What Did Schwarzenegger Know -- and When?

Wonderwall, Wednesday, June 15, 2011, 11:13am (PDT)

By Kat Giantis

• We're not sure whether to believe Mildred Baena's assertion that she didn't make any moolah from Hello! magazine to break her silence about her son with Arnold Schwarzenegger (not to mention share pictures of their look-alike tyke).

  And we're not the only ones raising a questioning eyebrow over the onetime housekeeper's claims. Sources close to the former Governator and his estranged wife, Maria Shriver, take issue with Mildred's statement that she didn't get around to informing him about their now-13-year-old son, Joseph.

  "I never told him," she maintains to the mag. "I never told anyone except my mother."

  But an insider insists to People magazine, "Arnold's been providing for the kid ever since he found out he was the father, which was when the kid was a young child."

  Adds another spy, "I am 100 percent sure that Arnold knew Joseph was his son for some, if not many, years. He did not know when she was pregnant and perhaps not even until he was a toddler, but he knew when the boy was very young."

  According to Baena, who worked in the Schwarzenegger-Shriver household for 20 years, "I knew Arnold was the father, and maybe as Joseph got older and began to look like him, he [Arnold] wondered. But he never said anything to me."

  Seems she explained away the resemblance by telling the curious that Austria-born "Arnold had a friend who would come over from Germany, and he was the father."

  The task of breaking the paternity news to Joseph apparently fell to his grandmother, who sat him down a year ago (his response: "Cool!").

  Not feeling as cool with the complicated situation is Shriver, who apparently pieced together Joseph's origins when she began to hear whispers about the kid's Arnold-esque appearance.

  She confronted Mildred and asked "point blank" if Arnold was the father, leading to a dramatic scene that Baena helpfully picture-paints for Hello!: "We held each other, and I told her it wasn't Arnie's fault, that it takes two."

  People mag says Shriver's only objective right now is protect her four kids with Schwarzenegger from the scandal.

  "While Maria may not have been as angry at Mildred as she was at Arnold, her instinct would be to protect her family," shares a family confidant. "Whatever she did in the aftermath was about taking care of her kids, trying to shield them and trying to minimize the repercussions."

• What's your take? Do you believe Mildred gave the interview simply "to set the record straight once and for all"? Tell us in the comments.

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