For the first time, Teddi Mellencamp is addressing all the speculation and rumors that she had an affair with her horse trainer, Simon Schroeder.
There is talk that the alleged infidelity caused her divorce from her estranged husband Edwin Arroyave, which was confirmed in November of 2024. Then, in February 2025, Teddi underwent emergency brain surgery where tumors were found.
Now, she’s reflecting back on this time period.
Keep reading to find out more…
About the alleged affair, Teddi, 44, said on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” podcast, “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, but what I can say is, did I do things that hurt other people? Yes.”
“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 said of her stage 4 diagnosis.
About the rumors, 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.”
“But I can say this from knowing — the wreckage doesn’t happen on its own…it never had happened to me. 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 said.
She continued, “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. 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.”