Eddie Cibrian was married to Brandi Glanville at the time he and the then-21-year-old Vanderpump Rules alum started seeing one another -- later, he also started seeing seeing now-wife LeeAnn Rimes.
Eddie Cibrian was stepping out on his marriage and Scheana Shay was just along for the ride, according to a new excerpt from her upcoming memoir, My Good Side. And it was a weekly ride, at that.
Despite Cibrian being married to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Brandi Glanville at the time, Shay said she really had no idea. As the Vanderpump Rules alum reminds her readers in an exclusive clip shared with Entertainment Weekly, this was before the era of omnipresent social media, so secrets were a lot easier to hold.
Shay writes that she was just 21 years old when she first met Cibrian while she was working at a private members-only club where "every A-list celebrity, director, writer, and actor hung out." Her roommate, who also worked there, had helped her land the gig at "the hottest place to work in Beverly Hills." Shay was hoping, like many who go to LA, to get discovered and figured this was a good place for it.
According to Shay, Cibrian walked in and she was done in immediately. "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," she explains in the book. "The second we made eye contact, he smiled at me with those dimples, and I melted."
Shay writes that she was smitten right away with Cibrian's charm, and how "he always made me feel like I was the only girl in the room when I was working."
As for Glanville, Shay writes that Cibrian being married never even crossed her mind -- and it certainly never crossed his lips. "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," she notes. He also never wore a wedding ring, per the book, so she simply "assumed he was single."
On top of that, she didn't have a smartphone and had to go to an internet cafe to even get online, so looking up this guy on Google never really crossed her mind. It was a simpler time when it came to things like that, for better or worse.
Shay explained that she and Cibrian were never even in what might consider an exclusive boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but by 2006, things had started to get physical between them, with Shay describing it as "a weekly booty call."
She explained that the hookups were always on a Tuesday after her shift, and they were even out in public together a lot during this time with friends, cruising on his boat and "taking photos together."
"In hindsight, it was pretty brazen of him to be fully out in public with a bunch of single women while his wife and child were at home," she writes in her book. And at the same time, she was falling hard, adding, "The frightening thing is that I totally thought I could end up with Eddie."
This was well before Shay would find success in reality television with the launch of VPR in 2013, and even before Glanville became a Housewife in 2011 -- which was also the year after she and Cibrian's very public divorce over his infidelity with a different woman.
At the same time that things were feeling right with Cibrian, Shay felt herself being young and not quite ready to commit -- plus, she and Cibrian had never been exclusive. "That was when I started seeing Jesse Metcalfe, the sexy gardener from Desperate Housewives," she writes.
They began dating in 2007, but when that relationship ran its course, she and Cibrian reconnected. And despite never going to his house or really being brought inside of his world, Shay writes that she "didn't see a single red flag" with him.
"It really felt like we were building something. Did I think it was weird that I never went to his house? No!" she writes. "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." For a young working-class woman, she was perfectly happy to hang in Beverly Hills or Hollywood and at her place.
Shay said that someone at her work did tip her off to the fact that Cibrian was married. "He must have seen that we were getting more serious and didn’t want me to get in too deep," writes Shay.
She writes that she ultimately asked him straight-out and he denied it, replying, "No, that's insane. Why would you ask me that?"
"It was gaslighting in its most basic form," Shay adds. "Yet, I trusted him, so we continued hanging out."
And, as it turns out, Cibrian was also stepping out on his marriage to Glanville with someone else -- the woman who would (somewhat controversially, at least in the public eye) become his wife the year after his divorce, LeAnn Rimes.
Scheana Shay's My Good Side hits booksellers on July 22.
