Teddi Mellencamp breaks silence on affair with horse trainer: Cancer is ‘my payback’

Teddi Mellencamp wonders whether her cancer is karma for having an affair with her then-married horse trainer, Simon Schroeder, which led to her divorce from her estranged husband, Edwin Arroyave.

“I’ve never talked about it at all, just because of the kids, 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, 44, told Jamie Kern Lima on the latter’s podcast Tuesday.

“To this day, does it still hurt my heart and I wonder if that’s why it got cancer? Yes, like it was my payback,” she added as she began to cry. “Nothing goes without payment, I guess.”

While Mellencamp was “trying to minimize everybody’s pain,” the months-long dalliance ended up “all over the press” late last year, which ended up “maximizing” the pain.

“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 lamented, admitting that “the wreckage doesn’t happen on its own.”

The “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” alum explained that she was “so broken as a human being” during that part of her life that she “did things out of [her] better judgment.”

She added, “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. 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.”

Though the “Two Ts in a Pod” co-host knew she was not herself, she stressed that that does not excuse 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. Like, I just was running around like a chicken with my head cut off,” she said, adding that she went from thing to thing, hoping something would make her “feel better.”

Mellencamap was diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma in October 2022. She underwent more than a dozen surgeries and got a clean bill of health in January 2024.

That November, she filed for divorce from Arroyave, with whom she shares three children: daughter Slate, 12, son Cruz, 10, and daughter Dove, 5. Arroyave, 48, is also dad to a teenage daughter named Isabella.

At the time, Page Six reported that Mellencamp’s affair with Schroeder caused her split from Arroyave, who had his own affair earlier in the marriage.

Three months later, Mellencamp underwent emergency surgery after “doctors found multiple tumors on [her] brain, which they believe [had] been growing for at least 6 months.”

During the operation, “more tumors were removed than expected.”

She announced in March that her medical team discovered “more tumors in [her] brain” as well as some in her lungs, which by April put her at stage 4.

Though immunotherapy was working well for a period of time, the “All In” founder revealed late last month that she had to pause the treatment because of its adverse effects.

She was given a 50/50 chance of survival.

Despite their romantic separation, a supportive Arroyave has remained by his estranged wife’s side throughout her treatment.