AMY Robach may have littered Marilee Feigbig's Instagram feed with "likes" while secretly hooking up with her husband because of her conscience, a psychologist has suggested.
But he thinks the GMA anchor should have "unliked" many of them as soon as her relationship with TJ Holmes was outed.
While speculation about the start date of Amy's shock affair with her co-anchor TJ Holmes is unconfirmed, it has been reported that it began last summer, if not before.
And since the GMA hosts' clandestine dating spree was exposed last November, they've both been suspended from the hit morning TV show.
At the time, a rep for Holmes and Robach said: “This relationship started over the past few months after they separated from their respective spouses in August.
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"They had not told anyone, even at ABC, because they were waiting until they both were divorced.”
Interestingly, given this timeline, the last of Amy's Instagram "likes" on Marilee Fiebig's feed occurred on August 19.
It came on a post featuring TJ and his daughter Sabine, 10, with Marilee offering a glimpse of a loving family bond.
Next to the photo of the girl hugging her father on his 45th birthday, Marilee also added a heart emoji to her comment, which said: "May the year ahead fill you with wishes made true."
While their affair was exposed in November, Amy and TJ also started to navigate fairly different paths online.
TJ quickly shut down his Instagram feed with Amy following suit - only to reinstate it later.
TJ's wife of 12 years, Marilee also went silent on her feed.
Amazingly, to this day, Marilee's emotive and heartwarming Instagram posts appear to still be riddled with "likes" by Amy.
In the post from last August, one of Marilee's followers has also since commented: "Amy had the absolute nerve to like this post knowing she was with that man."
In an exclusive interview, certified psychologist Dr. John Delatorre told The U.S Sun: " By liking Marilee’s post in August, Amy could've been interacting when she knew that she was engaging in problematic behavior with TJ.
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"She would know that the behavior could hurt both his daughter and wife.
"When individuals engage in misbehaviors, there are several things that they do psychologically to protect themselves from the negative consequences.
"One of them could be compartmentalization.
"Amy could have been trying to compartmentalize what was going on inside of herself.
"This ranges from hurting her own family, to hurting someone else's family, to putting her job in jeopardy.
"She could've been putting her feelings in different boxes, which was the best way in her mind to handle the situation.
"It's possible that she has negative feelings, that she feels shame and guilt for having engaged in the behavior in the affair.
"She knows that he has kids and even if he is a serial cheater, she's engaging in misbehavior because she's also married, and she also has kids.
"Amy wouldn’t have wanted people to think anything weird was going on, so she would have carried on doing what she normally does online.
"What we're probably seeing is that she'd be liking Marilee's photos as a form of damage control and outward crisis management.
"Amy may have thought to leave all the likes on Marilee's posts or she could have gone back through them all and taken them off.
"In hindsight, whatever she did in terms of liking the posts or not, it was never authentic.
"It was always an illusion of appropriateness on social media, just as opposed to keeping a secret and compartmentalizing the negative consequences of the secret."
Amy Robach joined Good Morning America in 2014 before working as a co-anchor alongside TJ Holmes on GMA3: What You Need To Know.
By November 2022, after several years on set together, Robach and Holmes hit the headlines for secretly dating while still married to their spouses.
Through the ensuing months and following a critical ABC suspension period, their careers have been upended.
More recently, the pair have been spotted on holiday and out running errands together, with TJ filing for divorce from Marilee after Christmas.
"When the news broke of the affair, I would have said to Amy to take her feed down," explains Dr. Delatorre, who specializes in clinical and forensic psychology.
"I would have also said to take all of those likes down on Marilee's feed, but that she can come back to Instagram later.
"Even though they might not have been having the affair at that point when she liked all of Marilee's posts.
"All of her likes needed to come down because if you're going to take one down, people are going to start assuming this is the time when their affair started.
"On Instagram, she could've left anything up showing work-related photos or of the GMA set, because that's clear to people that she was liking posts because of working on set with TJ.
"TJ, on the other hand, should've made a statement about what his actions were, what his intentions are, and then shut his Instagram down."
More recently and in the aftermath of their suspension, it appears that TJ may have also had an affair with an ABC intern 13 years his junior during his marriage to Marilee.
It has also since been alleged that TJ had slept with an ABC producer before romancing Amy.
"There's a lot to be said about TJ Holmes, and clearly, he's the one primarily at fault for what's going on," says Dr. Delatorre who is also a Licensed Sex Offender Treatment Provider.
"But Amy is an adult woman, and she can make her own decisions.
"The decisions that she has made included consequences that would be very negative for the people that she's been interacting with in a seemingly positive way online
"When people look at her seemingly positive interactions on social media, they’re wondering if there's an underlying issue that's going on.
"They'd be asking, how can she be doing this kind of thing knowing that she's hurting these two individuals?
"Saying that, I think Amy's now in a particularly difficult position if she does feel true love and has romantic feelings for TJ.
"TJ's out there constantly cheating on people.
"I think everybody's going to look and say, well, what's going on with Amy that she's with this guy?
"And when is she going to realize that she's just another person on the list of people that he's going to cheat on or cheat with?
"With TJ there are certainly more allegations of problematic behavior here.
"It was best that TJ shut everything down online immediately because anything that he'd try to say would come across as reconstitution.
"In reconstitution, someone who's engaged in some kind of misbehavior then wants to prove that they're not capable of engaging in that misbehavior to the public.
"They want an outward-facing image in which if the misbehavior is found out, no one is going to believe that the person was able to engage in the misbehavior.
"It would come across as somewhat gaslighting, somewhat manipulative, and somewhat coercive.
"These are the kinds of things that serial cheaters say to their partners when they're supposed to be in a monogamous relationship.
"Otherwise, it's important to understand that just because someone likes something on an Instagram post, it doesn't mean that they like you.
"Just because someone says something positive on Instagram doesn't mean that it should be taken with any more depth than what's given.
"The people that matter are the people that are going to be nice to you, but to your face.
"They're not going to be nice to you only on social media.
"I also think it's important to understand here that no one's perfect.
"People make decisions in the moment and when they make the decision they try and do the best that they can moving forward."
