Below Deck Mediterranean‘s season 10 stew Victoria SanJuan dropped a shocking bombshell about how her boyfriend died months before she joined the show.
During the Monday, September 29, episode of the hit Bravo series, Victoria opened up about her personal life with chief stew Aesha Scott and Kizzi Kitchener.
“Technically I am single. But mine is very tragic,” she said. “Eleven months — on my birthday — my boyfriend passed away.”
Victoria revealed that he “drowned,” which was “such a mystery” since her boyfriend was a dive instructor.
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“I met Bon trying to get my dive certification. He was a dive instructor at the time and I had a whole romance with him. We did everything together,” she elaborated in a confessional. “It was beautiful. Losing someone I love so much, your heart physically hurts. The first two months I was, like, brain dead.”
Victoria recalled trying to go back to scuba diving, adding, “But I just couldn’t do it.”
While speaking exclusively to Us Weekly, Aesha recalled learning about Victoria’s story.
“She is such an incredible human. I was like, ‘If the love of my life died a year prior, who knows how long it would take me [to get back to work].’ But it’s a really hard thing to throw yourself into — especially over that anniversary,” she said. “That’s one of the elements about the show — which is it’s a continued theme throughout the season — is people going through real s*** that a lot of the viewers will relate to.”
She continued: “There are people at home that will watch that and be like, ‘Oh my god, I had my partner pass away.’ I think there’s going to be a lot of different elements that people will resonate with.”
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Season 10, which premiered on Monday, reunited Aesha with Captain Sandy Yawn and now-bosun Nathan Gallager. In addition to past Below Deck star deckhand Max Salvador, the rest of the crew is made up of chef Josh Bingham, stews Kizzi Kitchener and Victoria and deckhands Christian Trimino and Tessa Budd.
“There is so much that happens. Like, the viewers this whole entire season are going to be absolutely enthralled,” Aesha teased. “I feel like with last season, it was a lot of the same stuff. It was the love triangles, and there were a lot of themes that just extended over. Whereas this season, every single charter I was like, ‘What just happened? And now that happened.’”
Aesha was excited to start fresh in season 10.
“I was like, ‘The story God is shining upon us.’ Because so much kept happening. There was so [much] interesting [stuff], but it’s not toxic or gross stuff,” she added. “It’s people’s real lives and family stories and just really interesting and often relatable stuff.”
Below Deck Med airs on Bravo Mondays at 8 p.m. ET. New episodes stream the next day on Peacock.
