Renee Zellweger addresses gay rumours about ex-husband Kenny Chesney

Renee Zellweger has opened up about her annulled marriage to Kenny Chesney and how her claims of fraud led people to think her ex-husband was gay.

In an interview with The Advocate, the 47-year-old actress revealed her true feelings about her quick marriage and even quicker annulment from 48-year-old singer Kenny Chesney.

The actress shocked the world when she married Chesney in May 2005 after dating for only four months, and by September, Zellweger filed for annulment citing fraud as the reason, which led many to believe that the country sensation was gay and had fooled her.

“I forgot about that. It’s a pretty big thing to forget, isn’t it? That made me sad,” she admitted to the magazine referring to her fraud allegations. “It made me sad that somehow people were using that as a way to be cruel and calling someone gay as a pejorative, which has fateful consequences. Of course, there’s the bigger-picture problem of why anyone had to make up a story at all.”

While the “Bridget Jones’ Baby” star may feel upset that people took her claims of fraud to mean Chesney was gay, she has never come out to directly clear up the issue.

“I’d said all I needed to say on that subject,” the actress said. “I’m an old-fashioned gal who doesn’t feel it’s appropriate to hang out your laundry on the lawn. I feel you devalue yourself as a human being when you share very personal things with a bajillion strangers who are making fun of you. I just don’t see that there’s any dignity in that.”

“But sometimes it is difficult to just let something be what it is, especially when it’s unnecessary ugliness,” she added. “Once you’ve said your piece, shouldn't that be enough? And why is the ugliness that’s perpetuated in the media so attractive to people?”

In an interview with Anderson Cooper two years after their split, Chesney denied the rumours himself, saying “It’s not true. Period.”

“Maybe I should have come out and said, ‘No, I’m not [gay],’ but I didn’t want to draw any more attention to it,” he explained at that time. “I didn’t have to prove to anybody that I wasn’t [gay]. I didn’t feel like I really did.”

Zellweger also shared a funny story about getting snapped on the beach with one of her gay friends.

“I’m lucky to have handfuls [of gay male confidants]. The majority of my closest friends are gay, and I have my pearl,” she shared. “I went to Miami for New Year’s Eve some years back with him and his boyfriend, and we got paparazzied on the beach.”

“We had a very Bridget Jones moment,” she recalled. “He had no desire to be photographed in his trunks, so he told me, ‘You need to get out of here and go for a run right now!’ Some tabloid ran the photos and wrote, ‘Has Renée finally found her pearl?’ I was like, ‘Aww, he’s my pearl!’ He’s family to me.”

Zellweger is returning to the big screen to reprise her role as Bridget Jones in “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” which will hit Australian cinemas on Sept. 7 and will be released in the US on Sept. 16.