Amy Robach‘s parents, Mike and Joan, are looking back at some of their daughter’s toughest times — including the T.J. Holmes scandal and her divorce from Andrew Shue.
“We were just worried about you and what’s the best way to show you that we loved you,” Joan told Robach, 51, during the Friday, June 7, episode of the “Amy & T.J.” podcast. “And it took us a while to think through how do we show her we love her without scolding her [or] saying, ‘I told you you shouldn’t have done this or done that.’”
Holmes, 46, who was previously married to Marilee Fiebig, then told Robach’s parents that he “would kind of imagine” that they “looked at [Amy] in the past year and a half and said, ‘I told you so.’”
“We would never say that — I would never say that to Amy, no,” Joan replied.
Robach added, “I’ve never felt more supported. More so than any other moment in my life … I felt the love, I felt the support and I didn’t feel judged at all.”
Mike, however, noted that he felt his daughter moved on with her former GMA3 coanchor “way too fast,” adding that he would have “much preferred” Robach’s divorce from Shue, 57, to have been finalized “before you all became a couple.”
Joan recalled Robach sending them a link to an article while they were in the car on the way to the airport, telling her to “read this before you come.”
T.J. Holmes, Amy Robach, Joan Robach and Mike Robach Courtesy of Amy Robach/Instagram
“I just wanted you to hear it from me first,” Robach explained. “I wanted to make sure you knew I was letting you know what was going on.”
Joan said that after she “read it aloud,” neither she nor her husband “said anything” for a long time, noting that they were “praying about how do we handle this right so that we don’t hurt Amy’s feelings and we don’t hurt her? That was our No. 1 goal, and so we took our time before we even approached. You invited us for dinner and we said, ‘Not tonight.’”
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“It scared me because normally you all have opinions right away, and so to not hear from you and to have you pass on dinner, I was panicked that night,” Robach reflected.
When Holmes asked whether the Robach’s parents were shocked that they were dating, Mike noted that they “could see your on camera chemistry” during GMA3, adding, “We had spent enough time with you all that, you know, we knew that you guys were in sync in a lot of ways. I think the romantic part was a little bit of a shock. I mean, I didn’t see it coming.”
Joan observed Amy as being “so much more settled” and said she hadn’t seen her “so happy in quite a while.”
“There’s a sense of freedom, I think, and a sense of contentment that you didn’t have before,” Mike explained. “It seemed like — and we talked about this earlier — [you] always seemed to be searching for something, you know, and maybe that was going places and searching for something. Well, you know, it seemed to us that you found it.”
Robach ended the interview by publicly thanking her parents for “being the most amazing parents through the most unimaginably tough time,” adding that they “stood by my side no matter what. That was everything.”
