Shannon Beador isn’t one to stay quiet when there’s something worth saying, and this time, she’s saying it all. The Real Housewives of Orange County star is opening up like never before, peeling back the curtain on the behind-the-scenes drama, her fractured friendships, and the private moments she’s kept hidden from the public for years.

“This is gonna bite me in the a**, but Kelly Dodd, sometimes she’s been a wonderful friend to me, and then other times, depending on her mood, she goes for the jugular,” Shannon confesses on Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa. “I just kind of keep at peace with her. I don’t wanna fight. I don’t like to fight, but I will fight.”
The drama isn’t limited to her time on-screen. Beador also drops a bombshell about how she initially joined RHOC—without telling her then-husband, David Beador.

“I didn’t tell my ex-husband that I was interviewing,” she says about her Season 9 audition. “They called me and they said, ‘Can you send us a red carpet photo?’ I go, ‘I can send you my Christmas card photo,’ and I faxed over a Christmas card picture of my family and they go, ‘We wanna meet you.’”
Thinking she had little chance, Beador went to the meeting alone. “I thought, I’m gonna be 50. They’re not gonna want me,” she says. “And then they gave me a callback on the spot and I came home going, I wasn’t really where I said I was gonna be and foreshadow because he had an affair, but he thought, ‘Oh, she had an affair.’ And they came down and met my family. And I got it.”