40 Notorious Love Triangles That Went Down In Music History

Taylor Swift was very clear about the reason she broke up from Joe Jonas: because he preferred actress Camilla Belle over her. Belle was then the subject of some of Swift’s cattiest ever lyrics in the song “Better Than Revenge” – “She’s an actress/She’s better known/ for the things that she does on the mattress.”

Jenner and Scott went on a break in 2019, and fans wondered if they were done for good. Then just a few days afterwards Jenner was seen getting very close to Drake at a party. This apparently led Scott to refer to Jenner as “my beautiful wife” in concert later, although the two aren’t actually married. Whatever happened with Drake seems to be over now though, because Jenner’s back with Scott and expecting baby no. 2.

The Swift-Perry feud ended in 2019 – as far as we know anyway – but what caused it in the first place? Allegedly both of them being romantically entangled with singer-songwriter John Mayer didn’t help matters. Or at least, the conflict really seemed to kick into overdrive when Perry began dating Swift’s famous ex. And Tay’s not a girl to mess with – her song about Mayer, Dear John, is positively scathing.

Frank Sinatra may have been a gifted singer, but a faithful husband he was not. While married to Nancy he had many affairs, the most intense being with actress Ava Gardner. In 1951 he finally got a divorce and married her, but even then the marriage only lasted six years. If only someone had thought to make “Team Nancy” and “Team Ava” t-shirts back then. 

A love triangle involving so many tabloid darlings? Ooh, the drama. Just weeks after Joe Jonas and Gigi Hadid split in 2015, suddenly pics of the supermodel and One Directioner Zayn Malik were all over the news. Jonas broke his silence in April the following year and told the Daily Mirror newspaper, “I think it’s interesting that she moved on so quickly. I mean it was definitely very quick.” Ouch.

One woman, Linda Daniele, caused absolute chaos between the Ramones. She dated Joey before moving on to Johnny – or she cheated, no-one’s completely sure – and Joey was livid. The two Ramones had a massive fight which ended with Joey in the hospital, and then Johnny wed Daniele. They stayed together until his death in 2004, but prior to that Johnny hadn’t attended Joey’s funeral in 2001. Best of friends then?!

Jason Aldean was caught kissing American Idol star Brittany Kerr while still married to Jessica Ussery, and the consequences were disastrous. Less than a year later the couple had filed for divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences” as the reason. Aldean told Us Weekly in April 2013, “I’ve learned that everyone always rushes to judgement when they hear news like this,” but can you blame them?

Faith Evans and Biggie Smalls were a power couple of the 1990s, but that didn’t mean things weren’t crazy behind the scenes. One day Evans walked in to find her husband in bed with another woman, rapper Lil’ Kim. Drama and even some physical fights followed… but believe it or not the two ladies are actually friends now.

This one’s unusual, because it actually started off as a polyamorous relationship. But in 2019 Mongeau explained on YouTube that it wasn’t a healthy one, saying, “Here I am just coming in and Bella wants me here, but she has a boyfriend [Sun] and he wasn’t my boyfriend, and I didn’t want him to be my boyfriend. He didn’t want me to be his girlfriend. It was this weird thing of him and I sharing her.” It’s all over now.

2000s’ kids were captivated by the Duff-Carter-Lohan love triangle. Carter explained to The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch show in 2005, “I started dating Hilary on my 13th birthday… then I just got a little bored so I went and I started getting to know Lindsay, dating Lindsay. Then I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I got back with Hilary. And then I ended up cheating on Hilary with her best friend.” What a gentleman.

Glee star Naya Rivera told all in her aptly titled 2016 book Sorry Not Sorry. She revealed that while she was engaged to Big Sean, she once walked in to find him with someone whose name rhymed with “Smariana Schmande.” And that person, whose real name we can all guess, went on to date Big Sean once Rivera split from him.

Joshua Bassett and Olivia Rodrigo appeared to be dating in 2020, but suddenly their interaction stopped and Bassett seemed to be seeing Sabrina Carpenter instead. The following year Rodrigo dropped a bombshell via her song Driving License, where she complained about losing her boyfriend to a “blonde girl” who was “much older.” Ah, young love.

In 2018 Miranda Lambert hooked up with a new man, Evan Felker. Unfortunately he was still married at the time, and his wife Staci Nelson got a big shock when he suddenly filed for divorce. While Lambert was posting triumphant messages on her Instagram, Nelson was uploading selfies of herself crying. And yet, she won in the end – believe it or not she actually remarried him in 2020.

This love triangle became extremely complicated as soon as a pregnancy was involved. Model Bebe Buell was in a relationship with Todd Rundgren when she had an affair with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and a little girl called Liv was the result. Liv – who the world now knows as actress Liv Tyler – didn’t know the true identity of her father until she was eight years old.

Never heard of Mindy Mann? That’s because she was Stefani and Rossdale’s nanny – emphasis on the was. Stefani discovered an affair between Mann and her husband had been going on for three years, including while she was pregnant, and unsurprisingly she divorced him. Stefani and Rossdale co-parent amicably now, but there’s no denying how devastated she was at first.

So Kevin Federline left Shar Jackson while she was pregnant – yes really – to hook up with Britney Spears. Before long she was pregnant too. However Jackson dealt with the situation gracefully and told MTV News in 2005, “Obviously, God didn’t think that’s who should be in my life at this particular moment in time, and that’s all right.” She did however release a lip gloss called “He Cheated.”

George Harrison wed model Pattie Boyd in the 1960s, but while married to him she began developing an attraction to his friend and fellow superstar Eric Clapton. He was completely head-over-heels in love with her, even writing the song “Layla” in her honor. By 1974 Boyd had split from her husband and was living with Clapton – but to his credit, Harrison bore neither of them any grudge. He even went to their wedding!

If the tabloids had their way, Selena Gomez and Hailey Baldwin would’ve torn each other’s hair out over Justin Bieber. Gomez was the rejected ex and Baldwin the triumphant winner with the $500,000 engagement ring. And yet all these young people actually behaved like adults, with Baldwin straight-up telling the media that she and Gomez weren’t feuding.

Who is Becky, the woman Beyoncé accused her husband of cheating with in her song “Sorry”? We just don’t know. Some people claimed it was Rita Ora, while others pointed the finger at designer Rachel Roy. What we do know, though, is that Jay Z better not cheat on her again.

In 2012 Drake and Common publically fell out, and it turned out it was all because Drake was dating Common’s ex Serena Williams. It got nasty, but eventually calmed, with Common telling VladTV in 2014, “Unfortunately the war might have been over a girl.” The girl in question is now married to tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian.

Rapper Iggy Azalea caught her fiancé, Nick Young, cheating on her with his high-school sweetheart Keonna Green. From there things got even more dramatic – Azalea deleted every last photo of Young from her Instagram and sent her lawyers after Green to stop her talking. Green for her part claimed she wished Azalea well but didn’t apologize.

Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were one of the biggest rock ‘n roll couples, but before any of that happened Love was the girlfriend of Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. She cheated on him with Cobain and the rest is history. Interestingly, Corgan actually took Love back in 2006, but it absolutely did not work out.

Mere months after separating from Step Up dancer Jenna Dewan, hunky actor Channing Tatum was spotted in the arms of singer Jessie J. How did Tatum tell Dewan about this new relationship? Well, he didn’t – she found out via the Internet. She said in her 2019 book Gracefully You: Finding Beauty and Balance in the Everyday that she was tempted to send out some angry tweets, but decided instead to act “gracefully.”

Shania Twain suffered an awful betrayal in 2008. Turned out her husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange, was having an affair with her best friend Marie-Anne Thiebaud. Thiebaud denied it, but her own husband Frederic handed over all the evidence to Twain. The singer divorced her husband… and married Frederic instead.

When Lindsey Buckingham was asked to join Fleetwood Mac, he insisted his girlfriend Stevie Nicks be brought into the fold too. He might have regretted that later. Nicks and Buckingham fell out and began sniping at each other in their songs, then Nicks embarked on an affair with Mick Fleetwood, who was married. All this formed the basis for their album Rumors.

Poor Cazzie David. She split with comedian Pete Davidson after two-and-a-half years together, but changed her mind and called him mere days later to try and get back together. Turned out that over the course of those few days he’d begun dating Ariana Grande. He then broke up with David via text message and covered all the tattoos he’d got for her. Ouch. But unsurprisingly Davidson and Grande didn’t last either.

Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz once caused a big fallout. He dated actress Michelle Trachtenberg for a bit before splitting from her and eventually marrying Ashlee Simpson. But Simpson was apparently far from happy when she saw Trachtenberg and Wentz getting along at a 2009 party. According to an insider, Simpson approached her love rival and said, “I hope you know, the whole time you were dating Pete, I was.”

This one played out on social media for the whole world to see. After Minaj split from Samuels, he released a track complaining about how she’d moved on with Meek Mill. So Minaj simply took to Twitter and pointed out that he had cheated on her, and now she was in love with Mill instead. Unfortunately her relationship with him also ended very badly.

Here’s a blast from the past. You probably know of the beautiful romance between Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter. But he actually had a spouse before her. This was Vivian Liberto, the mother of four of Cash’s children. Cash cheated on her with Carter, and poor Vivian was left out in the cold. Unsurprisingly she never got along with the woman who stole her man. 

LeAnn Rimes’ song “What Have I Done” is about, ya guessed it, an extramarital affair. She cheated on her husband Dean Sheremet with actor Eddie Cibrian, who was also married. Sheremet told the website Nat’s Next Adventure in 2015, “The dumbest thing she ever did for her career was divorce me,” but that remains to be seen.

Fans could have followed this one blow-by-blow on Instagram if they so chose. Hadid split up with The Weeknd in 2016, and Gomez swooped in on him not long after. This allegedly devastated Hadid, so she unfollowed both her ex and Gomez on Insta, the ultimate insult. But suddenly Gomez was back with Justin Bieber and The Weeknd went back to Hadid – for a while, anyway.

The most headline-grabbing marriage of the 1990s was Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee. They wed in 1995, apparently after “dating” for mere days, and it didn’t last long. By 1998 they were divorced and Anderson moved on to Kid Rock… except she was apparently still seeing Lee on the side. In 2007 both men met at the VMAs and wouldn’t you know it, the cops had to be called.

Kaynette Williams was Blake Shelton’s first wife, and the divorce was by all accounts not an amicable one. Williams claimed in the divorce papers that Shelton had been “guilty of inappropriate marital conduct,” and then she tried to sell her wedding gown on eBay. She and Shelton were still married when Shelton met Miranda Lambert, so everyone’s done the math there.

While engaged to superstar Mariah Carey, billionaire James Packer was always jealous of her backup dancer Bryan Tanaka. The pair seemed close… maybe a little too close. Packer even banned him from a show at one point. And as it turned out, he was right to worry. In 2016 Carey split from Packer and started dating Tanaka instead.

You may have noticed that former Disney stars seemingly date each other a lot. And naturally it always grabbed headlines. Since Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez both dated Nick Jonas, the media played the two women off against each other. But Gomez told W magazine in 2013, “We never feuded. We both liked the same guy when we were 16.”

Now this love triangle is notorious for… all the participants actually being mature and calm about it. Yes really. Joni Mitchell had relationships with both David Crosby and Graham Nash of the band CSNY during the 1960s, but there was seemingly no fights or jealousy involved. Well, it was the era of free love after all.

The most denim-clad love triangle ever. Golden couple Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake unexpectedly split up in 2002, and rumor had it that Spears’ dance choreographer Wade Robson was the reason. We may never know for sure what really went down though, because Timberlake has sworn to never tell a soul.

Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris were a golden couple throughout 2015, but the next year they split up. And within a matter of weeks of that news, Swift was seen canoodling with Marvel actor Tom Hiddleston on a beach. Harris soon fell out with her – Swift’s making it public that she wrote one of his songs didn’t help – and it was so, so messy.

The beautiful Anita Pallenberg was the girlfriend of Brian Jones in the late 1960s. But behind closed doors the relationship was unhealthy, and it led Pallenberg into the arms of Jones’ Rolling Stones bandmate Keith Richards. Where Jones failed, Richards succeeded. He and Pallenberg had three children together and remained friends.

Wild child Miley Cyrus made some more headlines in 2019. She split from her husband Liam Hemsworth that year, and then got together with singer Cody Simpson. But was she with Simpson just to get back at Hemsworth? Plenty of people thought so. But either way, she’s now with neither man and is known to take potshots at both of them via social media.

But heartache and drama aren’t reserved for musicians alone, and some of history's most scandalous star-crossed lovers are members of the Hollywo Case in point. The showbiz world was rocked back in 2000 when Meg Ryan hooked up with Russell Crowe... because she was already married to Dennis Quaid! And while Ryan and Crowe’s liaison was already over by the time that the actress’ divorce from Quaid was made final in July 2001, it was so juicy a scandal that it’s still a talking point years later.

Woody Allen was in a long-term relationship with actress Mia Farrow when he ended up having an affair with Soon-Yi Previn... Farrow’s adopted daughter. Allen was never Previn’s stepfather, but he was 34 years her senior – and Farrow wasn’t the only one grossed out by the news when it emerged back in 1992.

“I wasn’t supportive of his lifestyle,” Dita Von Teese said of ex-husband Marilyn Manson, “and someone else came along who was.” That someone was actress Evan Rachel Wood, who went on to be nicknamed “Dita 2.0” thanks to her seeming aping of the burlesque star's look in the late ’00s. Oh, and Wood was a whole 18 years younger than her rock star paramour – and 15 years younger than Von Teese. Yikes.

Still remembered: Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton’s habit of wearing vials of each other’s blood around their necks. Not so remembered: how hurt Laura Dern was when Thornton left her for Jolie in 2000. “While I was away, my boyfriend got married and I never heard from him again,” Dern lamented that year.

The world gasped in surprise and glee when Orlando Bloom threw a punch at Justin Bieber in Ibiza in 2014. It turned out that Bieber had flirted with Bloom’s wife Miranda Kerr at a fashion show two years previously, where she had – according to Bieber – promised to “make him a man.” Eep.

The 15-year age gap in the Demi Moore/Ashton Kutcher relationship was less of an obstacle than most had expected... then they agreed to separate in 2011, and Kutcher paired up with Mila Kunis. Apparently, despite the awkwardness of the whole situation and Moore’s initial heartbreak, they are actually all still friends.

A scandalous love triangle between three big British stars came out during the U.K. News International phone hacking trial in 2014. It turned out that in 2005 Sienna Miller had cheated on Jude Law with Daniel Craig – and, to make matters worse, Craig had had a girlfriend at the time, too. Oh, you guys...

Many people think, quite rightly, that Rihanna should just cut Chris Brown out of her life altogether. In 2012, however, she took to social media to essentially fight for him with model Karrueche Tran. In the end, Tran “won,” but she’s split up with him now, too. We just hope that RiRi doesn’t go back to Brown as a result.

Right after receiving divorce papers from Heather Locklear in 2006, Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora started dating her friend Denise Richards – and the press went wild. However, after years of unpleasantness, Locklear apparently gave the couple her blessing – not until they had already split and made up again, though.

Back in 1959 Fisher left his wife for actress Elizabeth Taylor – only to have her strike up a relationship with Richard Burton while still married to him. Fisher eventually remarked on the matter, “I wouldn’t stand in the way of this earth-shattering, world-shaking romance for anything in the world.” We detect a slight hint of sarcasm in there somewhere...

Hollywood is full of stories of men ditching girlfriends for younger models, but men indulging in that behavior while their girlfriends are pregnant is a special kind of cruel. But that’s exactly what Billy Crudup did to Mary-Louise Parker in 2003 when he left her for Claire Danes. And, no, it didn’t last.

The British Royal Family were an absolute scandal factory in the ’80s and ’90s. After marrying Diana Spencer in 1981, Prince Charles took up with Camilla Parker Bowles a few years later, and it was bad. “There were three of us in this marriage,” Diana said in 1995, following her separation from the prince. And even though Charles and Camilla have been wed for over a decade now, there are still some who will never forgive or forget.

Love triangles were even harder back in the 1940s. Actor Spencer Tracy, married to Louise Treadwell, couldn’t leave her for Katharine Hepburn for fear of the scandal that it might cause. So he simply remained married to his estranged wife. Hepburn didn’t press him to divorce, and her romance with Tracy lasted for 26 years.

Twilight fans exploded in 2012 when pictures leaked of Kristen Stewart kissing married film director Rupert Sanders. Edward and Bella were oooover! And, more importantly, so were Stewart and boyfriend/co-star Robert Pattinson. She apologized, but the damage was definitely done by that point.

“Kim is one of the main reasons why me and Kanye are not together. She’s a homewrecker,” Amber Rose said in 2012. The two women have since made up, and Kimye remain together. As for the third point of the triangle? Well, don’t expect a Rose-West reconciliation anytime soon.

Just when it seemed like the media were running out of things to say about Taylor Swift’s love life, she delivered in a big way. In 2016, she split from boyfriend Calvin Harris and instantly jumped into the arms of hot Brit Tom Hiddleston – and Harris was seriously bitter. This one could run and run, in fact; we think the Scottish musician’s just getting started with his social media shade...

A love triangle between three megastars captivated the world in 2005. When Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, the impact was seismic. All parties have since moved on – Pitt and Jolie are married now and Aniston is now wed to Justin Theroux – but the affair remains fertile tabloid fodder to this day. And people are still “Team Aniston” or “Team Jolie”...