Fran Drescher and her husband were high school sweethearts. When they divorced, he came out as gay.

This story includes descriptions of sexual assault that may be distressing to some readers.

Fran Drescher met Peter Marc Jacobson when she was 15.

Born and raised in Queens, New York, they became best friends in high school and started dating soon after.

Drescher and Jacobson got married in 1978, when they were 21, and both attended and then later dropped out of Queens University.

The couple then moved to California and started writing their own sitcom. Jacobson told AOL, Drescher's unique nasally voice was a "cash cow".

"We’ve made a career out of her voice… I write it and she says it," he shared in 2012.

"Fran and I started, basically, sitting in a basement watching sitcoms to writing sitcoms, and we created The Nanny."

The Nanny aired its first episode in 1993 and went for six seasons, wrapping in 1999. 

Jacobson wrote, directed and produced the sitcom, while Drescher, of course, played the lead, Fran Fine.

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When Jacobson married Drescher, he had no idea he was gay. 

"We were living a heterosexual life," the writer told Oprah in 2011. "I wasn't having affairs on the side or anything like that. I thought that I was straight."

Jacobson first began going to therapy in the '80s, not because he questioned his sexuality - something he would later talk to a professional about - but because he and Drescher were victims of a violent crime.

In January 1985, before either of them were famous, two armed men broke into their Los Angeles home while a friend was visiting.

While one ransacked their belongings, the other tied up Jacobson and forced the writer to watch as he raped Drescher and her friend at gunpoint.  

The two men were later captured and arrested, and one is serving a life sentence in prison.

During the height of The Nanny's success, tabloids found out about and reported on the incident. 

"People were calling my parents, they thought that it had just happened," Drescher told the television host.

"In a way it was an opportunity, because at that point, I was in therapy, and I was able to get in touch with a lot of feelings that I hadn't really addressed in the past," she said. 

After the traumatic event, Jacobson pushed aside any thoughts he had about his sexuality.

"I'd get angry because I'd start thinking about it, and I didn't know what to do with it," he said in the same interview. 

"I kept trying to push it back."

Doing so changed the writer's behaviour, which severely impacted his marriage to Drescher.

"Peter started to have control issues that I found somewhat suffocating," the actress recalled. 

"And only in hindsight, do we now understand that he was working so hard to control his authentic self, his true orientation."

As time went on, Jacobson became more aware of his sexuality, and confronted his wife, telling her he was bisexual.

"Honestly, he did not want the marriage to end," Drescher told Fox News in 2021.

"I needed it to end. I needed to find myself outside of the marriage and he needed to find himself outside of the marriage. He was mad at me for a while."

The couple got divorced in 1999. Jacobson moved to New York the day The Nanny ended, and the couple didn't speak for a year.

Although their marriage ended on a sour note, a health scare brought them back together.

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After two years of symptoms and misdiagnoses by eight doctors, Drescher was diagnosed with uterine cancer in 2000. She required an immediate hysterectomy.

Following the surgery, Drescher was cleared of any cancer.

The actress then wrote about her experience in her book Cancer Schmancer, and told Jacobson she wanted to see him in New York on her book tour.

"And that was when he said to me, 'I don't want you to be thrown if when you're doing all this press that somebody says, 'Do you know that your husband is living as a gay man now?'," she said to her ex-husband on Oprah.

It was the first time she had heard Jacobson was gay - not bisexual.

"We've been rebuilding our friendship ever since then," Drescher said.

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In 2011, the two began working together again, on a sitcom called Happily Divorced. 

The show ran for two seasons and was based loosely on their relationship - Drescher played a florist who finds out her husband of 18 years is gay. 

These days, Drescher and Jacobson still call each other soul mates, just in a difference sense. They holiday together, go out to dinner together, do everything together.

"It is a deep, deep love," Jacobson said at the Hollywood Museum’s LGBTQ+ Real To Reel Awards.

In 2015, the actress was asked how she didn't know her husband was gay.

"I have a gay art dealer, a gay dermatologist - not to mention my hairdresser," she said in 2015 when receiving an award at the Stonewall Community Foundation Vision Awards.

"I have a gay ex-husband! People always say to me, ‘How did you not know?’ He loves decorating and fashion and clothes, but we actually did have sex a lot."

"I didn’t know at the time, though, that in his mind he was f***ing the bartender at Olive Garden," she added.

The two remain close friends, and are both single, today.

Feature image: Getty/Instagram/@officialfrandrescher