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In an emotional new interview, Teddi Mellencamp is addressing for the first time the affair that contributed to the breakdown of her marriage, and how she’s wrestled with whether her cancer diagnosis was karmic retribution.
Speaking on Jamie Kern Lima’s podcast, the 44-year-old former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star reflected on a deeply personal chapter of her life: an affair with her then-married horse trainer, Simon Schroeder. The relationship, which came to light late last year, played a role in the unraveling of her marriage to Edwin Arroyave.
“I’ve never talked about it at all, just because of the kids,” Mellencamp said, her voice breaking. “And I’ve never wanted anybody to have a guarantee of whether it happened or didn’t happen, but what I can say is: Did I do things that hurt other people? Yes.”
Mellencamp, who was diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma in October 2022, candidly shared the guilt she’s carried, and the unsettling connection she sometimes draws between her actions and her illness.
“To this day, does it still hurt my heart and I wonder if that’s why I got cancer? Yes, like it was my payback,” she admitted, fighting back tears. “Nothing goes without payment, I guess.”
Despite her efforts to “minimize everybody’s pain,” she acknowledged that the fallout from the months-long affair only intensified once it became public. “It ended up all over the press,” she recalled. “Not only do you have yourself, you have your significant other, your kids, the other person’s significant other, their kids. I mean, so many people are hurt in the wreckage.”
She added, “The wreckage doesn’t happen on its own.”
Looking back, Mellencamp said she was at one of the lowest points in her life, emotionally and physically. “I was so broken as a human being,” she explained. “I did things out of my better judgment.”
Her physical health was deteriorating as well, though she didn’t realize the extent of it at the time. “I think I was so sick during that stage, ’cause remember how I told you there was months of headaches and stuff like that, I was looking for comfort anywhere I could get it,” she shared. “I felt so much pain. I felt so sick. I didn’t go to the doctors. I just felt some certain kind of way, and the pain was so much that I had gotten to the point of, like, almost hating waking up in the morning, which I had never been that kind of person.”
Mellencamp underwent more than a dozen surgeries after her melanoma diagnosis. By January 2024, she was declared cancer-free.
Just a month earlier, in November 2023, she filed for divorce from Arroyave, 48. The former couple shares three children: Slate, 12, Cruz, 10, and Dove, 5. Arroyave also has a teenage daughter, Isabella, from a previous relationship.
Now co-hosting the popular podcast Two Ts in a Pod, Mellencamp is continuing to work through the aftermath — without trying to justify her actions.
“But I do think a bunch of things happened in my life all around the same time, and I had zero control of any of them,” she said. “Like, I just was running around like a chicken with my head cut off.” She admitted to bouncing from one distraction to another, simply hoping something would make her “feel better.”
Though she’s moved forward with her health and career, Mellencamp isn’t shying away from taking accountability.
“There’s no excuse,” she said. “I just hope being honest about it helps someone else who’s going through something and feeling lost.”