On Watch What Happens Live tonight, Andy Cohen is one-on-one with David Beador and Shannon Beador.
Andy opens with the obvious question – why are David and Shannon torturing us, err, themselves, err, their girls with this “All About The Affair” interview?
“There’s been a tremendous backlash to Shannon,” says David. “It’s amazing that people that are on social media just completely shred her about Shannon and I’s relationship, about how I am completely removed from the marriage and look at my eyes, and it’s not true. I love Shannon. I love my family. It’s so unfair to her. That is really the reason I’m here. I’m not looking forward to this. I don’t want to be here, but I hate the fact that they attack Shannon over this. I hate it.”
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About the nature of the backlash, Shannon shares, “That I deserve to be cheated on because I nagged all the time last season. I was nagging all the time, BUT my husband was a different person and I didn’t know what was going on. That’s been hurtful. Nobody deserves to be cheated on.”
Andy jumps in to say that he would expect the backlash to be directed at the person who cheated. David agrees, adding, “It should have been. It was 100% my fault. Prior to all of this happening, we didn’t have the best marriage. I think that’s part of the reason she wanted to go on the show. She wanted to see … hope it would improve the marriage, but that’s kind of when the affair started.”
Shannon says, “It happened the day after our first day of filming.”
David explains (not really) how the affair began, “Without going into too much detail, because I’m hoping to put the past behind us, I went on a trip. One thing led to another, and I started having the affair. In hindsight, it was such a horrible thing to do to Shannon, to my family, to my kids, but it happened and it’s been very difficult to deal with the shame. As I watch it play through on the show and the social media, it’s really tough to see. It was all my doing. It wasn’t Shannon’s doing at all.”
Andy asks David if the affair was the result of him being attracted to the other woman or him trying to escape his marriage, “That’s a tough question. When it happened, it was a shock to me. It was a complete shock. I didn’t expect it. I wasn’t looking for it. Just all of a sudden… BOOM. It hit me square in the face.”
Shannon shares, “I had heard him whispering on the phone while we were filming. I just suspected it. I knew he was speaking to this person. I kept saying, ‘That’s not normal. I’m your wife and you’re not supposed to spend time with another woman. I feel it’s disrespectful to our marriage.’ I mean, I don’t mean to be mean, sweetie, but then he would make me feel stupid for pointing it out.”
David explains, “I was living a lie. I had to just keep lying. Part of that lying was denying everything that Shannon knows is going on.”
Andy asks Shannon how her co-stars, Heather Dubrow and Tamra Judge, came to know about David‘s affair before she did, “There were rumors going around town. They didn’t come up to me, because the people that heard the rumors, Heather and Tamra, I wasn’t on very good terms with them. They’re not going to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I think your husband’s having an affair.’ I would probably assume that they were doing it to hurt me again.”
Would David have confessed had he not been caught? David insists, “Yes.” Andy challenges, “Really?” David repeats, “Yes.” Does Shannon believe him? “I do,” she says, “because he was ready to leave me.” David admits he thought he was in love with the other woman.
“When I found out about the affair, he wasn’t Mr. I’m So Sorry or Mr. Warm And Fuzzy,” shares Shannon. “He wasn’t at all. It was the hardest time I had ever been through. A lot of not-so-nice things were said.”
David explains, “Like Shannon said, I was a completely different person at the time. My thought process wasn’t protecting Shannon and protecting my family. My thought process was moving onto another life, trying to get my kids through it.”
Shannon brags about never calling David‘s mistress on the phone to confront her, however, she admits to calling the woman’s husband.
“I called her husband because I had a book about how divorce affects the kids and I wanted to get it to him and she saw that I called,” she explains. “She called me. In that conversation, I wanted to say certain things, but I didn’t. I said, ‘I want my family back,’ and her response was, ‘He’s obsessed with me. He wants to marry me and I don’t even know the guy.’ It wasn’t kind. It wasn’t a kind conversation. I kept my composure and I said, ‘Please, you’re a strong woman. You’re a smart woman. My kids need their dad back. I need my husband back.’ At that point, she said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.'”
David had already moved out at this point. He came home a week later.
Shannon says that she sometimes wishes David hadn’t come home, adding, “I wish you would have moved in together and I wish you would have tried to play little nice house. Let me tell you, you would have come banging my door down within six months, saying, ‘What the heck was I thinking?!’ I know that for a fact.”
About the email, the one in which David told Shannon he wanted to move out, that caused so much drama, thanks to Tamra‘s big mouth, last season, David says, “That was gonna blow everything up, because at the time, Heather knew about [the affair]. But she didn’t say anything.”
Andy points out that Heather knew about the affair when Shannon showed up at her house to confront her – and she STILL didn’t say anything. “It was the ultimate girl code,” praises Shannon. “She didn’t even tell Terry. She kept it to herself, and I am very appreciative of that. When you have information like that, especially in our small town, you can really hurt people.”
About ending up at the same local event as the other woman, David shares, “For me, it was avoidance. I didn’t look at her. I thought I caught a glimpse of her and when I thought it was her, I turned away and I never looked again.”
Shannon: “I wanted him to look at her.”
Andy: “Why?”
Shannon: “I just wanted him to make a comparison.”
Andy: “Has she gained weight?”
Shannon: “I’ll just leave it at that.”
Andy asks if this was before or after The Daily Mail revealed her identity. It was before. About the report, David says, “It’s sad that they do that. I’m sorry, I know Shannon doesn’t agree with me on this, but it’s sad. We both moved on. I don’t see the point of dragging us through this anymore.” <side eye> Like how you are bringing even more attention to it, right now, on a very special episode of Watch What Happens Live?
About Shannon asking David to make a list of places he had gone with his mistress, she says, “Every time we went to a restaurant, I’d think, ‘Did they go here?’ I didn’t want to think that anymore. Once I found out everything, there were no longer any secrets between the two of us. That’s very important … is you move forward from infidelity. There are no more secrets. I know everything now. Everything.”
Andy brings up the viewers who say Shannon needs to stop holding the affair over David‘s head.
“Nobody knows what it feels like when someone cheats on you unless you’re in that position,” declares Shannon. “When it happens, it is devastating. It is like a death. If I want to take three months, four months, a year, to get over it, I’m entitled to take as much time as I need because it is painful and it is truthful.”
“When David left me for those two weeks, he would still come and pick the kids up from school,” continues Shannon. “One day, he handed Stella his wedding ring and he said, ‘Give this to your mother, I don’t want it anymore.’ That was a knife if my heart. I thought, ‘We are never gonna get back together.’ I had to do some interview commentary for the show and I wore his wedding ring because I wasn’t gonna give up.”
David admits, “It’s tough to hear. It’s heartbreaking. What I put her through, it was horrific. It really was horrific.” Andy rubs salt in his wounds, “In a galaxy of d-ck moves, giving the wedding ring to the kid…”
Does Shannon trust David now? “I do,” she says. “A lot of people have said, ‘Shannon, you’re punishing David by talking about this on the show.’ That is not my intent. We’re discussing this. Not only is he making himself accountable to me, he’s making himself accountable to any person that watches the show. That takes a lot of guts. It’s not easy what he’s doing because a lot of people do have judgements and they’re not positive ones.”
“The couples retreat is when I knew he truly was committed to us,” continues Shannon. “I saw him break down. I saw, for the first time, true remorse from him.”
Has Shannon forgiven David? David says, “Shannon’s probably 90-95% there.” Shannon agrees. David adds, “Maybe once every couple of weeks she regresses a little bit. I mean, we had an amazing day when we got to New York yesterday. We had an amazing afternoon.”
Andy asks about their sex life. Because, No Boundaries by Bravo. David jokes, “I was going to say, ‘We had great sex yesterday.’ I was gonna say that, but I stopped. It’s good. It’s very good.”
At the end of the day, do David and Shannon believe the show helped or hurt their marriage? “Personally, I think it’s helped our marriage,” claims David. “It’s been amazing.”
Shannon adds, “It was going to come out either way. Our kids have learned the lesson that family is worth fighting for. Of course, in some situations it might not be, but it is worth something and it is of value. I come from a broken home, so does David, and it’s affected the both of us for the rest of our lives. My kids are not spending weekends here and weekends here, we’re a cohesive family today and better than ever.”
Andy: “Aside from the kids, what keeps you in the marriage?”
David: “I’m committed to Shannon.”
Andy: “Why?”
David: “Because I committed to Shannon 15 years ago when we went down the aisle together. I love Shannon. She makes me a better man at the end of the day. She listens. She’s a wonderful woman.”
Shannon concludes, “We are in a good place. All of the bad stuff is behind us and we can just focus on the positive. That’s a good thing.”
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Photo Credit: Charles Sykes/Bravo
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