Family time! Lionel Richie will spend Mother’s Day with his ex-wife Brenda Harvey-Richie.
“In my case, my mother passed … but then I’ve got Nicole [Richie’s] mom,” the American Idol judge, 69, told Us Weekly exclusively at a Sunday, April 28, taping of an upcoming episode. “I’m going to be busy on Mother’s Day. … We’ll have a semi-family reunion.”
He added: “I send flowers, I do dinners. I do the whole thing.”
The singer and his college sweetheart, 66, tied the knot in 1975. Nearly 10 years later, 3-year-old Nicole moved in with the couple after her biological parents, Peter Michael Escovedo and Karen Moss, agreed. She was legally adopted by Harvey and Richie at age 9. The pair divorced in 1993 after the Grammy winner started dating Diane Alexander, and he went on to welcome son Miles, 24, and daughter Sofia, 20, with the actress before they split in 2003.
The Simple Life alum, 37, has two children of her own with Good Charlotte’s lead singer, Joel Madden — Harlow, 11, and Sparrow, 9.
Nicole told Us exclusively about her life as a mom in December 2018, saying her favorite thing is to “be in sweats” and “shut off” with her husband, 40.
“[My kids] don’t think I’m cool,” the House of Harlow designer said on an April 2017 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “Her friends now think that I’m funny. So, she’s starting to come around. She likes taking videos of me walking into walls and falling on the floor. I’ve sort of become the clown for her and her friends and I do it! It’s very sweet of me.”
She also opened up about her father at the time, revealing her biggest pet peeve — Lionel’s texting.
“The problem is the emojis. I don’t know if he knows what any of them mean,” she told Ellen DeGeneres. “I think he just presses every one that he sees. There’s always a lot of them and they have nothing to do with what we’re talking about.”
American Idol airs on ABC Sundays at 8 P.M. E.T.
With reporting by Taylor Ferber
