Teddi Mellencamp Breaks Silence on Alleged Horse Trainer Affair

Teddi Mellencamp has broken her silence about her alleged affair with her horse trainer, Simon Schroeder.

On the second half of The Jamie Kern Lima Show podcast, which dropped Tuesday, Aug. 5, Mellencamp opened up about the alleged affair with Schroeder, which first circulated in the news at the end of 2024.

“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,” Mellencamp, 44, said.

“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, referring to her stage 4 cancer diagnosis after her melanoma metastasized to her brain and lungs.

With tears in her eyes, Mellencamp said that “nothing goes without payment.”

“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,” she continued. “Because now not only do you have yourself, you have your significant other, your kids, the other person’s significant other, their kids.”

Schroeder’s ex-wife, Karli Schroeder, with whom he shares two kids, filed for divorce on Dec. 30, citing irreconcilable differences, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.

The filing, in which she also asked for spousal support as well as payment of her attorney fees from Simon, stated they were married April 14, 2024, and split on Sept. 22, 2024. The pair had a previous marriage annulled in Ventura County in February — but remarried two months later, according to Us Weekly.

The divorce occurred after rumors swirled in November 2024 that Simon had an affair with Mellencamp, amid the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum’s divorce from Edwin Arroyave. Simon never commented on the affair rumors, and never responded to PEOPLE’s request for comment in January 2025.

Mellencamp and Arroyave were married for 13 years when she filed for divorce on Nov. 1, 2024, citing irreconcilable differences, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE. However, in February 2025, the divorce proceedings came to a halt when Mellencamp revealed her cancer diagnosis.

In the months since, Mellencamp and Arroyave remained on good terms and emphasized how they’re still good friends. He has even been by her side as she continues to undergo treatment for cancer.

Speaking about her actions on the Aug. 5 podcast, Mellencamp said, “So many people are hurt in the wreckage.”

“But I can say this from knowing — the wreckage doesn’t happen on its own,” she said, adding that “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, explaining that she was “so sick.”

“Remember how I told you there was like months of headaches and stuff like that? I was looking for comfort anywhere I can get it,” she said, referring to the “severe and debilitating headaches” she mentioned in her announcement about the brain tumors.

“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,” she continued.

Mellencamp said she wasn’t herself but is not going to blame her alleged actions on the fact that she was sick.

“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.

In earlier segments of the podcast, Mellencamp spoke about how she and Arroyave, 48, put their divorce on pause when they found out about her stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis.

“I always knew he’d do the right thing by me,” Mellencamp said. “If he wanted to, he could still be filing and finishing this divorce off right now. But, my dad [musician John Mellencamp] and family just said like, ‘I don’t think this is the right thing for her to be able to try to navigate right now or figure out.’ It was like, ‘Yeah, of course. No, we’ll wait. We’ll wait until she’s better, and then we’ll figure it out.'”

Though Mellencamp called Arroyave her “ex-husband” at one point during the episode, she clarified that she doesn’t “know what you call somebody you were married to, then you filed for divorce, and then you got cancer, so then everything went on hold.”

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“To this day, I don’t hate Edwin,” she said, adding that she and Arroyave were staying in the same house together and “don’t argue.”

“”I just want him to be happy, and I want our kids to be happy, and I want us to be able to have a good friendship and relationship, and I don’t want to do anything to hurt him,” she said. “I kind of know how our marriage works.”