My Good Side

When the world pins a label on you—mean girl, home-wrecker, pick-me, problem—how do you take your name back? In My Good Side, Scheana Shay argues that the only way forward is to claim every side of your story, including the angles you’ve been taught to hide. She contends that fame reduces complex people into simple archetypes, and that survival—especially for women in high-spectacle industries—requires both ruthless self-honesty and radical self-compassion. The memoir isn’t a victory lap; it’s a method. To reframe your narrative, you have to name your scars, admit your missteps, and keep choosing yourself, even while millions weigh in.

Scheana’s core claim is simple and hard: reclaiming your story means outgrowing people-pleasing without losing your empathy. It demands owning the contradictions—ambition and vulnerability, independence and belonging, mistake and repair. But to do so, you need to understand the forces shaping you: early bullying, industry gatekeeping, media framing, and the feedback loops of reality TV that reward the worst version of you. She shows how those external pressures compound inner ones—perfectionism, intrusive thoughts, grief—and how motherhood, mental health work, and hard conversations can convert pain into purpose.

What you’ll explore in this summary

You’ll see how a scrappy Azusa kid who played second base on an all-boys team learned to perform for love and lash out to survive—a pattern that later made her both irresistible to cameras and vulnerable to caricature. You’ll walk through the pre–#MeToo Hooters scandal where she was secretly filmed in a “fitting,” then thrust into the national spotlight as a plaintiff with Gloria Allred; how that early lesson about power, consent, and public shaming shaped her career calculus. You’ll enter the Hollywood years—short-lived romances (Jesse Metcalfe), high wattage hookups (John Mayer), and the Eddie Cibrian saga that branded her “the other woman,” then metastasized into a reality TV storyline when Lisa Vanderpump steered her from Villa Blanca toward SUR.

You’ll also witness the private costs reality TV rarely shows: a best friend’s suicide (Collin) and how it remapped her understanding of depression; a marriage to Michael Shay that unraveled through secret opioid use and emotional infidelity, culminating in a filmed confrontation and quick divorce; a career detour to headlining a Vegas stage show; the demotions, edits, and backroom power that mold character arcs (a reminder: you’re watching a narrative, not raw life). Then the pivot that changed everything: fertility heartbreak, a miscarriage, a near-death birth with HELLP syndrome, and post-partum OCD—followed by a decision to use her platform for maternal health and mental health advocacy (think Glennon Doyle’s “we can do hard things,” filtered through a Bravo lens).

Why this matters now

My Good Side lands in the shadow of Scandoval, when a private affair detonated public lives and a restraining-order sideshow recast friends as adversaries. Scheana dissects how the legal theater, crisis PR, and editing rooms shape what you think you know—and how to keep your integrity when every incentive says weaponize the narrative. The memoir also breaks new ground by revealing a betrayal closer to home: Brock’s infidelity during her pregnancy, disclosed long after the headlines had moved on. The choice she makes—to stay, to forgive, to do the therapy—isn’t a moral prescription; it’s a window into repair (Esther Perel’s work on infidelity and meaning echoes here).

Across these chapters, three themes recur. First, identity is negotiated at the intersection of attention and agency; if you don’t define yourself, the cut-down will. Second, healing isn’t linear: grief, OCD, and shame resurface in new costumes (an Instagram follower count fixed at 420, a TV volume stuck on odd numbers) until you name and treat them (ERP, EMDR, medication). Third, motherhood doesn’t soften ambition; it clarifies stakes. It turns “good TV” into a threat to your nervous system and reorients choices—from calling out body-shaming to standing up to a restraining order she says was weaponized—around one small person’s safety.

Claim the camera, don’t let it claim you.

Scheana’s north star is simple: tell the truth before someone sells a version of it. The memoir is her unedited cut.

If you’ve ever been mislabeled at work, miscast in your family, or misunderstood online, this book hands you tools: set boundaries early, document your reality, choose your team (lawyers, therapists, friends) with more rigor than your glam, and when the internet feasts, feed yourself first. We’ll follow Scheana’s arc from Azusa to BravoCon and back to a kitchen island where a toddler says, “We’re a family.” Along the way we’ll explore how to stop auditioning for your worth, how to forgive without forgetting, and how to keep performing—on a stage, on a podcast, in a courtroom—without ever losing your good side.

Scheana’s first tug-of-war is one you’ve likely felt: the craving to be liked colliding with the need to stand firm. As a kid in Azusa, she was the girl who refused to trade baseball for softball, playing second base on an all-boys team because a Rockford Peach (her great-aunt Shirley “Hustle” Burkovich) and Madonna’s jersey in A League of Their Own said she could. That impulse—to define herself—ran alongside a deep hunger for approval. Attention, validation, and words of affirmation were her love languages. In practice, that pairing made her fearless onstage and fragile in hallways.

The identity squeeze

Raised by a white mom and a Dutch stepdad (Ron, the man she calls Dad) while being half Mexican, Scheana learned early that rooms don’t always know what to do with ambiguity. Junior high peers mocked her last name (Jancan, warped to “Jenkins”) and hurled slurs like “Güera.” When a classmate’s crush liked Scheana, a ring of girls shoved her into a “fight, fight, fight” circle. Teachers broke it up, but the suspension stuck. The message: even if you’re not the aggressor, you’ll pay for the scene. That’s a people-pleaser’s nightmare—conflict finds you, and you’re punished for it.

Meanwhile, threats came by pager (“013 403”—DIE HOE—and “187”) and notes with hand-drawn tombstones. She didn’t tell her parents. Her mom had miscarried; her dad had just officially become “Dad” through marriage; stability felt fragile. So she did what many first-born good girls do: swallowed pain to spare the room. She even stayed awake all night at a sleepover when other girls threatened to cut off her hair. The lie children tell themselves—“everyone would be happier if I were gone”—festered. She calls it depression now; at the time, it was survival.

Micro-rebellions that mattered

Even while appeasing, she kept testing edges. Sixteen brought a driver’s license and a job—fired within probation for “distracting” male baggers (her mom called the union). She hyped crowds as “Miss Mopar” and lied about her age to get on the set of Biker Boyz. She snuck a disposable camera into the Teen Choice Awards and got herself kicked out for a flash photo of Usher, then sweet-talked back in. Each tiny insurrection built a muscle she’d need later in rooms with network execs: don’t accept the posted rules; learn who wrote them.

The blueprint you can borrow

If you grew up a people pleaser, you know how easily caretaking morphs into self-erasure. Scheana offers a counter-rhythm: pick a principle, then practice it small until it’s reflex. Her principle was self-definition. She wasn’t going to wear the skirt if pants felt right, even if the entire Catholic school did. That doesn’t mean she didn’t conform—she bought the clogs and knee socks when she realized optics mattered—but she chose moments to be unmistakably herself.

Brené Brown says belonging is the opposite of fitting in; it requires being seen (Braving the Wilderness). Scheana’s early life shows the cost of being seen before you have language for it. The lesson for you: build language. Name what you’re doing when you push back. Say, “I’m choosing baseball over softball because velocity thrills me,” or “I’m keeping my last name because it’s my grandmother’s.” People-pleasing rarely disappears, but you can dock it to a purpose bigger than approval.

A note on anger and grace

Her eighth-grade backyard brawl with “Darlene” ended with Scheana handing out a black eye and getting grounded—for the other girl. Anger, in her world, justified itself only when it protected dignity. Years later, that same split-second heat would resurface on a New York sidewalk when a betrayal detonated. The skill isn’t the punch—she insists she didn’t—but the boundary. For you, the move isn’t to become unbothered; it’s to be bothered on purpose. When the room demands your silence to stay comfortable, decide in advance when you’ll let it be uncomfortable.

The paradox Scheana lives—seeking love while choosing herself—sets the baseline for every chapter that follows. It’s the tension that makes her catnip for television and tinder for tabloid bonfires. It’s also what makes her instructive. She doesn’t resolve the paradox; she negotiates it. So will you.

The Hooters “interview” could have been a shame story that Scheana buried. Instead, she weaponized it into accountability—years before #MeToo gave us better language. At 18, eager for tips and a cuter uniform than the country club, she walked into a trailer outside a new Hooters and into a trap. The manager, Juan Aponte, staged a “uniform fitting,” directed her where to change “so construction workers couldn’t see,” and secretly filmed it all on a hidden camera. She left hired and high on validation. Months later, police stood at her door with grainy stills of her changing. They’d found 180 illicit recordings—some of minors.

From victim to voice

Her uncle tipped her to Gloria Allred’s interest. Allred asked if Scheana would be the voice who could handle cameras. She said yes. There’s a difference between seeking attention and choosing visibility to force a reckoning. She sat on Maury, The Early Show, and CNN not as “the Hooters girl” but as a witness. The details were sickening: Aponte told women to remove black bras so they “wouldn’t show” under white tanks, asked for nude thongs, and filmed over eighty women and girls—including 17-year-olds—under the guise of professionalism.

They won. Aponte got five years, pled no contest to using a minor for sex acts and eavesdropping. There was a settlement. But the victory came at a cost familiar to anyone who’s blown the whistle: scrutiny boomeranged back. Why did she apply to Hooters anyway? What did she expect? Was she “asking for it”?

Pre–#MeToo context (and why it matters)

In 2003–2004, the public vocabulary centered on women’s guilt, not men’s culpability. If you were filmed without consent, you still had to justify your wardrobe. Reading this now evokes Chanel Miller’s Know My Name—how survivors are forced to educate the very systems that harmed them. Scheana names how the shame worked on her: she worried Azusa Pacific University could expel her for violating a conduct code just by applying to Hooters or speaking publicly about it. She internalized the lie that wanting male attention voided her right to consent. It didn’t. It never does.

Turning instinct into policy

She wishes she’d listened to her gut in the trailer. That regret isn’t victim-blaming; it’s pattern recognition. You can learn it too. Three practices emerge: (1) Name the power asymmetry out loud (“I’m alone with a hiring manager in a trailer; this is vulnerable”). (2) Pre-commit to a boundary (“I’ll only change in a public dressing area or with a female staffer present”). (3) Document oddities in real time (texts to yourself become time-stamped evidence). These aren’t paranoia; they’re anti-gaslighting infrastructure.

The legal system handled this one predator, but Scheana underlines the darker truth: most never see a day in jail. Justice, as defined by court wins, is a statistical outlier. Justice, as lived, may look like refusing to be silent, choosing to be “the face” so others can remain unnamed, and transmuting personal harm into industry warning labels.

You didn’t cause it. You get to stop it.

Visibility isn’t vanity; it’s leverage. When a system banks on your shame, your story is a policy change waiting to happen.

If your workplace ever makes you feel “crazy” for noticing red flags, borrow Scheana’s blueprint. Phone a lawyer or an advocate early (many bar associations and nonprofits offer free consults). Bring a friend to interviews. Ask for written policies. And if you choose to speak out, hold the microphone like a tool, not a trophy. (Context: That balance sits at the heart of #MeToo memoirs by Ambra Battilana Gutierrez and Emily Ratajkowski.) The point isn’t to be fearless; it’s to be resourced.

Scheana never pretends the Eddie Cibrian chapter was tidy. At 21, working in a Beverly Hills cigar lounge, she fell into a weekly rhythm with Eddie—no wedding ring, doting attention, poker nights, Hollywood bars. She didn’t Google him (Palm Treo, no browser), didn’t know he was married to Brandi Glanville, and didn’t see red flags because they were hiding in plain sight. When she finally asked, he gaslit her. When her mom read a newspaper item about Brandi’s second pregnancy, he apologized, claimed the marriage was over, then slipped right back into her life. Only when Us Weekly splashed his affair with LeAnn Rimes did she end it for good—and signed a legal doc at his lawyer’s behest to say she hadn’t cheated with him post-LeAnn. People-pleasing, meet power imbalance.

From private mess to public persona

Hollywood punished her long after she walked away. A fired colleague sold a story about Scheana hanging with John Mayer; the cigar lounge rulebook banned relationships with members, so she lost the job. That loss pushed her to Villa Blanca, which put her in Lisa Vanderpump’s orbit and, eventually, in front of Bravo cameras. The Eddie plotline became storyline. At SUR’s opening party, Lisa steered her—with a tray of goat cheese balls—toward Brandi’s circle. Brandi clocked her: “There’s that She-Anna Marie girl.” The label stuck. Castmates like Stassi Schroeder minted it into a moral identity: home-wrecker, pick-me, villain. You can feel the machine close around a young woman’s worst mistake and lock her inside it.

How production shapes the person you think you see

Scheana pulls back the curtain on call times and “roundabout directives.” Early on, Lisa called her at 7 a.m. with “suggestions” about how to move a narrative forward—defend x, tweet y. Later, Scheana says, those calls waned as she refused to defend a body-shaming moment. Editors (one even joked on a podcast that she loved stitching Scheana’s “cringiest” bits) can splice scenes to imply pining where there was friendship, or playfully prompt “ask Nikolai about dating” and then air it like she flirted with a teen. If you watch reality TV, take note: you’re consuming character arcs, not character. (Compare with Paris Hilton’s Paris: The Memoir and Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died for how public personas get engineered.)

Repair without revisionism

Scheana apologizes to Brandi and her sons directly in the book—years overdue and untelevised. She can’t rewrite those choices; she can refuse to turn them into clickbait. The maturation here is subtle: when you’ve been flattened into a type, repair is deciding what you owe the harmed person, not the audience. You might not be on TV, but you know the dynamic: a boss or sibling hardens into a role you once played. You can’t escape by denying the role; you exit by making it too small for you.

The camera doesn’t forgive. People can.

If you’re going to repent, do it to the person you hurt, not to the lens. Then let the storyline be wrong about you.

Practically, you can apply this in your inbox. When a rumor blooms, choose one email: the harmed party. Set boundaries with the “audience” (coworkers, group chats) and refuse to litigate your repentance in public. The story will swirl anyway. Your job is to stay human in the middle of it.

Two plotlines that rarely trend meet here: a friend’s suicide and a spouse’s secret drug use. Both rewired how Scheana loves. Collin—the bar manager who felt like a safe detour from celebrity chaos—kissed another woman in front of her, she retaliated by sleeping with his best friend, and within weeks he was gone. Her last texts with him were full of regret and depression. She replayed their final exchange for years, angry at him, then repentant, then changed. A chance moment years later—driving over Mulholland when Rush (their inside joke from I Love You, Man) came on—became a sign: forgiveness can be retroactive, and rituals (a Jameson toast on his birthday) can anchor grief when answers won’t.

Marriage on television, addiction in the drawer

Michael Shay was the hometown good guy who felt like forever. Their 2014 wedding at Hummingbird Nest Ranch was filmed, choreographed, and riddled with ominous hiccups (wrong cue, wrong song). She clocked his drinking and his Vicodin “party drug,” but minimized it—everyone had a vice, she reasoned. Then the honeymoon glow dimmed. A dentist bottle of Vicodin she never used turned up empty. A massive stash appeared in his truck door. Pills went missing from her dad’s medicine cabinet after a family visit. He deflected, gaslit, and always promised to do better.

While filming season five, the narrative needed resolution. Producers sensed she was hiding something. She chose to reveal the addiction (a truth) instead of the emotional affair she’d discovered (another truth), because she feared the moral reversal: “you deserve this for Brandi.” When Shay drained their joint account, disappeared for a week, and she uncovered a $600 Adderall pipeline (paid from their finances), she staged a filmed sit-down—hoping for rehab and honesty. He denied. She ended the marriage on camera. The producer later admitted he thought she was “cold” until he learned the context—a mini parable about how audiences judge without the backstory.

Lessons if you love someone who’s using

Al-Anon teaches that you didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, and you can’t cure it. Scheana lived the corollary: you can choose to stop starring in the story. She split funds quickly, paid legal fees, and made the divorce as merciful as possible. Years later, they found closure; she apologized for how addiction became a storyline and wished him well. The show must go on; your heart doesn’t have to. If you’re there now, build three lines: money (separate accounts), time (limits on rescue runs), narrative (what you will and won’t discuss at work).

Grief teaches triage.

You can mourn the person you loved, confront the person they’ve become, and still honor the best ending available: the truth.

Esther Perel notes that betrayal can be an attempt to find a lost self. That nuance doesn’t excuse harm; it explains why repair demands boundaries plus compassion. Scheana’s arc—Jameson toasts for Collin, a quick divorce that didn’t scorch earth, and a later apology to Shay—offers you a template: make endings kind, not quiet. Kindness is how you move without dragging yesterday behind you.

When love and reputation blew up, Scheana did something counterintuitive: she left LA’s center stage to headline a Vegas one. Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man gave her a residency, an apartment, and 160 nights to rebuild the muscle that fame had frayed—performing for joy, not judgment. Friends came (Brittany, Ariana, James, Sandoval). Others stayed away (Katie, Stassi, Lala, back then). Rob—her on-and-off almost—showed for opening night, but she finally chose the stage over the story. The reset mattered because it reminded her who she was without pooled tips, confessional lighting, and a “who’s safe this season?” pecking order.

Demoted, still central

Back in LA, season eight arrived with a meeting no reality star wants: “we’re demoting you.” She was told she’d be the “glue” between legacy cast and new servers and, if she stayed, maybe she’d bridge to a spin-off (eventually The Valley). She swallowed the cut, onboarded new cast like Charli Burnett (half Mexican, half white—mirror energy), and tried to be a big sister while editing choices framed her as “boy crazy” and “cringe.” An editor later bragged on a podcast about curating Scheana’s most awkward moments; she was fired. But the damage was done: a friendly porch chat could be recut into a thirst-monologue; a playful prompt to speak with Nikolai at an engagement taping became a “she’s hitting on a teen” beat.

Seeing the machine, keeping your soul

Here’s where mindset matters. Carol Dweck’s growth mindset isn’t about positive thinking; it’s about control (Mindset). Scheana can’t control the edit, but she can control the feed. She launched and grew her podcast, flew to Vegas weekly, and kept her service shifts to anchor income when day rates dipped. She froze her eggs—twice—while filming, sober during injections, hormonal, and still showed up. When a new woman, Dayna Kathan, arrived cool and self-possessed, production initially pitted them against each other (love triangle with Max). Scheana snapped—famously using an inhaler mid-panic and breaking the fourth wall to yell at a producer in SUR’s alley. Then she and Dayna did what women are told not to: they got honest, then got close, and ignored the script.

Takeaways for your “edit”

You have an edit, too—the version of you curated in Slack threads, family chats, or school gates. When the room decides your type, two moves help. First, diversify your stage. If work is misframing you, build a project (podcast, residency, side hustle) where you control cutdowns. Second, be excellent in boring ways—banking, boundaries, calendars—so “demotion” can be data, not devastation. Visibility is volatile; systems are ballast.

A bad cut can’t cancel craft.

Keep performing somewhere no one else holds the scissors. That’s where your confidence grows back.

Vegas wasn’t just a gig; it was a lab. It proved to Scheana—and can prove to you—that when a room won’t let you change, changing rooms is a career strategy, not a retreat.

Scheana meets Brock Davies not in a fairy tale but at a San Diego after-party, where he first flirts with her friend and then, in a moment straight out of Dirty Dancing, lifts her into the air. Three “good lies”—a spontaneous Rams invite (he didn’t have tickets), a crocodile story to cover childhood finger injuries (it was an electric gate), and a secret Bali trip instead of Uluru—turn into a love story she can trust. He shows up for small things (ginger tea when she’s sick) and big ones (a surprise koala adoption, a Jameson toast for Collin on the anniversary of his death). The relationship unfolds the way durable ones often do: through care competencies.

Miracle, then heartbreak

Fertility physicians had warned: with an AMH of 0.26, natural pregnancy was “close to impossible.” She froze eggs—twice—sobered for weeks, injected hormones, and readied herself for IVF. Then, like a glitch, two pink lines appeared. A week later: spotting, low progesterone, an ultrasound with no yolk sac, “come back in seven days,” then a D&C. She filmed her reaction in a clinic parking lot and turned off the camera when the doctor told her what no one wants to hear. The next day one friend invited her to dinner with celebrities; she wanted a friend on a couch. She sobbed alone in a shower. Brock walked in later with cold In-N-Out when there were no words left.

HEL(L)P and a sleepy blue baby

After grief, another pregnancy. Induction timed carefully nine days before filming season nine. Fifteen hours in, a blood-pressure spike, preeclampsia, a magnesium drip, shaking, feverish. Summer Moon arrived limp and blue—“mag baby,” nurses said, common post-magnesium. Forty-five seconds of silence felt like years. Then the cry. Scheana was whisked to high-risk ICU with HELLP syndrome (dangerously low platelets, elevated liver enzymes), catheterized, and told she couldn’t hold her baby unmonitored. Brock stayed bedside for five days. Three days home. Then cameras went up. TV showed a hibachi dinner guest list; it didn’t show the mother who almost died.

Why this story matters outside Bravo

Black and Indigenous women die at far higher rates in childbirth; preeclampsia and HELLP remain under-discussed, even as notable women (Serena Williams) have raised alarms. Scheana’s candor adds to a growing chorus making maternal health visible (Angela Garbes’s Like a Mother is a powerful companion). If you’re pregnant, push for blood-pressure monitoring, ask about preeclampsia signs, and plan a postpartum advocate. If you’re a leader, don’t reduce a teammate’s leave to “time off”; it might be how she stays alive.

Joy after loss is still joy.

It doesn’t cancel grief; it crowns it. The rainbow at Scheana’s Mexico wedding, the flower petals in Summer’s hands—those are chapter headings, not erasures.

Motherhood sharpened Scheana’s filter. “Good TV” is not worth a bad nervous system. That recalibration animates what comes next: naming a mental health diagnosis she didn’t know she carried.

Scheana didn’t think she had postpartum depression. She thought she had “sick thoughts”—anxious tapes of choking, falling, SIDS, car crashes—that looped every hour of every day. She hovered so hard she pureed everything and cut grapes into quarters long past need. Meanwhile, quieter compulsions ran the show: following exactly 420 people on Instagram for a decade, demanding TV volumes be set to odd numbers, counting radio bars before a song “could” play. Those aren’t quirks; they’re rituals designed to neutralize dread.

Calling it by its name

A therapist finally named it: postpartum OCD. Many OBs still miss it, or confuse it with PPD, because the mother looks functional while her mind runs emergency drills. Intrusive thoughts aren’t desires; they’re alarms misfiring. Once named, treatment options clarified: medication (she takes sertraline), EMDR for trauma processing, and the gold standard for OCD—exposure and response prevention (ERP). ERP is slow bravery. You do the thing that scares you (to the edge of your tolerance), and you refuse the ritual. Over time, your brain learns the world doesn’t end when you don’t check the baby cam fifteen times.

Practicing exposures (real life, not textbook)

Her therapist asked for a Level 10 exposure. Two emerged: Disneyland alone with Summer and flying solo with her toddler. She chose Disneyland. Lines without backup, a toddler ducking under queue bars, a mother whose whole body rings with “what if.” She called a friend who worked there, got a princess meet-and-greet to avoid meltdowns, used a FastPass to manage stress, stayed five hours, then let her sister join for the last rides. She lived. So did Summer. The next day she didn’t unfollow two people to return to “420.” She let the number rise. That unseen victory mattered as much as any televised confrontation.

Advocacy as aftercare

Scheana joined the International OCD Foundation community, shared her story on VPR and beyond, and received the IOCDF’s Illumination Award. The platform that once caricatured her now amplifies her. That reversal is instructive: if a room mislabels you, become the expert the room needs. (Context: Megan Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK offers a similar alchemy for grief.)

Intrusive thoughts are not intent.

They’re noise your nervous system mistakes for commands. ERP teaches your body a truer story than fear can tell.

If you hear yourself in this, seek an OCD-informed clinician (IOCDF’s directory helps), ask specifically about ERP, and normalize medication as one tool—not a moral test. If you love someone with postpartum OCD, don’t argue facts (“the baby won’t choke”); offer exposures (“I’m here while you practice”) and relief (“I’ve got nap duty; go breathe”). The goal isn’t to be fearless. It’s to live fully with fear in the passenger seat.

When rumors about Tom Sandoval and Raquel began, Scheana trusted relationship history over red flags. She’d danced with Sandoval when Ariana stayed home; it never meant betrayal. Ally Lewber’s “I saw them at the Abbey at 1 a.m.” felt like new-couple nerves, not proof. Scheana even quizzed Raquel over dinner (“Are you in love with him?”) and confronted Sandoval in TomTom’s alley. Both denied. She wanted to believe them. Then, in a New York bar bathroom after Watch What Happens Live, Ariana found an intimate FaceTime on Tom’s phone. On the sidewalk, Raquel told Scheana the affair had been seven months. Scheana says she grabbed the phone, hurled it, and shoved Raquel twice. Later, she told Ariana on speaker what she’d done. That night, lines hardened.

The restraining order theater

Days later, Scheana learned via TMZ that Raquel had filed for a restraining order alleging a punch, a black eye, and a “permanent scar.” Scheana says she panicked—about a record, about her job, about her daughter seeing her mother accused. The filing included her home address; paparazzi camped outside. Production faced logistics: both women had to attend the reunion while staying 100 yards apart. A trailer and a two-car choreography made it possible. Onstage, Andy Cohen handed Scheana a paper purporting to drop the TRO; her lawyer later told her it had no legal effect. She ripped it up on camera. In court a week later, Raquel didn’t appear; the TRO was dismissed. Scheana frames the order as PR victimhood, a way to recast herself as a threat. Readers can sit with two truths: a shove is still a shove; weaponized paperwork is still harm.

Aftershocks with old friends

The blast radius didn’t stop at Ariana and Tom. Lisa Vanderpump snubbed Scheana at the Creative Arts Emmys (no selfie—“ask Kyle Richards for one,” she quipped), then at the Vanderpump Dog Foundation Gala. Once the show’s matriarch, Lisa, in Scheana’s telling, turned chilly after a friendly photo with her rival. Meanwhile, when a later episode filmed Lisa telling Lala and Scheana that Sandoval was struggling with suicidal ideation, Scheana chose grace—she’d regretted not extending more to Collin. That compassion didn’t erase boundaries: when Tom later sued Ariana over the discovered video, then dropped the suit after backlash, Scheana let go of hopes for repair.

Your take-home in a crisis PR world

When narratives weaponize law—TROs, cease-and-desists—get counsel before you get rhetorical. Protect your address. Gather witnesses. Prepare for the court of public opinion and the one with a judge (different timelines, different tactics). Inside your circle, choose one seated truth: loyalty to the harmed party. Outside it, be cordial and brief. It’s not your job to narrate everyone’s healing arc.

Boundaries are what you do, not what you post.

Handle the legal. Hold the line. Let the internet eat someone else’s day.

If you’ve ever discovered betrayal, the instinct to blow things up is human. So is the lure of public theater. Scheana’s saga suggests a third way: defend yourself vigorously and privately, then use the mic to advocate, not retaliate.

After a beachfront proposal at home (morganite ring by Kyle Chan, rose petals, Summer present) and a foiled on-camera elopement plan in Solvang, Scheana and Brock pulled off a secret legal wedding in August 2021, followed by a Mexico celebration a year later—fire dancers, a Dirty Dancing lift, a rainbow that felt like a nod from the baby they lost. The joy was real, even as a darker truth simmered off-camera: during pregnancy, at the height of her fear after miscarriage, Brock had an affair. He confessed years later, after blind items began to churn. She slapped him, threw a Rubik’s Cube, then had to decide: end the family she’d fought to build, or choose a grueling repair.

Choosing repair (eyes open)

She chose to stay—for Summer, and because Brock wrote a contrite letter long before he was caught, admitted specifics, and accepted therapy. The decision wasn’t performative; she hid it from castmates for months to figure out what she wanted, not what a storyline demanded. She frames forgiveness as a self-preservation strategy: if she kept hating Tom for Ariana, she’d have to keep hating Brock for herself. That doesn’t make betrayal OK; it makes healing honest. If you’re in the blast zone of infidelity, her path mirrors Esther Perel’s counsel: treat an affair as both crime and crisis. Consequences and curiosity can coexist.

Business is a boundary, too

Scheana’s later chapters double as a mini-MBA for creatives. Separate finances saved her during and after divorce. A prenup with Brock gives clarity if love and life diverge. A painful footnote: she signed away rights to her song “Good as Gold” early on, under the friendly guidance of a manager-lawyer duo who felt like family. To this day, she hasn’t earned from streams. If you’re an artist: never share counsel with your manager; keep originals of every contract; and refuse notarizations you don’t fully grasp. Intellectual property is love’s opposite—it’s enforceable.

What a next act looks like

On November 25, 2024, Bravo replaced the VPR cast. Scheana didn’t spiral. She has a thriving podcast, a growing music collaboration (the 27s), a turn on The Masked Singer that scared her and proved her, and a voice in mental health spaces that aren’t contingent on a call sheet. She’s also revisiting her relationship to Lisa Vanderpump—now more boss than mentor—and holding both truth and gratitude: Lisa may have known about Eddie all along, possibly leveraging the connection to seed a spin-off, but she also created the professional ecosystem where Scheana found friends, a family, and a platform to call her own.

Your field of dreams is portable.

Jobs end. Edits fade. Contracts expire. Craft, community, and clarity travel with you.

If you’re staring down a transition, take Scheana’s checklist: a separate bank account, a signed prenup, a therapist versed in EMDR/ERP, a lawyer who works only for you, a project where you control the edit, and one ritual—like a rainbow song—that reminds you joy isn’t a plotline; it’s a practice.