For 11 seasons on Bravo’s hit reality television show Vanderpump Rules, Scheana Shay shared nearly every detail of her life. We saw her in times of great joy, like the birth of her daughter in 2021, but also in times of great pain.
From day one she spoke candidly about her relationship with a married man, finding what she thought was true love but ended in divorce, navigating the end of meaningful friendships, and more. But she held back from the public one of the toughest things she’s ever gone through—until now.
As Shay reveals in her upcoming memoir My Good Side, an excerpt of which she’s sharing exclusively with Glamour, her husband, Brock Davies, had an affair when she was pregnant with their daughter in 2020. He kept the relationship a secret until after they were married, revealing it to her when the affair of her costars Tom Sandoval and Rachel “Raquel” Leviss, known as Scandoval, became national news in March 2023.
In her memoir Shay explains that learning of the Scandoval affair had been uniquely traumatic—she was close friend with all three—and resulted in a heated argument that ended with Leviss filing a restraining order against Shay. Shay denied the allegations of physical assault and was vindicated when the order was dismissed. But the emotional damage was done. Afterward, Shay had hoped to move on from the drama and regroup with her husband and daughter, and begin to heal. But as she writes, her pain had only just begun. Below, she shares what happened next, in an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, My Good Side.
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In the throes of Scandoval and its aftermath, my own world shattered. Since Raquel had doxxed my address when she filed the restraining order, my only safe place no longer felt secure. Every day I was gritting my teeth and trying to power through this mess, not really knowing what my life would look like on the other side of it.
By the end of March, once we’d filmed the reunion and the restraining order had been dismissed, I assumed my life would settle down. Silly me. The story of the scandal was far from done, and it became clear that the media was going to have a field day with it for quite some time to come. Each morning I would wake up to a new headline or viral video while attempting to parent an almost two-year-old who had no idea what was going on. I knew I had to stay strong for her, but it was one of the most stressful and uncertain periods of my entire life.
That was when blind items about Brock and Raquel having an affair surfaced. Prior to Tom and Raquel’s indiscretions, Brock had been supportive of Raquel when she split from James. Even though I knew in my heart that the gossip concerning Brock and Raquel was ridiculously fake, we had to deal with it anyway. There was the smallest section of my brain that kept thinking: If Tom and Raquel pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes for seven months, could Brock and Raquel have done the same thing? When such a monumental lie is exposed so close to you, it brings a lot into question.
That wasn’t the only blind item about Brock and another woman to emerge during this time. There was also one about him dating a woman in San Diego around the same time we met, which claimed that Brock would spend Saturdays with her, before coming up to see me on Sundays for Chargers games. It also alleged that she had helped him pack for the Australia trip where we made our relationship official, prompting her to cut ties with him. I certainly didn’t trust Raquel as far as I could throw her, so when Brock dismissed the accusations and denied that some woman helped him pack, I believed him.
Miraculously, by Easter—between filming seasons 10 and 11—media attention and fan speculation had died down a little, and paparazzi were no longer camped outside my house.
We had an amazing day with my family, and that night Brock and I sat down to watch the latest episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. It was a typical evening at home for us, and—finally—my nervous system wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I guess I should have known better than to relax into my state of calmness.
Right before I pressed play, Brock told me to put down the remote because he needed to talk to me about something important. I thought he was joking at first. But then I noticed his face was serious, and my heart began beating against my chest. What else could possibly go wrong?
Brock said that with all of the fake news being published, he was afraid that something that actually was true might surface, and it was best that I heard it directly from him. My whole body froze, and I remained in a state of paralyzed shock as he confessed that he’d cheated on me two years prior, when we were living in San Diego during the pandemic, while I was pregnant with Summer.
I had spent so much time fighting off my anxiety and convincing myself that just because Tom cheated on Ariana didn’t mean Brock would ever cheat on me. Now I was finding out just how wrong I was.
As I sat there, feeling completely sick to my stomach, he admitted that—at the time—he was scared about being a father again, specifically about whether he even deserved to be, and he chose to deal with it by sleeping with someone else. I use the word “chose” because it was very much a conscious decision. No one twisted his arm or dragged him into bed.
Just when I thought my world had been rocked beyond anything I could have imagined, it was officially shattered into pieces—pieces I wasn’t sure I could put back together. I didn’t want to believe what he was telling me, and, oddly, I didn’t know how to react, either. I was so angry, so sad, and so hurt; those were givens.
There was this deep fury bubbling inside of me, and I couldn’t release it. If I screamed, I could wake up my daughter. Our daughter. His baby, whom I’d been carrying while he was in bed with another woman. I stood up and started pacing back and forth, fuming, and feeling like I might throw up.
Then, unable to contain my rage, I slapped him and threw a Rubik’s cube in his direction, which he dodged. To this day, every time I see a Rubik’s cube it triggers me, pulling me right back to this incredibly dark moment in my life. Same goes for any mention of an F45 gym.
Brock didn’t know what to say. What could he possibly say? He’d done what he’d done, and it wasn’t going to go away or be swept under the rug. Still, I wanted details. I had to know who the woman was and why he’d so blatantly betrayed me, particularly during such a vulnerable period of my life.
He said that the woman was someone he had known since before we met. One day, while I was at home, pregnant with his child, Brock went to work at his gym, F45 Training East Hillcrest in San Diego, and he ran into her outside. After reconnecting, he said they began a brief affair.
I was a little confused because I’d always had his location and could have checked it at any time. How had I not caught them? But he also had a second phone for work, which I did know about but didn’t monitor. It turned out that was their sole form of communication. Nice, right?
That same night Brock gave me a letter that he’d written a year after the affair ended. Why then? I wondered. Apparently, he had compartmentalized his indiscretion (convenient, I know), but while we were out at a local festival in San Diego one night, he ran into some old friends who reminded him of that time in his life, and everything that he’d done came rushing back. He said he realized he was throwing his second chance at a family away by stepping out and swore to himself that he would never betray me again.
That night after the festival, he wrote the letter, which included more specifics than I ever wanted, such as how many times they’d slept together, where they’d done it, and where they hadn’t (our house). He also pointed out that it was purely physical, never emotional, and he always used protection. Gee, thanks! He definitely wasn’t sober when he put pen to paper, so the spelling errors were rampant. I can’t explain why, but that really irritated me. Maybe because it felt like another sign of his carelessness.
The letter made me remember the weeks leading up to my second trimester when, like many pregnant women, I was sexually stimulated. I’ll never forget how, during that time, Brock was “afraid” to have sex with me (or he simply didn’t want to). That did a number on my anxiety, and it killed my confidence in a way I can’t even describe. His behavior now made so much more sense.
Once I’d read it, that was more than enough. I told him to immediately toss it into the fire. I never wanted to set eyes on those words again.
Excerpted from MY GOOD SIDE: A Memoir Copyright © 2025 Scheana Shay. Published by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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