His wives and their lives. Bruce Jenner‘s second wife Linda Thompson shared a recent photo of herself with the former Olympian and his first wife Chrystie Scott (nee Crownover) via Instagram on Wednesday, April 29.
Thompson, 64, posted the snapshot of Bruce wedged between his ex-spouses, alongside a link to her Huffington Post piece in which she revealed how he told her his lifelong secret. As the story goes, Thompson — who previously dated Elvis Presley — met Jenner at a tennis tournament, where they immediately hit it off. The two were married from 1981 to 1984, and share two sons Brandon, 33, and Brody, 31.
“Those were the happiest days of my life,” Thompson wrote in her piece published last Friday, April 24. “I had a wonderful husband, who was the most athletic, high-spirited, energetic, easygoing, manly man imaginable. I had two beautiful, healthy baby boys. I had two great stepchildren. Life was just about as good as it gets. We had moved into a sweet, one-acre mini-estate where I planted roses, fruit trees, and flowers, and where many lasting memories were made.”
All of that changed when Jenner told her that he identified as a woman, as he revealed publicly during his sit-down special with Diane Sawyer last Friday.
“When Brody was about 18 months old and Brandon was about 3 and a half years old, Bruce came to me one day with a very somber look on his face,” Thompson recalled. “[He] said, ‘There’s something about me that I really need to tell you, something you need to know.’ I truly thought he might possibly tell me he had had an affair while on the road. But that’s not what he wanted to confess to me. Bruce told me that he identified as a woman.”
She continued: “I may be the only woman in the state of California to have waived child support and alimony. But when Bruce and I divorced, that’s what I did. As confused and sad as I was, Bruce was also very confused and extremely distraught.”
Thompson said it was, in retrospect, a blessing that she didn’t know until years later. “If Bruce had told me about his gender issue when we first began getting romantically involved, I would not have married him. Pure and simple,” she wrote. “But looking back, I’m so grateful to God, the universe, and Bruce that I didn’t know, and that Bruce played the role in my life that he did.”
Meanwhile, Scott spoke out in support of her ex-husband on Good Morning America on Monday, April 27. “I know it’s been painful for him,” she noted of Bruce’s secret, which he kept to himself for decades. “I know it’s been a torment in his life.” Jenner told Sawyer during his 20/20 special that Scott was “the first one to know” that he identified as female.
“Understandably, I was speechless,” Scott recalled of the moment Bruce told her. “I didn’t really know what to stay. I was really pleased that he shared that intimacy with me, that he trusted me with his deepest darkest secret.”
