Almost two years on from their split, Shakira is looking back on her and Gerard Piqué’s relationship.
As you might be aware, Shakira and Gerard — who share two kids: Milan, 11, and Sasha, 9 — dated for 11 years before announcing that they had parted ways in June 2022.
Things quickly got pretty messy, with rumors circulating that Gerard had cheated on Shakira. She further fueled the discourse with the release of a brutal diss track last January, and months later, she appeared to make a jab at him at the 2023 Billboard Latin Women in Music ceremony.
Shakira also publicly discussed how she was navigating the split, telling Elle, “This is really hard to talk about personally — especially because I’m still going through it, and because I’m in the public eye, and because our separation is not like a regular separation. And so it’s been tough not only for me but also for my kids.”
As for Gerard, he remained silent for a while following his and Shakira’s initial statement, though wound up debuting his new girlfriend on Instagram just weeks after Shakira’s diss track was released.
A couple of months later, he discussed the split for the first time, telling El País in a translated interview that he was focused on “protecting” his kids and being “faithful” to himself.
“Everyone has their responsibility to try to do what is best for their children,” he said. “It is about protecting them. That is the job of all parents with children. That is what I am focused on, and that is my job as a father.”
“The day I die, I will look back and hope I have always done what I wanted. I want to be faithful to myself,” he added, with his comments unsurprisingly sparking backlash online.
Fast-forward to today, and Shakira has discussed the past relationship in some more detail.
This weekend, Shakira sat down with the Sunday Times for a wide-ranging interview — much of which was centered around the upcoming release of her first album in seven years, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, which translates to Women No Longer Cry.
Addressing her long hiatus, Shakira recalled putting her “career on hold” while she and Gerard were together so that she could be with him while he played football.
“For a long time I put my career on hold, to be next to Gerard, so he could play football,” she said. “There was a lot of sacrifice for love.”
Speaking a little further about her upcoming album, Shakira noted that the project represents “the transformation of pain into creativity, frustration into productivity, anger into passion, vulnerability into resilience.”
“There were so many pieces of my life that crumbled in front of my eyes, and I had to rebuild myself in a way, picking up the bones from the floor and putting them all together. And the glue that kept it all together was music,” she added.
What’s more, Shakira outright addressed speculation that some of her upcoming lyrics are about Gerard. Per the Times, one of her soon-to-be-released tracks, named “Ultima (Last),” features the line: “Surely with time you'll regret it / And someday you'll want to come back to my door.”
And when asked if this was about Gerard, Shakira purportedly replied: “Voldemort, that one that shouldn't be mentioned? It's hopefully the last song that I will write about this, and to him.”
“I felt that there was still something there, stuck in my throat, and I needed to get it out,” she added.