Martha Stewart's Ex-Husband Moved On With Her Assistant After Their Divorce

Martha Stewart walked down the aisle when she was just 19 years old. If she hadn't done so, we wouldn't have a Martha Stewart. The granddaughter of Polish immigrants, the lifestyle guru was born Martha Kostyra. That changed when Martha married Andrew Stewart in July 1961. The pair met the previous year on a blind date, when Martha was a history and architectural history student at Barnard College and Andrew was a law student at Yale. Yes, Martha's initial career path veered far from where she ended up. And Andrew was always part of it.

In the early days of their marriage, the Stewarts enjoyed renovating homes, a passion that took them from New York to Westport, Connecticut. Martha resigned from her job as a stockbroker to live on their farmhouse property and spend her days perfecting the home and her cooking, which she did thanks to Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." She became confident enough to try her luck in the catering business. "I found myself preparing blindly for a wedding for 300," she said, according to a 1995 People report.

Martha didn't disappoint. Steadily, she built the business into the empire we know today. But her dedication and growing success caused issues at home. "He told me he needed his own life," a friend of Andrew's told New York Magazine in 1991, the year their divorce was finalized. Martha never married again. Andrew did not long after — and to someone close to Martha.

Martha and Andrew Stewart split in 1987, igniting a drawn-out divorce process that concluded in 1991. Shortly after, Andrew went public with his relationship with Robyn Fairclough, who had worked as Martha's assistant and as a flower consultant for her business in the past. That in itself hit Martha hard, the 1995 People report noted. And it didn't help that Fairclough was 21 years younger than him, and much closer in age to their daughter, Alexis. Andrew's romance with Fairclough was no fling, either.

In May 1993, the two tied the knot in New York. Perhaps Martha sensed Andrew and Fairclough had a lot in common. "What Robyn found sort of weird was that Martha would always say, 'You and Andy would be perfect together,'" a family friend told Jerry Oppenheimer for his 1997 biography, "Just Desserts" (via the Daily Mail). But it was far from a compliment. "Martha used to push them together, laughing about it in her way, which was more of a put-down of the two of them. It was sadistic," the source explained.

By the time her ex-husband got together with Fairclough, he and Martha weren't on speaking terms. According to People, he obtained a court order to keep Martha from talking to him — a decision she respected for three decades. "Getting divorced was a terrible thing for me ... And that we haven't spoken since the divorce is even more painful," she told People in 2020. 

The year Andrew Stewart married Robyn Fairclough, Martha Stewart met Charles Simonyi, a software architect who made bank for his contributions to Microsoft. Martha and the Hungarian-born billionaire started their relationship at some point in 1993, which continued on an on-again, off-again basis until 2008. They kept their relationship mainly away from the spotlight, with Martha rarely talking about him in interviews. "I had a longtime boyfriend. That ended a couple years ago," she simply told the New York Post in 2013.

But squished between her two long-term relationships, she found time for a fling with a rather high-profile figure. Martha briefly dated Anthony Hopkins right after her divorce became final, but "The Silence of the Lambs" got in the way of their happily-ever-after. "Do you want someone eating your brain while you are sitting in your beautiful dining room in Maine?" she asked Howard Stern on his show in 2006. "I would have probably had a very nice relationship with Anthony Hopkins but I couldn't get past the Lecter thing."

Andrew, for his part, went on to divorce a second time. It's unclear when his marriage to Fairclough ended, but he found love a third time later in life. In 2015, the publishing executive tied the knot with Shyla Nelson Stewart, who serves as president and CEO of Fieldstone Publishing. According to its website, the couple shares five children and two grandchildren, whom they like to spoil in their Pasadena home.