JULIA LEMIGOVA OPENS UP ABOUT LIFE IN SAME-SEX MARRIAGE TO MARTINA NAVRATILOVA
The wife of tennis great Martina Navratilova has opened up for the first time about how their same-sex marriage has affected their personal life and her relationship with her daughter.
Former Russian beauty queen Julia Lemigova, 42, married 58-year-old Navratilova in a much-publicised same-sex ceremony on December 15.
Lemigova admitted in an interview with the Daily Mail that their relationship has had its fair share of hiccups. It included touching insight into how the couple dealt with some of the harsh things people had been saying to her daughters Victoria, 13, and Emma, eight, at school.
“One day my eldest daughter came home (upset) from school and said people had been saying things,” Lemigova explained.
“Not necessarily nice things — at the time same-sex marriage wasn’t legal in France.
“She asked, ‘who is Martina?’ I said: ‘Martina is someone I love.’ Her eyes went all wide.
“I said: ‘I can’t imagine living without her.’ Then we had a conversation about whether they liked Martina being around and my daughter said: ‘I want her to live with us, too’.” With the family splitting their time between France and the United States, another obstacle they have had to overcome is language barriers.
Paris is where Julia runs a spa as well as her skincare business, and while Julia and Martina speak English to each other, the girls – each from a different previous relationship of Lemigova’s – speak French to one another.
And it only grows more complex from there.
“We started off trying to speak in Czech and Russian, but that didn’t really work,” Lemigova said. “The girls speak French between themselves, English to Martina and Russian to me.”
A more light-hearted issue the couple have had to deal with, according to Lemigova – who at the age of 18 was the last woman to win the title Miss USSR in 1990 – is how much room Navratilova’s extensive collection of tennis silverware takes up.
“She (Martina) was going to leave them in storage, but I thought they should be on display,” said Lemigova, adding that Navratilova’s silverware had to eventually be split between the three houses the couple own between them (two in Miami and one in Paris).
“I started to unpack them, thinking we could do a trophy wall in one room, but when I’d covered four walls and the ceiling, there were still boxes to go!”
