Scheana Shay looks back on her affair with Eddie Cibrian in her new memoir.
The Vanderpump Rules alum, 40, began an intimate relationship with the Sunset Beach actor, 52, in late 2006 while he was married to Brandi Glanville, which later played out on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Pump Rules.
In an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, My Good Side, published by Entertainment Weekly on Wednesday, July 2, Shay maintains that she wasn’t aware Cibrian was married when they began seeing each other. (Cibrian also had an affair with now-wife LeAnn Rimes while married to Glanville, 52, with whom he shares sons Mason, 22, and Jake, 18.)
Shay recalls meeting Cibrian after completing college and moving to Los Angeles at the age of 21. She writes that she had aspirations of “making a name for myself in the entertainment industry, whether that was as an actress, a TV host, or a news reporter,” and landed a job at a cigar lounge frequented by some of Hollywood’s biggest names.
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It was there that Shay “first laid eyes on” the actor. “If you were to ask me when I was growing up what my exact type was, to a tee it was Eddie — tall, dark, and handsome, with dimples. The second we made eye contact, he smiled at me with those dimples, and I melted,” she writes. “How could I not? He’s undeniably a gorgeous human. Our relationship wasn’t romantic from the jump, though the writing was on the wall from day one.”
The “Scheananigans” podcast host says she and Cibrian began a “physical relationship” toward the end of 2006; however, they were not exclusively dating.
“Of course, I’ve been asked a zillion times how I didn’t realize he was married. Why would I have thought he was?” she writes. “He never wore a wedding ring, so I assumed he was single. … This was pre–social media, so it wasn’t like he was posting pics of his family in matching pajamas in front of a Christmas tree.”
According to Shay, at the time, she didn’t have an internet browser on her cellphone and didn’t own a laptop, so she would check her email at an internet cafe. “I wasn’t concerned with Googling this hot guy who said he was an actor in L.A.,” she notes.
Shay says that while she thought about a future with Cibrian, she wasn’t ready to settle down at 21 and began dating Desperate Housewives actor Jesse Metcalfe. That romance, she writes, fizzled out by the summer of 2007, and she “fell right back into regularly hanging with Eddie,” though this time their relationship was more than just physical.
Shay writes that “Eddie came to help me and met most of my friends and even my mother. His best friend also joined us with his son, who was a toddler at the time. We were literally intertwining our families and the people closest to us.”
However, she recalls that she never went to Cibrian’s house — he always stayed at hers. “Did I think it was weird that I never went to his house? No! He lived in Calabasas, supposedly. And I certainly wasn’t making the trek to Calabasas in 2007, when Ubers didn’t exist, and I had less than $1,000 to my name,” she writes. “It was so much easier and more fun to hang out in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, and my place was closer and more convenient.”
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At the time, Shay says, “I didn’t see a single red flag, especially since we weren’t exclusive.”
Eventually, Shay writes that a colleague at the cigar lounge informed her that Cibrian was married. “I didn’t believe it (or maybe I didn’t want to believe it) because I was wild about Eddie,” she admits.
Shay says she confronted Cibrian, and he allegedly responded, “No, that’s insane. Why would you ask me that?”
“It was gaslighting in its most basic form,” she writes, noting that “I trusted him, so we continued hanging out.”
Us Weekly has reached out to Cibrian’s representative for comment.
My Good Side is available July 22.
