Hilary Duff's Father Had Affair With Flight Attendant--Breaks Up Marriage

Tomorrow's Star Magazine states that last year, while fans thought Hilary Duff was reeling from a romantic breakup from Joel Madden, it turns out she had deeper woes. Out of the limelight, her parents, Robert and Susan Duff, had quietly split up after 22 years of marriage- and Hilary says it was caused by her father’s cheating! Her dad had been having an affair for more than a year with an attractive 46-year old flight attendant, a source tells Star. As for the family’s silence on the matter, “I was embarrassed that my family wasn’t perfect and that some woman had broken it up,” Hilary, 19, recently claimed. “This is so hard to talk about.”

Hilary’s parents have been apart often since the late 1990s, when mom Susan, 53, moved to L.A. with Hilary and her older sister, Haylie, 22, to launch their acting careers (Hilary broke through first in 2001, when she landed the lead role in the Disney Channel sitcom Lizzie McGuire).

Meanwhile, their father Robert, 60, remained home in Houston , where he owns a chain of convenience stores- and where he met his lover.

The song “Gypsy Woman” is about her father’s lover, “and ‘The Stranger’ is a song I wrote about how my mom must feel about my dad. I made it seem like it was about a relationship I was in because I didn’t want people to know about my parents,” she said.

The lyrics reveal some bitterness: “Did I ever do anything that was this cruel to you?/ Did I ever make you wonder who was standing in the room?/ You made yourself look perfect in every way/ So when this goes down, I’m the one that will be blamed,” Hilary sings about her mom’s supposed feelings towards her unfaithful husband. It’s an unfortunate situation that she’s grown more thoughtful about as time has passed. “Last year was an emotional year for me, “Hilary has said recently. “There was a lot of growing, learning and change. It wasn’t so much a conscious choice as a natural evolution.”