Teddi Mellencamp recalled her mindset in the aftermath of estranged husband Edwin Arroyave’s affair a decade ago.
“I had to beg Edwin to want to stay with me. I had to beg him. I don’t think he was in love with me at that point,” Mellencamp, 44, recalled on the Tuesday, August 5, episode of “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” podcast. “I think we’ve gone through times in our marriage where we’ve been madly in love with each other, but that wasn’t one of those times.”
Mellencamp shared that she considered walking away from the marriage, but “then it got better,” which is why she stayed.
“People oftentimes think that if this happens in a marriage and even if it’s reversed — which you know people have said a lot of different things about me too — is that you’re doing it because you don’t have care for other people in your life,” she added. “Sometimes you just don’t have enough care for yourself.”
Mellencamp acknowledged that she also made “huge mistakes” in their relationship after Arroyave’s affair, but said that his infidelity “broke” her. (Mellencamp had an affair of her own years later.)
“That was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘How will I show up every day with a smile on my face and raise these kids and be this perfect wife and start a television show?’” she said.
Mellencamp discovered that Arroyave’s affair was with “someone that she knew” just before her first season on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2017.
“My first season on Housewives, that’s what I was going through,” Mellencamp added. “People say, ‘Oh you seem kind of quiet or you were kind of passive or but that’s not really who you are.’ I was like, well I wasn’t faking who I was, I was coping. I was so scared that someone was going to find out and ruin my family’s life.”
Page Six broke the news of Arroyave’s affair in November 2024, days after Mellencamp announced that they had split after 13 years of marriage. (The former couple share kids Slate, 12, Cruz, 10, and Dove, 5.)
“After a great deal of care and consideration, I have made the difficult decision to file for divorce,” she shared via Instagram at the time. “My priority is my children and ensuring that every care is taken with their privacy and wellbeing throughout this new chapter.”
Mellencamp filed for divorce that same month, revealing that their date of separation was in October 2024.
During Wednesday’s podcast episode, Mellencamp claimed that she only told one person after initially finding out about Arroyave’s affair. She alleged that the other woman “was coming forward” because of “a financial thing.”
“That was even more heart-wrenching because I was like, ‘You’d be willing to do this to my family for money and not even a lot of it. Disgusting,” Mellencamp added. That person called me and told me, and it was a couple days before filming of my first season.”
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