If you watch Vanderpump Rules online, you know that the show’s fifth season wasn’t particularly kind Scheana Marie.

In addition to finding herself at the very bottom of her chick clique totem pole, Scheana got divorced from Mike Shay in a messy split that played out over the season’s final episodes.

To make matters worse, Shay appeared on the Vanderpump reunion show, making for one of the most awkward moments in Bravo history.

Scheana sat down with the Juicy Scoop podcast earlier this week, and she was surprisingly candid in her discussion of the show, her marriage, and the way they each made the other more difficult:

“Contractually, he didn’t have a choice,” Scheana said of Shay’s odd decision to appear on the reunion show.

Some have fans have contested that explanation, pointing out that Mike didn’t seem to have much in the way of contractual obligation during the rest of the season.

The troubled aspiring music producer and rapper barely appeared on camera, chalking his absences up to “late nights in the studio.”

But Scheana says that while Shay’s enthusiasm for the series may have waned during the past season, he was completely on board earlier in the show’s run.

“We signed up to do this show together so I’m so sick of people being like ‘You dragged him into this. You can tell he never wanted it,'” Scheana told the host.

“We were together for a whole year before there was Vanderpump Rules.”

She added:

“He knew I wanted to be in the entertainment industry and when the idea of this show got brought up, we had a really long talk about it. What should we do? And we both agreed that we wanted to do it.”

Interestingly, Scheana admits that her role on the show influenced her decision to get married, and they she may not have tied the knot were it not for the pressure to drum up storylines:

“I’ve thought about that so much and I want to say yes, but I feel like we did maybe rush it a little. I was twenty nine and I felt like that was a time when I was ready,” Scheana says.

“We’d known each other for a long time, we’d been together for three years at that point. In hindsight, there a lot of red flags that I just kind of swept under the rug. It built up to be quite a large pile and I just kept walking over it.” 

In a revelation that probably won’t do much for Scheana’s reputation for being “fake,” the SUR hostess admits that marrying Shay for the show started as a joke … then quickly became a reality:

“Jokingly, we were like we are going to get engaged Season 2 and get engaged Season 3, have a kid Season 4 or 5. We were joking about it,” she tells the podcast.

That’s one joke that turned out to have a less-than-amusing punchline.

Source: celebweddings