Michaele Salahi and Neal Schon: Our Affair Is "Like a Fairy Tale"

Reality star and Journey guitarist who ran off together are speaking out about their relationship and why Michaele left Tareq

By Marianne Garvey Sep 20, 2011 3:15 PMTags
Michaele Salahi, TwitterTwitter

Michaele Salahi is esctatic about her Housewife turned groupie status and claims her love affair with Journey guitarist Neal Schon is true love.

The scandalous twosome are speaking out about their relationship and how they came to be a couple 10 days after the rocker invited the Real Housewives of D.C. star and her husband, Tareq Salahi, to his concert in Virginia. After his wife disappeared with Neal, Tareq feared she was kidnapped and begged the public to be on the lookout for his missus. 

But kidnapped she was not—instead she had run off with Neal in what he's calling a "fairy tale"...

"It's like a fairy tale. It is, it really is," Neal told the Daily Beast about finally being out in the open with Michaele. "I'm very happy, very happy after waiting for her for 15 years. Now I want to get beyond all this media hype thatt Tareq has put out there. It's really quite embarrassing."

The Bravo reality star revealed that back in the late '90s, she had been dating both Tareq and Neal but chose Tareq because she'd been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and believed she would receive better care from him.

"I chose Tareq over Neal because I thought life would be less stressful living on a vineyard in Virginia," she said. "Life on the road with a rock band...well, I thought I might not have been able to keep up."

The new pair admit that before that night at the concert, they had been texting each other on a secret phone a friend had provided Michaele with so she could communicate with the outside world without Tareq knowing.

Michaele knew she was going to leave her husband after Neal asked her if they were going to keep up the back and forth forever.

"I began to see he really loved me. I had to begin to feel it completely in my soul, " she said.

The night of the concert, Neal says Michaele told him she loved him. 

"What happened was...she takes off her wedding ring...right in front of Tareq. Takes it off," Neal explains. "And then she proceeds to come into my dressing room where I'm sitting down. I have tennis shoes on and she's like, nine feet tall over me. And she looks down at me like she's standing on stilts and says 'I love you, and that's never gonna change.' And when that happened I said, 'Get over here! This has taken 15 years!"

That very night, Neal tried to get her on his tour bus with him, but she went home with Tareq instead in order to avoid humiliating him.

But just over a week later, she was ready to bail. 

"I didn't want to hurt anyone, but I realized I was hurting myself," she said of her decision to finally leave her husband, whom she called "controlling."

Neal added that Tareq had ordered Michaele around, telling her when she could and couldn't leave the house and taking away her money, phone and car so she couldn't do much on her own.

And when she finally did leave, she left all her possessions behind.

"I was going crazy," she said. "Because when you want to be with someone that bad, you start to go crazy. He [Neal] sent someone to come get me. I got on a plane by myself and I just went. I just walked away from everything."

It remains to be seen whether the new couple will last—Neal also left his partner, former Playboy Playmate Ava Fabian, who he reportedly married in Paris two months ago, although it's unclear if the ceremony was legally binding.

Tareq has already filed for divorce from Michaele. Part two of our exclusive interview with the spurned husband airs on E! News tonight at 7:00.