Kelsey Swanson says her breakup from a 10-year relationship was shaped by secrecy from the start, including what she now describes as a hidden web of other relationships around John Caprio. In an exclusive interview, Swanson said she learned early that her now-ex was seeing other people and spent years trying to make sense of what was really happening.
Swanson said on The Real Housewives of Rhode Island that she and her longtime boyfriend had split, then went deeper on The Real Housewives of Rhode Island After Show about how the relationship began when she was 21 and he was 43. She said she knew “at the very beginning” that he was seeing other people, later found out she was not the only woman in his life and felt trapped between what she suspected and what she was told.
“I would hear things,” Swanson said, adding, “I never asked, but he never told.” She said the situation was not necessarily what she signed up for, but that it gradually “took on a life of its own,” and that she trained herself to accept it so she would not be disappointed. Swanson said she lived with “constant fear and anxiety” about what she would find out next, and described herself as “staying in my lane” because, as a 20-something-year-old woman, she did not think she could challenge a man more than two decades older than her.
Her account also pointed to how uneven the relationship had become. Swanson said she never caught him on the phone with another woman in front of her, but that he would say he was going away and she would later discover someone else was joining the trip. She said she found evidence on Facebook while they were in bed together, and when she tried to press for answers, he shut her down and told her not to ask questions.
That leaves the central question less about whether the relationship was open than whether it was ever honest. Swanson said she is still unsure whether to call it cheating, but her own description makes clear that whatever label fit, it was a relationship built on concealment, denial and an imbalance that she says she accepted only because she felt too afraid to push back.