In her only interview about the affair allegation (which she strongly denies), the attorney reveals the “debilitating” aftermath — and her hard-earned triumphs

The furniture had just arrived, and boxes were still packed in the Silicon Valley, Calif., house Nicole Shanahan was trying to turn into a home for herself and her daughter after her 2021 split from husband Sergey Brin, Google’s billionaire cofounder, when scandal hit.

Suddenly the world believed that Shanahan — a 37-year-old attorney, philanthropist and investor — had a tryst with Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, 52, leading to Brin, 49, filing for divorce. It was all in a July 2022 Wall Street Journal story picked up around the globe within a day. While many pointed out that the backlash against her had a decidedly sexist slant, online trolls called her a “gold digger” and made vulgar comments about her. (Shanahan and Musk both denied the affair; WSJ told PEOPLE, “We are confident in our sourcing, and we stand by our reporting.”)

“My career has been based on academic and intellectual credibility, and I was being shamed internationally for being a cheater,” says Shanahan. “To be known because of a sexual act is one of the most humiliating things . . . it was utterly debilitating.”

One year after being accused of an affair with Tesla’s Elon Musk at the end of her marriage to Google’s Sergey Brin, attorney and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan is telling her own story in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.JESSICA CHOU

But now, a year after the whirlwind, Shanahan sits at a dining table near her new garden, where vegetables will soon sprout. Smiling wide, she points to an email that her attorney sent minutes ago: “You’re officially divorced!” the message reads.

Those three words mark the end to a 17-month legal process with Brin, during which she survived a “wave of chaos” from the scandal — and found a new love (more on the “silly, smart” man later) in private. “It’s been a long journey,” she tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. “Today is a turning point of letting go. I’m happy I’ve arrived at a point where I can reflect on my story.”

Nicole Shanahan at home on June 1.JESSICA CHOU

A “Conversation” with Elon Musk Becomes a Scandal

By December 2021, Shanahan was separated from Brin — now the world’s 11th richest person, worth around $97 billion, depending on market fluctuations. When the WSJ report — in which unnamed sources claimed a “brief affair,” including a December 2021 “liaison” with Musk — was published last July, “I remember feeling like everything I had ever worked for was under siege by a press cycle that had no idea what was going on in my life,” Shanahan says, “and who I was.”

She insists that she was never even more than friends with Musk, whose pal Brin had helped fund Tesla, the automaker that helped make Musk the world’s richest person, worth $238 billion.

“Did Elon and I have sex, like it was a moment of passion, and then it was over? No,” she says. “Did we have a romantic relationship? No. We didn’t have an affair.”

Instead, she and Musk had simply talked about “how I might think about helping my daughter with her autism treatment, given his background with Neuralink,” his neurotechnology company, she says. “It was a conversation that was very meaningful about life and how people show up for one another. To be painted with such a massive scarlet letter for it just seems so unfair.”

Such conversations were common in her and Brin’s Silicon Valley circle. “There’s a community of friendship involving not just Sergey and Elon but many other people in the tech world — investors, founders, really big thinkers, dreamers and doers,” she says. “Elon was another person in this group of people. There’s almost this generational ecosystem and it’s a community. You run ideas past each other and you ask questions.”

But she wouldn’t describe Musk nor the others as her closest friends. “Is it as close as my girlfriends? No,” she says. “My girlfriends that I’ve known for 10, 15 years that we’re like sisters to each other? No, it’s not that relationship — but I would call it a collegial environment.”

Shanahan questions why many have defined her by the Internet Zeitgeist. “Is this a commentary on my morals? Is it just general interest in sex, money, power?” she says. “I mean, that’s the piece that still has me confounded is how that part of the story effectively overshadowed everything else going on in the news at the time.” Comparing the importance of the climate crisis to what she sees as a frivolous and sexist situation, she asks, “Why does it matter so much?”

Elon Musk at the 2022 Met Gala in N.Y.C. on May 2, 2022. ANGELA WEISS/AFP VIA GETTY

Today, when Google users search her name, much about Musk appears in the results. “There’s a lot of layers of irony. It feels frustrating,” she says. “I stayed out of conferences and public conversations for almost a year. I had to come to terms with that reality.”

It remains unclear how her conversation with Musk became a scandal, but Shanahan has a message for the story’s unnamed sources. “I have a strong sense of who they are and what they were motivated by,” she says. “It would be very easy to be angry and to feel defamed and seek clarity. In practical terms I understand why they did it, but in a deeper, spiritual context, I can’t understand — I would never do anything like that.”

Still, she says, “I forgive you, and I’m moving on.”

Shanahan’s Challenging Start

“In many ways, I was perfectly trained as a child to get through this chapter of my life — the frenetic weight of a mentally ill father and a shell-shocked mother taught me to lean into a personal sense of self that has been bullishly cultivated through times of chaos,” Shanahan writes in a personal essay that PEOPLE is publishing online Thursday. “Bad things happen, injustice happens, but there are always tools for overcoming them, it’s a matter of relentless commitment to oneself.”

Growing up on welfare in Oakland with a father who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and a Chinese immigrant mother who struggled to make ends meet before becoming an accountant, “I had a very hard childhood with a lot of sadness, fear and instability,” she says of her dad’s behavior. “At times there was violence.”

Despite having a challenging childhood, “I was a very optimistic kid,” says Nicole Shanahan (in her 1997 softball portrait).COURTESY NICOLE SHANAHAN

To cope with the trauma due to his mental illness, she dwelled on her possibilities. “When you grow up in a home that sometimes feels like a war zone, you learn to find peace, joy, love and harmony in non-obvious places,” she says.

Her safe place was school, where the honor student set her sights on a career in law. “Since I was 5, I knew I wanted to be a judge,” she says. “I had a very strong opinion about justice.”

She had street smarts, too. “When you grow up with very little,” she says, “it makes you creative, resourceful and quick to action.” At 12 she started bussing tables at a local burger joint for cash, and by 15 she landed a hosting job at a nicer restaurant. “I would unpack my tips envelope in front of my mom,” she says, “and she was blown away by how much was coming out.”

“School was one of the only reliable things I had in my life,” says Nicole Shanahan (after graduating high school in 2003).COURTESY NICOLE SHANAHAN

Shanahan shares that she eventually learned to forgive her father, who died in 2014, by participating in The Hoffman Process — which British GQ once called “seven days to change a lifetime” — in October of 2021. “It’s a week-long intensive, 14 hours a day,” she says of the emotional retreat. “They take away your cell phone, they take away your laptop. And you’re in a classroom setting with about 29 other individuals.”

“What The Hoffman Process helped me understand is that people really are doing what they know to do,” she says. “A lot of what my father dealt with was due to his unresolved trauma in his own life. Rather than being embarrassed by him or ashamed or upset or just generally angry at the universe, Hoffman Process made me understand that he was really the product of his own past pains and hurts.”

Before law school, Nicole Shanahan (second from right, with colleagues in 2007) worked at a law firm’s Beijing office.COURTESY NICOLE SHANAHAN

Forging Her Own Path and Falling for Sergey Brin

At 17, Shanahan left home for college at the University of Puget Sound, where she focused on Asian studies, economics and Mandarin Chinese. After working as a paralegal and patent specialist, she graduated from Santa Clara University School of Law in 2014 and earned a fellowship at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.

At Stanford, she took on a project with the San Francisco District Attorney Office. “I really doubled down on criminal justice reform, looking at police report data and determining if we could find bias by looking for patterns,” she says.

Also in 2014, she met Brin at the Wanderlust yoga festival in Lake Tahoe. They began dating in 2015, with Brin showing up to her campus office for long walks. “We fell in love at Stanford, wandering the campus and talking about quantum physics,” she says. “He showed me around the areas he’d frequent when he was there as a masters student — and where he created Google with Larry Page!”

“There was so much innovation happening in the Valley,” she says of tech’s inspiring energy at the time. “I adored it. 2014-2016 were years in which Silicon Valley was the most popular place to be on the planet if you were an ambitious young person seeking to change the world for the better. I look back at that time with so much nostalgia. I was at Stanford as a fellow running between the law school and the computer science department in the early days of machine learning and big data, and AI was talked about a lot.”

“We were bonded,” says Nicole Shanahan (in Hawaii with Brin, Echo and his other kids in April 2021).COURTESY NICOLE SHANAHAN

While forging her own path with her company ClearAccessIP — a patent platform she created in law school and sold in 2020 — “here I was hanging out with Sergey,” she says. “I was living in a fairy tale. It was magical. It seemed like we really could solve a lot of the world’s problems with tech then.”

‘Living as a Wife of a Billionaire’

In 2018 she married Brin and gave birth to daughter Echo, now 4, after struggling with infertility. But everyday life was not what she expected. “When I was living as a wife of a billionaire, I was not the best version of myself,” she says. “I felt conflicted every day, like I couldn’t access the thing that made me what I am.”

“I couldn’t access that 5-year-old girl who had to figure out how to turn a 30-year-old baseball mitt into something I could go to softball practice with,” she continues. “It was the girl who just had endless optimism and tenacity and that fight — ’cause I’m a fighter — and I didn’t know how to switch gears. I tried for years. I looked around me for examples of how I could adapt to this new lifestyle.”

She and Brin appeared happy in paparazzi shots on vacations, and behind the scenes, she threw herself into philanthropy, hoping that making a difference for others would fulfill her. In 2018 she came up with the idea for the Buck Institute’s Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality — inspired by her struggle to conceive Echo — and made a $6 million donation to launch it. “As I was being told what my chances were of having a child and being encouraged to freeze my eggs, it occurred to me that this should be an area of longevity research,” she says. “I don’t care about living to 120. What I do care about is being able to have a healthy child throughout my 30s and hopefully even my 40s.”

During her pregnancy with daughter Echo, Nicole Shanahan and Sergey Brin attended the 2019 Breakthrough Prize event in Mountain View, Calif., on Nov. 4, 2018. They married three days later, on Nov. 7.MIIKKA SKAFFARI/GETTY

Still, Shanahan grew increasingly frustrated by how insulated her life had become. She longed “to do real work” through her Bia-Echo Foundation, for which she now spends her days researching and investing in climate solutions, reproductive health, social justice and a cure for autism — a topic close to her heart after Echo was diagnosed to be on the spectrum. “I didn’t want a layer of departments between me and the people I want to help,” she says. “I want to be hands on.”

As for what she learned in the marriage, “It’s nearly impossible to have mega wealth and be deeply grounded,” she says. “I’ll just talk from my own experience. I think that with wealth comes a great deal of responsibility. To execute on that responsibility well, you must be grounded and you must be connected to people. At all corners of society, you must be able to have empathy and to connect with people. Otherwise, you will not show up responsibly as someone who holds extreme wealth. As you hear, people claim that there’s a disconnectedness — I mean I experienced it personally.”

“For me, it felt like there was a degree of I couldn’t figure out how to be in a rhythm within a community of people,” she continues. “And we need community and connection to be happy. It was hard for me — and I’m a very sensitive person — to figure out how to live my life within an almost regulated social rhythm of connection with others.”

The Breakup with Brin and the Fallout from Scandal

Amid her identity crisis, she realized the truth about her union with Brin: “It wasn’t a right fit,” she says. “I can only speak for myself obviously, but I think what happened was I looked inside the marriage and I couldn’t see myself.”

The couple separated by December 2021 and he filed for divorce in June 2022. The next month, she was setting up a new home for Echo as she learned that WSJ was working on a story involving her.

“It wasn’t until probably July 23 that I got word that they had more than two confirming sources that I had an affair with Elon Musk and that that affair was what prompted Sergey to divorce me,” she says. “That was their narrative and I was really alarmed.”

Through a representative, she denied the allegation and asked WSJ to not publish the story, she says. “I was going through a lot in my personal life,” she explains. “This was a time where I was saying goodbye to a life and a family that I loved very much,” including her two step-children, Chloe and Benji, whom Brin had with ex-wife Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of 23andMe. (Her sister, Susan Wojcicki, was once CEO of YouTube, a Google platform.)

Shanahan says of her mindset at the time, “I was learning how to be a single mom — in partnership with Sergey obviously, but it’s different when you go from an intact home to now two separate homes.”

When the WSJ story with Musk came out on July 25, 2022, Shanahan was surprised to see it picked up around the globe. “I had never seen anything like this,” she says. “I had never been in anything anywhere near this. I’m not a celebrity.”

“I’m told you’re not supposed to read the comments and tweets, but I did,” she adds. “I was really, honestly, intrigued by the different interpretations people were having. It seemed to me that misogynists and feminists were having very different opinions on the story and how they were interpreting it. The Wall Street Journal really focused on Sergey and Elon and I was almost an irrelevant character. But many of the other outlets I noticed were really trying to figure out who I was and how someone like me could end up in a situation like this.”

“I tried to remain objective and I tried to remain academic as much as possible, but I could not also deny the fact that it hurt,” she adds. “It hurt significantly.”

Nicole Shanahan at home on June 1.JESSICA CHOU

Healing and Starting a New Chapter

As countless news outlets began contacting her for comment on the story, she turned inward and focused on beginning a new chapter. “I had to go to first principles,” says Shanahan, who asked herself, “Who is Nicole?” The answer? A woman “with a very big and open heart who loves innovation, but not at the expense of humanity,” she says.

Enter Planeta Ventures, the venture capital fund that Shanahan says she’s managing with Abe Burns, whom Bloomberg called “The Celebrity Techsplainer of Beverly Hills” in 2017. She says they’ve invested in Earth-conscious startups like Zero Acre, a cooking oil with a low carbon footprint that has attracted other investors like Chipotle.

“Vegetable oil is a $232 billion market,” she says. “It’s devastating to the environment. Thirty percent of global croplands are devoted to growing vegetable oil crops. Deforestation drives biodiversity loss and is the second largest contributor to climate change, and we’re seeing forests getting cleared for oil production for all kinds of different oils: palm, soy, canola, sunflower, peanut, cotton seed, corn, rice bran — and the demand for vegetable oils is just increasing. What Zero Acre does is they use fermentation.”

Shanahan uses it in her own kitchen. “Consumers want to cook with cooking oil that’s going to deep fry chicken beautifully, and this will do that,” she says. “You’re actually doing something that’s good for your health and the environment, and the food tastes better.”

Healing has included time with loved ones (including her mom, who lives nearby) and self-reflection. “There were a lot of people here that I knew prior to my life with Sergey that were there for me in ways that I could have never imagined,” she says, “telling me they were going to stand by me no matter what.”

“I have a venture portfolio now,” says the Planeta Ventures founder and managing director (at home on June 1), who has invested in Earth-conscious startups like Zero Acre cooking oil.JESSICA CHOU

Co-Parenting Daughter Echo with Brin and Funding Autism Research

Through it all, her No. 1 priority is Echo, whose Moana toys are scattered throughout their otherwise organized home. “I didn’t want this to impact my daughter,” she says of the divorce from Brin, with whom she’s built “a healthy co-parenting relationship,” and life in Silicon Valley after the scandal. “I wanted to be able to take her to school with my head held high and her head held high.”

“When she’s an adult reading this piece,” Shanahan adds, “I want her to know that she is so inspiring and so amazing, and I am so proud to be her mother every single day.”

Shanahan’s face lights up as she talks about raising the little girl. “I think she communicates with trees,” she says. “I’ve never seen a child do this so regularly, but she goes up to a tree and puts her hand on it and looks up at the leaves and smiles. She loves the water — she’s like a fish. She is one of the hardest working young people I have ever met. Being autistic is really hard because sometimes you feel trapped in your head. I see her working to communicate with us, and I’m so proud of her. I have every bit of intention and dedication to helping her through every stage of this.”

To that end, Shanahan says she spends 60% of her time delving into autism research, “in part because I am hopeful of helping my daughter overcome her autism, whatever that might look like, whether it be in five years not having a diagnosis anymore, or having all of the tools to navigate the challenges that her diagnosis has produced in her life.”

“This has led me into fields of science that have been utterly fascinating,” she continues. “I talk to two scientists a week, typically, whether they’re neurosurgeons or neurologists or mitochondrial experts. Then I spend an equal amount of time after meeting with them trying to digest my notes. I chat with a lot of other mothers of autistic children because I think mothers are some of the most well-educated and researched. They’re having to show up for their child every hour of every single day. They’re trying some of these autism interventions and they’re able to tell you with greater accuracy than any published medical paper what they’re seeing in their children.”

As someone who hopes to remain “on the cutting edge” of autism research, “I just funded a big project at UC Davis looking at the exposome,” she says, “so we can early diagnose children as early as 2 days old.”

Nicole Shanahan at home on June 1.JESSICA CHOU

Finding New Love and Looking Forward

Shanahan’s favorite TV show is Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and her favorite band is the Talking Heads, but the self-described nature lover says learning to “quiet my mind” outdoors has been her best habit in the past year. She regularly surfs along the Southern California coast, and last summer, she attended the Burning Man festival in Nevada. There she met a friend of a friend, Jacob Strumwasser, a 39-year-old vice president at Lightning Labs and a “reformed Wall Street guy,” as she describes him.

“I was there for less than 24 hours and we met over coffee,” she says. “He had no idea who I was and I had no idea who he was, and we became friends. Our relationship started as a deep friendship. We saw each other in a silo of our own experience with one another and nothing else.”

Soon the pair bonded over their passion for surfing and realized they both love the same beach in SoCal. “We were living parallel surfing lives it seems, and then we met at Burning Man, which is the driest place on the planet, and talked about how much we missed surfing,” she says with a laugh. “I feel really fortunate, he’s lovely.”

She’s found him to be a supportive partner. “Echo comes first, and Jacob understands that and he shows up for me as a friend — and I feel like a better mother as a result,” she says.

Partner Jacob Strumwasser is “silly, smart, sensitive, considerate, creative and loves nature,” says Nicole Shanahan (at their love ceremony on May 5).COURTESY KIM DUNHAM

Instead of getting married traditionally, they celebrated their commitment in a love ceremony at that special beach in May. “It’s lovely to be seen for who I am,” she says, “and not how search results show me.”

When asked what it’s been like for her and Echo to start a new home life with Strumwasser, Shanahan says, “It’s been a process of trusting myself, trusting him, listening to my daughter and paying very close attention to household dynamics. And she comes first, every day she comes first.”

The trio spends afternoons in the backyard, taking long swims in the pool. “I’ve had a lot of perfect days recently,” says Shanahan, looking out at the water between bites of her favorite mint candies. In particular, the proud mom recalls the day before yesterday: “My daughter swims like a mermaid. She just looked at me with the biggest smile on her face and her eyes wide open — she refuses to wear goggles. You’re just underwater with her, and words don’t matter in that moment.”

Reflecting on the contentment she feels today, Shanahan finds one thing she wishes she could go back and tell herself during the hardest days amid the scandal: “It might seem so hopeless right now, but follow the crumbs of your future, the crumbs that will lead you out of this,” she says. “Don’t stop looking for the smallest signal that everything is going to be better than okay.”