autism treatment, given his background with Neuralink.”

“It was a conversation that was very meaningful about life and how people show up for one another,” she continued. “To be painted with such a massive scarlet letter for it just seems so unfair.”

She went on to say that Elon Musk never had a “close” relationship and openly wondered why it made headlines. "Is this a commentary on my morals? Is it just general interest in sex, money, power?" she asked. "I mean, that's the piece that still has me confounded is how that part of the story effectively overshadowed everything else going on in the news at the time."

As The Blast previously reported, the new Twitter boss took to the platform shortly after the news broke to slam reports that he had an affair with the wife of one of his friends.

“This is total bs,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Sergey and I are friends and were at a party together last night!” Musk went on to say, “I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic.”

“WSJ has run so many bs hit pieces on me and Tesla I’ve lost count! It’s embarrassing for them, frankly,” he wrote in a separate tweet. “They once wrote an article saying FBI was about to arrest me, so I called FBI to ask what’s up and they said WSJ article was total bs. Just more shortseller fud.”

When one account said that they were “glad to hear” that there was no truth to the affair allegations, Musk responded, “Haven’t even had sex in ages (sigh).”