NEED TO KNOW
Brock Davies is ready to, in his words, “face the music.”
Weeks after his wife Scheana Shay dropped the bombshell news in her book that he had cheated on her while she was pregnant with their now 4-year-old daughter, Summer Moon, the Vanderpump Rules star is opening up for the first time about the affair and why he waited nearly two years to disclose his infidelity.
Speaking in a candid conversation with Shay on the Friday, July 25 episode of her podcast Scheananigans, Davies apologized to Shay for stepping out on their marriage, noting, “it’s rough to realize that your actions have betrayed the ones that you love.”
He insisted that the extramarital relationship, which took place while he and Shay were living in San Diego during the pandemic, was not romantic.
“It was a sexual affair,” he said. “There was no dating. There was no courting. It was just purely that meetup, and then we had sex. And it happened multiple times over a three-week span.”
Nicole Weingart/Bravo via Getty
Davies did not name the woman he slept with, but said he called things off. “I felt horrible about it,” he claimed. “I was like, ‘This is not okay. I’m not doing this.’ And I pulled the pin.”
Despite his regrets, Davies still chose to remained silent about what he did, explaining that he “minimized what it was” and “compartmentalized it” in his brain.
“I was an absolute coward,” Davies said. “That man was a coward, and he wasn’t thinking about protecting you. He was just thinking about protecting himself, saving his face.”
“It was selfish. It was a self-preservation tactic, you could say,” Davies added, of his silence. “I believed that I was never gonna do it again, and we could just move past this. … And it was just another level of betrayal that I put on top of the first one.”
JC Olivera/WireImage
Being able to separate his emotions and actions, Davies said, was a skill set he developed over the course of his life.
“This is not an excuse,” Davies shared. In an effort to give more context to his actions, he explained he grew up in “constant instability,” an environment that instilled in him “a drive for achievement” and an urge to “find my value in my achievements.”
“It created this egomaniac,” he said, reflecting on how he shrugged off consequences of his own actions. “I detached from a lot of my emotions easily. I minimized a lot of my destructive qualities and characters. … And looking back on that now, I can kind of understand where there’s a serious problem there. It wasn’t until I was open to learning more about that where I realized, ‘Okay, I am a part of this problem and I can change it.’ ”
“Those skill sets in my twenties and thirties definitely served me in getting to where I am, from this boy from New Zealand, from a dairy farm,” he continued. “But then going into this father role and husband role, those those skill set that I developed do not serve me well at all.”
Grand Central Publishing
Shay first opened up about Davies’ affair in an excerpt from her memoir, My Good Side, which was published by Glamour on July 10. In the text, she recounted how Davies admitted to his infidelity as rumors swirled about him sleeping with her former costar, Rachel Leviss, amid the fallout of Leviss’ cheating scandal with Tom Sandoval in 2023.
On Scheananigans, however, Davies did not mention the Leviss rumors as a catalyst to him coming clean. Instead, he said that returning to San Diego a year and a half later and running into “some of our old friends” was a reminder that “my destructive actions might cost me everything.”
“Since then, it has just been building up and building up,” he said. “Every day, just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and the weight was heavier and heavier. And Scandavol, on the side of it all, was an element, but it wasn’t the core reason.”
“I realized that in order for me to actually have a healthy relationship with you, one based on complete honesty, I needed to address this,” he told Shay. “This was the one thing that was hanging over me. It burned a hole in my heart. It really did.”
Noam Galai/Bravo via Getty
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
As for what drove Davies to cheat, Shay wrote in her book that he told her he was scared of being a parent again and believed he was a “bad dad,” due to his past actions with his older kids from a previous relationship. But upon reflection, Davies took that back.
“I just used that as an easy way out,” he said on Friday’s podcast. “And the reality is, you just gotta do the work. I used fear then, and… I was just being weak in that moment and blaming other things instead of looking deep within.”
Since this experience, Davies said he’s had “a serious conversation with myself” and, through therapy, done the internal work to be a better man, a better husband and a better father.
“I know what I did, and I know what I could have lost,” he said. “I’m just respecting the fact that at the end of the day, what I’ve done doesn’t define who I’m gonna become.”
He also thanked Shay for modeling a “type of forgiveness” he’d never had before. “I’m proud of you for telling your story, and I’m sorry for this being a part of your story,” Davies said.