What do you say when the dust settles and you come face-to-face with the woman who waltzed off with your husband? It’s something so many jilted wives have to deal with, and it can be an impossible thing to navigate – especially when that woman (whom you consider to be a marriage-wrecker) becomes stepmum to your children.
No love was ever lost between Abby Cohen – surely, the most famous victim of the Strictly ‘curse’ – and Kristina Rihanoff, the so-called Siberian sexbomb who ended up partnering Abby’s husband Ben off the dancefloor as well as on it.
There has been much water under the bridge in the 12 years since Abby’s life imploded, and her marriage ended in an unthinkably public way, with every twist played out in the spotlight.
Her 17-year-old twins, Harriette and Isabelle, who split their time between the homes of their mum and dad, now have an eight-year-old half-sister called Mila, although Abby just uses the term ‘sister’, suggesting they have all moved on to be one of those fully blended families.
But when I ask how things are between her and Kristina these days, her answer is astonishing.
‘I haven’t seen her since Strictly,’ she says, of Kristina. ‘I’ve never ever seen her since the show.’
At first, I think I’ve misunderstood. Given how their lives are entwined, surely the two women must have been in the same room at some stage over the past decade – at a family event or children’s school function? Surely they must have had to exchange words – however chilly or painfully polite – at a motorway services handover, or on a driveway after a kids’ party?
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No love was ever lost between Abby Cohen (pictured) and Kristina Rihanoff , the so-called Siberian sexbomb who ended up partnering Abby’s husband Ben off the dancefloor as well as on it
Abby, 47, shakes her head. ‘No, it’s weird and bizarre but our paths haven’t crossed,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe it either, given that we live in the same town. I’ve never even bumped into her. It’s as if the universe has kept us apart, probably to protect my emotions.’
Has she worried, in the past, about bumping into Kristina, a woman she once called ‘that f****** Russian’, in Sainsbury’s? ‘Yes of course.’ What would she say if she did? She opens her mouth, then shuts it again. ‘No comment.’
Abby is giving this interview with great reluctance. When I meet this obviously traumatised woman at a Hertfordshire hotel, I get the impression she would like to never have to hear the words ‘Russian dancer’, or ‘Strictly’ ever again. Actually, she would quite like to pack her ex, the mess he has created and the whole Strictly shebang into a giant glitterball and send them all to Siberia, forever.
Her world fell apart in the aftermath of the show. Even hearing the theme tune brings back memories of something she now realises was a breakdown. ‘I have PTSD from it,’ she says. ‘I don’t have much memory of it because it was so traumatic. I was broken. I didn’t want to be here any more. I certainly can’t watch it.’
Abby says she – a very private, ‘homebody’ type, totally unprepared for entry to that glitzy world (‘and nothing like Kristina; in fact the opposite’) – was never really a Strictly sort to begin with.
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Ben Cohen and his wife, Abby, as childhood sweethearts aged 17. Their relationship fell apart after Ben appeared on Strictly Come Dancing
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The love affair between Ben and Kristina – the one that upended Abby’s entire life – is over. Pictured: Ben and Kristina on Strictly
2013: Ben Cohen & Kristina Paso dance to ‘Supermassive Blackhole’
Yet here we are again, with her being forced into the sort of toxic tango she never wanted to be part of in the first place. The twist this time is that the love affair between Ben and Kristina – the one that upended her entire life – is over.
They too have split, and this time it seems to be Ben’s life that is in freefall. In September, he appeared in court, defending Kristina who was facing charges for driving without insurance. He came across as a broken man, admitting he was ‘fighting to save his home and his relationship’.
His finances were in tatters, the pair were up to their neck in debt after a series of failed business ventures. Last week, their relationship – which had seemed to be moving towards marriage – was said to be over, and the Strictly curse had come full circle.
What does this have to do with Abby, given that she has rebuilt her life, and impressively so? Nothing. Yet it means she is back in the papers. She says even members of her family keep calling to alert her of every new development in the Ben and Kristina show – where she will be forever on the credits. Her anger is palpable.
‘I’m sick of being talked about every time Ben and Kristina are mentioned,’ she says. ‘Unfortunately, I’m always brought into their story because I was the victim, if you like, at the time. Their love story involves me because I was the third person.
‘But I just want it to go away. I want this to be closure on it.’
Does she have views on the split? Of course she does, but she admits she has to be careful about how she voices them, given that her priority has to be the protection of her daughters, ‘who are my life’.
They worship their father. ‘He is their hero,’ she says, in that way of the ex who can never publicly contradict that image. Though she does pity his current predicament, having lost everything.
‘I’m sad for Ben,’ she admits. ‘I do feel sorry for him. Our marriage broke down and it’s happening all over again to him, and he’s got another child.
‘He’s got to start again from nothing, in his late forties. He’s going from being so successful as a rugby player to [people] now reading of his business failures.’
She doesn’t want to rub salt in the wounds, she says: ‘I don’t want to make him look more stupid than he already does.’ And yet she asks the question so many are asking.
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”I’m sad for Ben,’ Abby admits. ‘I do feel sorry for him. Our marriage broke down and it’s happening all over again to him, and he’s got another child’
Do you think public breakups make it harder to heal?
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‘It’s come full circle now that they have split. It reminds me of all the hurt I went through. Was it really worth it? I don’t know.’
There is anger there, about the fact that her daughters are ‘having to go through it again, losing their home, and this time they have a sister too’.
They are ‘older and more resilient’ now, but ‘they’ve still got to go through more change, having already done it once’.
It’s striking that she does not join the rush to kick the man when he is down. She says that she believes in karma, though. ‘I have read people commenting on this, saying: ‘The wife will be happy about that, it’s karma.’ I think that what goes around, comes around, doesn’t it?’
Is she sad for Kristina too, who sobbed in court, clearly devastated at about how things have turned out? It’s another ‘no comment’ there.
And asked if she is surprised that the relationship is over, though, Abby shakes her head.
‘To be successful and have longevity, relationships have to be built on strong foundations. How they met is not, in my opinion, a solid enough foundation because it is all about lust. It’s a physical thing. I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me like an organic thing.’
Abby starts to cry when she talks about how her relationship with Ben – which began when she was 16 and he was 17 – began: ‘Looking back, we were children, but we were best friends. He was my hero too, my protector.’
They married in 2003, and had their twins five years later. Family life was, she thought, everything.
‘Ben was just a homeboy,’ she says. ‘He just did his job well in sport and he came home and mowed the grass. He was probably quite boring, to be honest. He was down to earth.’
Then he, in her eyes anyway, ran off with a woman who seemed to
be everything Abby was not. She physically shudders when she talks about Kristina, even when she is trying so hard ‘not to be the bitter ex wife’.
‘We are total opposites,’ she says. ‘I’m a homemaker. I’m a family girl. I make stews and Sunday dinners. I don’t know if Kristina does that, but I don’t think so.
‘Me and Kristina are completely different. We look completely different. We like different things. She doesn’t have any wellies, put it that way. She doesn’t pick dog mess off the floor like I have to do every day.’
2014: Ben Cohen and Kristina Rihanoff talk about Strictly experience
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Abby does blame the Strictly bosses for seeking to stir things up by putting Kristina and Ben together (the former couple pictured in 2018)
Actually, of the two it is suddenly Abby who seems to have the more lovely, and together, life, notwithstanding the trauma of the past decade.
Two years ago she successfully fought colon cancer, and has since found purpose in using her platform to spread awareness about the need for early reporting of bowel issues. ‘It’s the one up side of this ‘celebrity’ thing,’ she tells me.
I ask if her cancer improved relations with Ben, which can at best be called perfunctory.
She says not. He didn’t reach out, call, offer to help? ‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘There was maybe one text message.’
Her career gives Abby purpose these days. She ‘started again’, as a photographer, entirely self-taught.
And she has fallen in love with new partner David, ‘who is very private’. ‘It took a while, because I was completely broken, but in a way what happened was the making of me, because it forced me to work out who I was.’
She manages a laugh when she says that her ex simply wouldn’t recognise her as the same quiet mouse he was married to. ‘Ben wouldn’t know me,’ she says. ‘I’m a completely different person.’ Stronger? ‘Yes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’
Abby’s views about Strictly have not mellowed. How she hates that show. Every year, while the rest of the country gets excited about a new series, she shudders.
‘I don’t like the show. There is such sadness attached to it because [when Ben went on it] I was married, and then I wasn’t. When I hear the music it kind of gives me PTSD, to be honest.’
Most people think that Strictly is still about escapism and loveliness. But Abby says: ‘I wish it was still a show like that but it isn’t. It’s not about dancing any more; it’s about ‘who is going to go off with who this year’.’
Every series seems to have an Abby – a wife or girlfriend sitting with a fixed grin in the audience. She tells me that she received a gift from Rebecca Humphries following her boyfriend and comedian Seann Walsh’s photographed kiss with his dance partner Katya in 2018.
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”Ben wouldn’t know me,’ Abby says. ‘I’m a completely different person.’ Stronger? ‘Yes. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Pictured together in 2014
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Ben and Kristina always maintained that there was no affair while they were on Strictly, and that the love between them only developed when the show ended
‘It was a T shirt saying ‘Strong Girls’ Club’. We didn’t speak but we did exchange a few messages, sort of ‘girl power, got-your-back kind of thing’.’
This sounds like a macabre Strictly Widows’ Club, frankly, but you can understand Abby’s anger. How different her life might have been had Kristina been paired with, say, the golfer Tony Jacklin, back in 2013.
She does blame the Strictly bosses for seeking to stir things up by putting Kristina and Ben together. ‘Well there was a history there wasn’t there?’ she says, referencing the fact that Kristina – who had just come out of a relationship with boxer Joe Calzaghe, who was also her former pupil on Strictly (and also married when they met).
Indeed, I recall interviewing Kristina in 2009. ‘People say I’m working my way through the Strictly stars,’ she told me, indignantly, ‘but I’d never go after another woman’s man.’
Abby very much feels that, given that background, Ben shouldn’t have been paired with Kristina. ‘Looking back, I don’t know if it was the right time for her to do that show, given her own relationship status, having just broken down,’ she says. ‘I don’t know whether she was in a bad place at the time, having just split with Joe Calzaghe.’
Ben and Kristina always maintained that there was no affair while they were on Strictly, and that the love between them only developed when the show ended. Abby won’t address this, but her arched eyebrow says it all. ‘He just got partnered with the wrong one,’ she says.
Abby admitted at the time that the arrival of Ben and Kristina’s daughter was like a ‘stab to the heart’, but she says today that she had long accepted the couple were together forever.
She fully expected them to get married. ‘Actually I thought they already were,’ she says, citing a lavish Hello! photoshoot, which took place in the Maldives and featured Ben going down on one knee. ‘Cringe,’ she says today.
She will say that she’s delighted that Kristina will no longer be giving interviews about her shiny, happy life.
‘It gives me peace that she’s not going to talk about this again, it’s not going to be thrown in my face again,’ she says. ‘It’s done.
‘I feel quite relieved about that. It was like a constant reminder of what I’ve been through, so that is finished.’