Shaunie Henderson, the ex-wife of Basketball Hall of Famer and TNT analyst Shaquille O'Neal, clarified a controversial statement made in her autobiography about their marriage following his cryptic public response.
Henderson said a passage in her newly released autobiography, Undefeated: Changing the Rules and Winning on My Own Terms, questioning whether she "was ever really in love" with O'Neal was "taken out of context" while speaking to PEOPLE.com on Friday (May 11).
“My book is my truth, and when I was talking to my friend yesterday, I was like, developing an opinion and a comment from content with no context will show you a lot of people’s intelligence and unintelligence, right?” Henderson said. “There was no context to just that one quote that I said, and I think that sadly, people are taking my words out of context.”
Henderson's response came days after O'Neal shared a cryptic post on his Instagram account amid reports of the passage being included in his ex-wife's autobiography.
"I understand...I wouldn't have been in love with me either. Wishing you all the best...(heart emoji). All love. Shaq," O'Neal wrote in an Instagram post.
Henderson, who married pastor Keion Henderson in 2022, shared details of her nearly 10-year marriage to O'Neal in her autobiography.
"Looking back, I don’t know that I was ever really in love with the man, but I was in love with the idea of being married to the man I had a family with," she wrote, per Essence. "I was in love with the idea of building a life together. I truly did enjoy spending time with him. [NBA] road trips allowed me to be with my husband and experience the NBA life for a little while."
O'Neal has spoken candidly about his infidelity during their marriage in the past and Henderson did acknowledge things from his perspective in her autobiography.
"He was trying to be a world-famous, thirty-something multimillionaire with thousands of women throwing themselves at him, and people in general begging just to be in his presence, while being a husband and a father simultaneously," she wrote. "How could anyone possibly know how to do that?"
O'Neal and Henderson, who share four children, met in 1999 and were married in 2002, having initially filed for divorce in 2007 before withdrawing and later filing again in 2009, citing irreconcilable differences.