Tina Knowles, the mother of music stars Beyoncé and Solange, said she knew during her first year of marriage that Mathew Knowles was cheating on her.
Knowles, 71, is on a national media tour to promote her memoir, Matriarch: A Memoir. In the book, the superstar mom talks about the turbulent beginning of her marriage.
“When I went into writing the book, it was very carefully written at first,” says Knowles, 71, according to People. “But then it was like, this doesn’t even make sense because there’s only, you know, all the positive stuff. And there was a lot of positivity. But no, I didn’t plan on writing that. But it’s my story. It’s just the truth.”
Tina Knowles says Mathew began cheating almost right away
“There were already problems in our marriage that first year. But the suspicions I had would get washed away by the fact that our love was stronger than a misstep,” Tina Knowles wrote in the book, according to the magazine. “It was us against the world, taking on what life brought us.”
The Knowles were married in 1980 and welcomed Beyoncé in 1981.
Despite the euphoria that accompanies a newborn child, Mathew Knowles was turning into a serial philanderer, Tina Knowles wrote in her book.
Tina Knowles’s internal torment on whether to stay or leave
Knowles admits she was embroiled in an internal war of resentment and anger mixed with love and loyalty to Mathew Knowles. But the infidelity and other marital tumult had gotten so bad that by the fifth year of their marriage, when Solange was born, Knowles writes that she contemplated leaving the self-made businessman.
She said the marriage “was deteriorating faster than I could possibly find ways or even reasons to make it work. even with the pregnancy. I had gotten used to these extremes — incredibly joyous half the time as we shared life’s adventure, then being disgusted and heartsick over how brazen his cheating could get.”
Knowles opted to stay and supported Mathew Knowles, who managed Beyoncé as her career as the lead singer in Destiny’s Child began to blossom.
She was an enterprising businesswoman herself. As a talented hairstylist and fashion designer, Knowles was omnipresent behind the scenes creating Destiny’s Child’s dazzling threads and hairstyles, which continued after Beyoncé went solo in the 2000s.
Even as things began taking off with the all-girl group, which included “bonus daughter” Kelly Rowland, the brazen and reckless cheating persisted, she wrote. And the matriarch was caught up in a constant dance of nirvana over the group’s success and the torment from Mathew Knowles’ disrespect.
“I was caught in this dance with him, each doing the same steps over and over: He would cheat or act up, and I would say I’d had enough. He would beg for forgiveness…But this is what married people did, I told myself,” Knowles wrote in the book.
Tina Knowles details when she ended the marriage
The final straw came when Tina Knowles discovered that Mathew Knowles had fathered a love child, Nixon Knowles, in 2009 with mistress Alexsandra Wright. Not long thereafter, the husband also fathered a daughter, Koi Knowles, with Taqoya Branscomb.
Tina Knowles felt she was about to burst with fury.
“I screamed, ‘Get out! Get out!’ like he was some demon. ‘I hate you!’ …my world had exploded,” Tina Knowles said.
“I was deeply sad, not about him but about the marriage,” she adds. “I felt like I failed. I failed us, my kids — myself.”
The Knowles finally divorced in 2011. Four years later, Tina Knowles married actor Richard Lawson, best known for his role in the 1982 blockbuster Poltergeist, in 2015. They were married for eight years before separating in 2023 and finalizing their divorce shortly after.
