Were Leander Paes and Rhea Pillai ever married?

Seems like May has not been too kind to celebrity marriages. Blame it one the summer or the paparazzi, after news that Shashi Tharoor and wife Sunanda Pushkar are contemplating a split and Chitrangada Singh and Jyoti Randhawa have filed for divorce, now Leander Paes and Rhea Pillai’s marriage seems to have hit rock bottom. Oh, wait! If media reports are to be believed, they were not married at all!

After tabloids reported the tennis star and the former model’s impending split, Leander’s publicist reportedly got in touch with DNA to say that they were never married. DNA says:

Following an article in After Hrs on Monday (Rhea-Leander: Headed for divorce) Leander Paes’s spokesperson got in touch with us to say, “Leander and Rhea are not married. They have a daughter, but they are in a live-in relationship.”

Rhea was married to actor Sanjay Dutt in 1998 and their divorce came through a few years later. Leander was dating actor Mahima Chaudhry but later started dating Rhea. Rhea and Leander have a daughter Aiyana.

Mumbai Mirror reported a close friend of the couple as saying that the relationship has been on the rocks for a while now but this time, things have gone from bad to worse.  The source also said that while the world took Rhea and Leander to be married, they never took the plunge themselves. “Rhea was apprehensive about marrying again after her bad experience with Sanjay Dutt,”  Mumbai Mirror had quoted a source.