Martina Navratilova had to make her wife’s tenth engagement the most special of all.
The Czech-American former professional tennis player, 69, has been married to former model Julia Lemigova since 2014, though their love story began over a decade before.
Read on for everything we know about the couple.
Martina and Julia’s love story
Martina and Julia, 53, met around 2000, at a club in Paris, though they didn’t reconnect and start dating until almost a decade later.
Speaking on a 2017 episode of Channel 4’s Married to a Celebrity: The Survival Guide, Martina recalled: “I was at a club with some friends, a gay bar in Paris. We’re sitting here, we’re dancing and then we sit down and then there’s this gorgeous woman standing at the bar and she’s like … looking at me.”
“I gave this kind of a Russian look to her. Really, it was more like, ‘Okay, you are coming to talk to me now,'” Julia added.
The pair later reconnected at the French Open in 2008, and started dating shortly after. Martina proposed in 2014 at the U.S. Open, a moment that was broadcast on the big screen at the famed Arthur Ashe Stadium. They married in New York on December 15, 2014, with none other than Brooke Shields serving as their maid of honor.
In 2021, when Julia joined the cast on season four on The Real Housewives of Miami, she made history as the first housewife in the franchise’s history to be married to another woman.
© Getty ImagesMeet Julia
Julia was born Yulia Andreevna Lemigova in June 1972 in Moscow while the Soviet Union still existed. She is the daughter of a former Red Army colonel, and was first runner-up at Miss USSR in 1990, but subsequently crowned Miss USSR following the disqualification of the original winner, Maria Kezha, for being underage. She represented the Soviet Union at the 1991 Miss Universe pageant, placing second.
Following her stint as a pageant queen in Russia, she moved to Paris, where she ran a wellness center as well as a skincare and spa line.
She shared a son with late banker Édouard Stern, Maximilian, who died of shaken baby syndrome in 2000, and whose father died five years later in an infamous murder at the hands of his mistress, Cécile Brossard.
Julia, who once said on RHOM that she had been engaged nine times, also has two daughters, Victoria and Emma, from other previous relationships.
© Getty ImagesThey adopted two sons
In addition to Victoria and Emma, Martina and Julia are moms to two sons they welcomed via adoption, after Martina was declared cancer-free, having been previously diagnosed with both stage 1 throat cancer and breast cancer in 2023.
“When you’re adopting a child, it has to be about the child. And, right now, it’s everything about Martina, and for her getting healthy. So, we’re putting it on hold,” Julia had said during the RHOM season 5 reunion. They welcomed their sons in August 2024.
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