Revisiting that morning show relationship drama one year later

“I guess the best way to sum us up, Amy and T.J., is that we’re the folks who lost the jobs we love because we love each other. And that is the bottom line,” T.J. Holmes says in the first episode of the new podcast he co-hosts with his professional and romantic partner, Amy Robach. Almost exactly a year ago, the pair was pushed off the air at GMA3 after a tabloid frenzy fomented around their romantic relationship, which blossomed while they were still, technically, married to other people. Now they’ve got their own podcast, Amy & T.J., to set the record straight—although you could also call it “‘Scandal-less,’ because this was a scandal that wasn’t,” Robach asserts.

Much was made of Holmes and Robach’s flirtatious behavior on camera while they were still married, and the fact that they used to double-date with their ex-spouses before getting together. But on Amy & T.J., the couple claims they were both already in the middle of divorce proceedings when the first tabloid photos of them together hit the Internet. “We thought in January, we’re going to go and walk in and explain to management that we are a couple … We’d actually even talked about doing it earlier,” Robach shares (via The Hollywood Reporter). “Right before the pictures came out, we thought: Should we tell them what’s going on? And we thought, ‘Let’s just get these divorces cleaned up and then let’s do it.’ But we had every intention of doing it and we didn’t believe, and I don’t think we still do believe, we were doing anything technically wrong.”

The pair weren’t naive enough to think their relationship wouldn’t “raise some eyebrows,” but they didn’t expect it to go down the way it did—nor did they imagine it would capture everyone’s imagination in that way. “In that world, affiliated with the show we were affiliated, that’s just a sexy freakin’ story,” Holmes admits now. “And I just don’t think we thought about it in that way, that anybody would give a damn what we were doing.”

Instead, the whole thing blew up, and ABC went into damage control. “We each got a phone call from our bosses saying that they had made the decision—and they made it again a point to say we hadn’t violated any company policy—but because we had become a distraction that they thought it would be best if they temporarily took us off the air to let things quiet down,” Robach recalls. “And I remember I said … ‘Now this is going to be a story if you take us off the air, please don’t do this.’”

Reader: they did it—and the temporary action eventually became permanent. That led to a “dark” time for the newly-outed couple. “There were days when I wanted to die,” Robach says. “That was something I never experienced before in my life.” At one point, she did a wellness check on Holmes, who had drunk so much vodka and consumed so many marijuana edibles that he became unresponsive, terrifying Robach (per Page Six).

Now, though, Homes is the “happiest and healthiest that I’ve been in my life” (via People). He adds, “Bottom line, we have not said this. I’m in love with this woman and she’s in love with me and we are planning a life together.” As Robach says: “Relationships are hard, they’re messy, they’re not perfect. We have fought for love, and I can say I have never been happier. I am with my best friend.”