Teddi Mellencamp, known for her role on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, is opening up about the emotional and physical battles she’s been facing—both past and present.
In a raw and vulnerable interview on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” podcast this week, Mellencamp spoke for the first time about an alleged affair she had with her horse trainer, Simon Schroeder, while married to her husband, Edwin Arroyave. What makes this confession even more powerful is that it comes as she continues treatment for stage 4 melanoma, which has spread to her brain and lungs.
“I’ve never talked about it at all, just because of the kids, and I’ve never wanted anybody to have a guarantee whether it happened or didn’t happen,” Mellencamp shared. “But what I can say is, did I do things that hurt other people? Yes.”
She went on to say that the pain from those choices still lingers. “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. Nothing goes without payment.”
Reflecting on the fallout, she added, “However long it was… it was all over the press, it was everywhere. You’re trying to minimize everybody’s pain. You end up maximizing it. Because now not only do you have yourself, you have your significant other, your kids, the other person’s significant other, their kids.”
Teddi admitted that the situation caused “so many people” to be hurt in the wreckage.” But she added, “The wreckage doesn’t happen on its own… I think I was so broken as a human being during that part of my life that I did things out of my better judgment.”
She revealed that she had been physically unwell for months during that time. “Remember how I told you there was like months of headaches and stuff like that? I was looking for comfort anywhere I [could] get it,” she said. “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.”
Rumors of the affair began to surface in late 2024, shortly after Mellencamp filed for divorce from Arroyave. But when her stage 4 cancer diagnosis hit, everything changed. The couple decided to pause their separation so she could focus on treatment.
“I always knew he’d do the right thing by me,” she said. “If he wanted to, he could still be filing and finishing this divorce off right now. But, my dad [musician John Mellencamp] and family just said like, ‘I don’t think this is the right thing for her to be able to try to navigate right now or figure out.’ It was like, ‘Yeah, of course. No, we’ll wait. We’ll wait until she’s better, and then we’ll figure it out.'”
Despite everything, Mellencamp says there’s no bitterness. “To this day, I don’t hate Edwin. I just want him to be happy, and I want our kids to be happy, and I want us to be able to have a good friendship and relationship, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt him. I kind of know how our marriage works.”
As she continues to raise awareness about melanoma and her health journey, Mellencamp encourages others to take ownership of their care. “When you go to a doctor, you just assume that’s it. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do,” she told Glamour last month. “At first, I didn’t even really do the research on melanoma because I didn’t want to know all of the bad things.”
She added, “There’s a difference between self-diagnosing yourself and being an advocate for your own health. I never really thought about it because I was like, I go to a doctor every three months. Why wouldn’t they get me checked?”
That assumption may have cost her dearly. “When I finally followed up on it, they were like, ‘We didn’t do the scans, because you didn’t have anything above a stage one on your body.’ But look what happened.”
Now, through both her past and present struggles, Teddi Mellencamp is speaking out—not just about cancer, but about healing, forgiveness, and the long road toward redemption.