Peter Kramer/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images"Just because somebody says something doesn't mean it is true."
That's what Brooks Ayers said to me during my four hours of interviewing him to try and uncover whether he really did have cancer. They are also words that have already come back to haunt him.
To be honest, before I was preparing to interview Brooks I had never seen a full episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County. I had 24 hours to brush up on 10 seasons' worth of drama.
I watched so much footage of Vicki Gunvalson, Meghan King Edmonds, Shannon Beador, Tamra Judge and Heather Dubrow in that short amount of time, I thought my head was going to explode.
But not being a regular RHOC viewer helped as I sat across from the soft-talking Mississippi native who was being mic'd up in front of me. I was able to lend a fresh pair of eyes to what was becoming an increasingly sordid situation for followers of Vicki and Brooks' twisted story. I wasn't rooting for or against anyone: My aim was simply to uncover the truth.
Admittedly I did feel slightly guilty heading into the interview because, frankly, who wants to ask somebody if they really have cancer? And, truth be told, I didn't at the time think it was possible that someone would make up a story like that, especially on national TV.
I threw everything I could at Brooks, all the seeming cancer story contradictions on the show and more. He was charming, never got angry with me and seemed to have an answer for everything.
As I walked away from that first interview, I thanked him for his time and for handling some difficult questions with poise. I even told him I was sorry he was going through this. The truth is, part of me believed him. He seemed genuine.
But as the days passed, and we aired our interview on TV and wrote about it online, I started to replay some of his responses in my head. He had refused to take a lie detector test, and wouldn't show Bravo any documented evidence of his cancer battle, and that nagged at me. Why wasn't he grabbing at the opportunity to prove he was telling the truth once and for all?
There were other red flags too. He seemed grateful for the reality show experience, even though most of the world believed him to be a liar, and when I asked him if he would consider doing even more reality TV, he said he would. Surely this show had ruined his life, tainted him forever?
Not at all, he told me gleefully.
I was also bothered by the way he blamed the other women on the show for everything. His problems were all a result of their "drama," as he put it. He used the same phrases over and over again: it's just "a game of telephone," they "lied" and "they don't have my best interests at heart."
When I watched back the full interview, it struck me that he had no problem blaming the other women for all his woes.
But being a fame whore and possibly a misogynist doesn't necessarily mean you would also fake cancer. Because, again, who would actually make up something like that?!
A little less than two weeks after our first sit-down, I was due to interview him for the second time, at 8 a.m. on a Monday. I spent the weekend re-watching everything, scouring blogs and comment sections and going through tweets, and I started keeping a list of inconsistencies.
The list wouldn't end. And it wasn't just Brooks' story that had holes—Vicki's did too. At times they were telling different versions of the same tale.
On that Monday, I found myself opposite a very different-seeming man than before. This time Brooks looked uncomfortable; he was more fidgety and less patient. It was the morning after the third RHOC reunion had aired and the accusations that he was perpetuating a hoax came in hard and fast. Even Vicki seemed to have turned against him.
I began by asking about the most obvious inconsistency from our first interview, something that the Twitterverse had gone to town on: His claim that his non-Hodgkin lymphoma had reduced from being at stage 3 to stage 2.
This time, I printed out the official explanation from the American Cancer Society. It's impossible to reduce the staging of your cancer. You are either stage 3 or you are in remission, I explained.
"I misspoke…" he protested.
His explanation felt rehearsed. He obviously knew it was coming.
So then I continued asking him about the other apparent holes in his and Vicki's stories. Here are just a few of them:
Red Flag 1: In our first interview, Brooks said that nothing about his and Vicki's storyline had ever been made up or manipulated. In the final reunion, however, Vicki admitted she made up the story about Terry Dubrow giving Brooks an IV in the middle of the night.
Brooks' explanation: Vicki lied, it was nothing to do with him.
Red Flag 2: Brooks told me multiple times he was diagnosed in October 2014. But I have seen a text between Vicki and another cast mate, dated Sept. 9, that announces the diagnosis, a full month beforehand.
His explanation: I can't remember the exact date.
Red Flag 3: Brooks had previously told me he had only drunk alcohol twice since his diagnosis, on his birthday and Vicki's birthday. But I had found new evidence that he had consumed alcohol on other occasions.
His explanation: I was talking about drinking "on camera." He then admitted he drinks alcohol a couple of times a week.
Red Flag 4: Scangate. The discrepancies in the PET scan document he showed on camera to Tamra. It was on a letterhead for a company that does not do the type of scan he claimed he had. At the third reunion, both Vicki's daughter, Briana, and Shannon were insistent it could not be authentic. Shannon even offered up a report from a scan that she underwent at the same clinic as part of her quest to prove that Brooks was lying.
His explanation: After going back and forth in blaming the women, he said, "I don't have an answer for you."
Red Flag 5: He said that he was not meant to travel for a week or two after having his three chemotherapy treatments, but I brought up evidence where he had in fact traveled soon after, on several occasions.
His explanation: He said he occasionally went against doctors' orders.
Red Flag 6: He told me that not one of the women had actually asked him outright about his cancer and so he hadn't had a chance to explain his illness properly to them. I told him I had seen a text sent from Vicki to Meghan asking her not to ask Brooks about his cancer, per his own orders. I was also told he stopped filming a scene at Cut because the girls were asking him too many questions.
His explanation: He backtracked, saying they are not friends of his so why would he have to explain anything to them?
Red Flag 7: On Oct. 23, Brooks tweeted a picture of his arm with a needle in it. A source said the pic was initially posted with the hashtag "#chemo" on it, but the tweet was later deleted. Briana also called Brooks out for that, insisting that he was giving blood, not having chemotherapy.
His explanation: "Briana will say and do anything that she can to discredit me." I asked, "Did you put #chemo on the picture?" He said, "I don't remember, to be honest with you."
Red Flag 8: I asked Brooks about another story told during the reunion, about Vicki telling Tamra and Briana four years ago that he was dying of pancreatic cancer (he actually had pancreatitis at the time). Why would she have said that, I asked.
His explanation: I can't control what Vicki tells people. I didn't tell her that.
And there were more red flags. Pages of them. And we went over all of them during that second interview, as well as some disturbing allegations about what was really going on behind closed doors between Brooks and Vicki, stories of physical and verbal abuse and his creepy behavior around Vicki's daughter, Briana.
Through it all, he fidgeted, deflected and shot off denial after denial.
We now know for certain that his so-called "proof of cancer," the medical documents he gave to E! News, were actually fake. City of Hope hospital confirmed they had never treated a man by that name, and Brooks then admitted to falsifying the paperwork.
The reality is that he lied.
The real question now is not whether Brooks faked cancer (he still insists he didn't), but whether Vicki knew about the lie. Brooks was already portrayed on RHOC as a shady, villainous character, but Vicki is the "OG of the OC." She has millions of fans and has long been admired for her resilience and business acumen.
How could she have not known that all that glitters is not gold? She was sharing a house with him during his treatment. Is she really a victim in all of this, an innocent bystander? She claimed in the reunion that she felt duped by Brooks, that she had fabricated the story about Brooks needing an IV in the middle of the night because she wanted compassion.
But how can we believe anything she says?
And then there's the smoking gun, the on-the-record tall tale that no amount of tears and playing the sympathy card can possibly get her out of: her claim that she sat with Brooks for four hours while he got chemo at City of Hope.
Brooks and Vicki, in overestimating what they could get away with, underestimated all of us.
Brooks arrogantly handing over fake paperwork was a foolish move. I remember during my first interview with him he told me that the scandal would be forgotten in a few months. I believe both Vicki and Brooks never thought their personal storyline would become national news, or at least not in an unfavorable way.
If at some point in the future it is definitively proven that Brooks lied about having cancer, then this isn't just a sad story about the lengths some people will go to for fame and attention. People make stuff up and embellish their stories on TV all the time for a variety of self-serving reasons.
But this is so much worse. Millions of people are battling cancer and would give anything to be cured, or to have access to the caliber of care provided by City of Hope. What about the people who were in any way inspired by Brooks and his so-called candor?
I would love to sit down with Vicki to give her a chance to tell her side. But she won't talk to me because she knows I'm too familiar with the ins and outs of this story. Moreover, she knows now that we're not going to just take her at her word.
As I ended my second two-hour interview with Brooks, moments after he had passed me his paperwork, I asked him if he would put his doctor on the phone with me. Not to ask for an on-camera interview or to otherwise pump him for details, but to verify Brooks' side of the story for good.
"Sure," Brooks told me. "Let me call him and ask."
I never heard from him again.
(E! and Bravo are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)
—Additional reporting by Adam Mann