Who Are Country Star Sara Evans’ Current and Former Husbands?

Country singer Sara Evans made major headlines when she revealed that she was reconciling with her husband, Jay Barker, two years after filing for a divorce. This also comes two years after Barker was arrested for assault following an incident that involved Sara and one of her friends.

Now, following the news that the two of them are back together, many wanted to know more about both of Sara’s marriages. Here’s what we know about Barker, her current husband, as well as who she was married to before him.

Sara’s current husband is Barker, and the two have been together since 2008. Barker has shared custody of four kids from a previous marriage, and they have integrated into Sara’s family.

Before her marriage to Barker, Sara was married to Craig Schelske. The two were married in 1993, and, at the time, Craig was working as an aspiring musician. The two had three children together.

After his music career largely flailed out, Craig ran for Congress as a Republican in Oregon, and ultimately lost. Following Sara’s success, the two moved to Tennessee, and their three children were born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006, news broke that Sara was filing for divorce from Craig. In her filing, she accused Craig of unemployment, alcoholism, infidelity, watching adult entertainment with their children present, and verbal abuse.

Craig denied the accusations, but the divorce was made official in 2007. Sara also filed two restraining orders against Craig in 2010 and 2011, preventing him from making derogatory statements about her or their marriage.

The divorce was highly contested and involved a number of related lawsuits, including one filed against Sara by her former maid for defamation, because Sara had accused her of having an affair with Craig.

Sara and Barker met first through her marriage counselor. Jay is a former quarterback at the University of Alabama and was a radio host at the time when they first met. They married in 2008 and moved to Alabama in 2011 before returning to Nashville in 2019.

Barker was arrested for aggravated assault in January of 2022 after he attempted to hit Sara with his car when she was the passenger in a friend’s vehicle.

Sara recently announced on her podcast that she and Barker had reconciled two years after the incident and explained that Barker had changed his way thanks to both individual therapy and marriage counseling.

“My biggest fear is that people are going to judge me or be angry with me for staying with Jay and not understand the whole story and the whole picture,” she told People. “I just want, more than anything, for them to understand that each marriage is different, each story is different.”

She’s hoping people give her the benefit of the doubt, understanding that she knows her marriage better than they do.