She's back. After half a season without her, Stassi Schroeder is returning to Vanderpump Rules Season 4 whether you like it or not. (I'm looking at you, Scheana, Katie, Tom Sandoval, Jax, etc.) Despite leaving the show publicly at the end of Season 3, Stassi is returning to her rightful place, Bravo, with a new mindset. And don't worry — those promos with her flirting with Jax are misleading. "When I saw that [video] I was like, 'What?'" Stassi tells Bustle in an interview.
Stassi Schroeder then (when the show aired in 2013) to Stassi Schroeder now are completely different people. Then, Stassi was the leader of the pack. She was dating Jax, best friends with Kristen (dating Tom Sandoval) and Katie (dating Tom Schwartz). Now, well, I don't know who she's friends with.
At one point, Stassi went her own way. She moved to New York (with her current boyfriend) and seemed to separate from her former reality TV self. Then she moved back to Los Angeles, and everything fell back into place. "I don't think I'll fully be able to cut ties with this situation," Stassi says, "because we were all best friends for so long."
Stassi notes that what makes the show so special is the fact that the relationships on the show were authentic. This wasn't a cast plopped down in a room and told to interact — these were "very real friendships," she says. Because the relationships were real, she says that made the betrayals that much worse. She adds a silver lining to the situation: "Because we had those relationships, it makes it easier, eventually, to forgive."
From Stassi's point of view, she was wronged by many. She felt her two closest friends betrayed her (Kristen and Katie), and her ex-boyfriend Jax cheated on her (multiple times), which makes you wonder why she'd want to get back into such a dynamic. "I'm not fully in it," she says. "I can pop in and out and keep certain people at arms distance and not really get hurt by anyone."
Stassi is willing to accept blame for some of the things that went down on the show's previous seasons, noting that she's "made a lot of mistakes." But would she do anything differently? "I don't think about [making mistakes] while I'm filming, and while that does get me in trouble and that does alienate people, that's the only way I know how to do reality TV," she says. "There's nothing I could do differently because I'm just trying to live my life."
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