Two years after being fired from Vanderpump Rules, Stassi Schroeder is ready to talk.
The decision was handed down by Bravo in summer 2020 after Stassi's former co-star Faith Stowers revealed that Stassi and Kristen Doute, both of whom are white, had called the police on Faith, a Black woman, to report a false claim. The pair issued apologies once Faith's story gained traction, but the damage was done. Stassi, essentially, was done.
At least, that's what it seemed like at the time. Now, the former reality-TV star is releasing her second book, Off With My Head: The Definitive Basic Bitch Handbook to Surviving Rock Bottom. In it, Stassi chronicles what she's dubbed "the Canceling of 2020," sparing no detail when describing all the ways her life has changed post-Pump Rules.
Both an examination of the past and a look to the future, Off With My Head drops several bombshells about Vanderpump Rules, her pregnancy and more. E! has rounded up the biggest ones below.
Read on for Off With My Head: The Definitive Basic Bitch Handbook to Surviving Rock Bottom's most shocking revelations.
Stassi Schroeder was fired from Vanderpump Rules in 2020—after her former cast mate Faith Stowers revealed that in 2018 Stassi and Kristen Doute had called the police on her to report a false claim—but she was controversial long before then.
In Off With My Head, Stassi admitted that she's shown "extreme ignorance" several times over the years—criticizing the #MeToo movement, posting an Instagram photo with the caption "Nazi chic"—and while she faced backlash and even lost sponsors after these incidents, "being canceled once didn't help or prepare me for this next one," a.k.a. "the Canceling of 2020."
Stassi acknowledged that she made "a terrible mistake" by calling the cops on Faith—at one point explaining what she's come to learn about unconscious bias, white privilege, racism and police brutality—but insisted that she was more or less playing her role as a reality TV star. "I mean, this is the s--t Vanderpump Rules is about: exposing people, calling them out," Stassi wrote. "I'm not trying to justify what I did whatsoever, but looking back I was motivated by the fact that Faith had played a dirty role on our show that year by hooking up with Jax [Taylor] behind Brittany [Cartwright]'s back and blackmailing him with audio."
Faith, for her part, has previously stated that she never meant to record her encounter with Jax. She's also denied sending the audio to anyone, and James Kennedy admitted that he stole the recording off of her phone during a season six episode of Vanderpump Rules.
E! News has reached out to Faith's team for comment but has not heard back yet.
Once news of Stassi and Kristen's 2018 actions resurfaced, what Stassi called the "seven days of destruction" began. Within a week, her podcast was wiped from the internet, she was fired from Vanderpump Rules, and her animated-series deal with Sony, pegged to her first book, Next Level Basic, was terminated. Stassi was also dropped by several sponsors, her PR agent and her talent agency.
So she hired a crisis publicist. His first order of business? A new crisis: Someone had leaked the fact that she and her fiancé Beau Clark were expecting their first child to a tabloid.
Had her pregnancy not been leaked, Stassi insisted she would've pulled a Kylie Jenner and "[holed] up at home as if I were a glamorous recluse living in a compound."
"Since my career had imploded, I wanted to be pregnant quietly and privately," Stassi wrote. "I felt torn apart by everyone, so why would I then share this most special thing with those very people? I also knew that people just didn't want to hear from me. It wasn't my time to be out there hashtagging #blessed and #pregnant (not that I would do that, but still). It was my time to take a step back and be respectful. But someone in my life decided to take my baby and spin it."
"I'm 98 percent certain I know who spawned #babygate," Stassi wrote of the pregnancy news leak. "Journalists wouldn't tell me who leaked it, but there are only a few people in my life who I know talk to the press. Whoever it was, it was truly unforgivable (unless of course they realized the error of their ways and owned up to it and sincerely apologized— I'm waiting!)."
"Because Beau was associated with me, no one wanted to work with him," Stassi wrote. "That was devastating to deal with. I can handle being fired, I can handle being ridiculed and tossed aside (sort of), but to toss aside my partner for my mistakes is something that shook me to my very core. The amount of guilt I still carry around tears me to shreds. It wasn't just me who was hurt financially because of the firing, now it was my other half. I watched his coworkers unfollow him on social media; I watched all his contracts fall through and his brand partnerships get canceled."
The murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 "were so powerful," Stassi wrote, "I knew I wanted to learn more." So, she hired a diversity coach and began examining things like cultural competence and systemic racism. It wasn't long before she started to feel "so deeply ashamed" about a 2017 podcast episode in which she dismissed the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
"I wish I could take it back," Stassi said. "I cringe and have a visceral reaction every time I think about it. Yes, I had already learned from that mistake, already been canceled for it, already atoned for i...but this time I felt so much more ashamed. I just understood entirely and completely how wrong I was. I couldn't even believe I had questioned Black Lives Matter. The realization that I was one of those freaking Karens who say 'What about all lives matter?' was a seriously tough pill to swallow."
Stassi and her longtime BFF Kristen weren't on good terms prior to the events of 2020, but after they were both fired, they began texting each other. "After all, we were the only people who could understand what we were going through," Stassi wrote. "What we went through was so traumatizing that it made all of our past friendship issues seem like nothing. It was more important to be there for each other than to hold on to grudges. There was no conversation about the past, we just let it go."
Had Stassi not being fired, season eight of Vanderpump Rules would've been her last. Why? "Like me, most of my friends were just outgrowing the show," she wrote. "We weren't the same kids who started almost a decade before."
The show's new additions—Brett Caprioni, Charli Burnett, Danica Dow, Dayna Kathan and Max Boyens—made that clear, as well. As Stassi put it, "It was also hard watching all these new people come in acting like they owned the show—a show that us OG cast members built with our blood, sweat, and tears for eight years. Fine, maybe we weren't building houses for the needy with our bare hands or working on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, but believe it or not, we did work hard! Like I said, the new cast members constantly referred to us as old and boring (which is probably accurate, TBH) and it made the filming experience a little unpleasant. It wasn't the same Vanderpump anymore."
According to Stassi, there was once a plan for the original Vanderpump Rules cast to star in "some sort of TBD Valley Rules-type show since Kristen, Katie [Maloney], Tom [Schwartz], Jax, Brittany, Tom [Sandoval], and Ariana [Madix] were all living in the Valley."
"If the spin-off show would've happened and if it had been well received by fans, I could have gone on forever filming it because I believe that what makes a show worth doing is who you're doing it with," Stassi said. "And this way, I'd be continuing on with my group of friends, my chosen family...Obviously, though, that's not happening."
"I didn't remember the actual sacred pact because I was hammered and that was the trip that made me realize I had to quit Adderall for good," Stassi wrote about the 2018 pledge. "Lala [Kent] says that we shook hands along with Brittany and Katie and vowed that when the first one of us got pregnant, the others would try as well. Did we, like, do a magic spell or cut our hands and put them together in a blood oath? No. But there had to have been some sort of witchcraft going on because Lala and Brittany got pregnant three months after I did."
Kristen may have slept with her then-boyfriend Jax, but Stassi regrets slapping her over it. "Violence is never the answer!" she wrote. "I wish I could take it back, but I'm pretty sure this goes down in history as the slap heard 'round the world, at least the world that watches Bravo."
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