Jax Taylor has a bone to pick with his ex, Brittany Cartwright.
The Valley star appeared on Bravo’s Hot Mic Podcast, where he opened up about his contentious divorce from Cartwright, with whom he shares 3-year-old son, Cruz.
Taylor addressed his mental health challenges and his efforts to change after seeking treatment at a facility in September, while also acknowledging that Cartwright is upset over some of his behaviors and their very public split.
“She’s upset, she’s upset. She’s gonna hit below the belt, she’s gonna say things like, ‘I’m not gonna change,’ she’s gonna say this and that ’cause she’s hurt,” Taylor told host Alex Baskin. “And she has every right to be.”
Referencing the breakdown of their marriage, which played out the Vanderpump Rules spinoff, Taylor admitted that he was “verbally abusive” both to his wife and those around him.
“I would find something to set me off, and take it out on her,” Taylor shared. “Which was so wrong.”
After hearing some of the negative things Cartwright has said about him, Taylor said he too was “hurt” and was hopeful his wife of five years would have kinder words to say about her ex.
“It hurts me that she says that. I would hope that she’d be like, ‘I will always love him and I want him to change.’ I would hope she would say that, just for my own thing,” the Jax’s Studio City owner said. “I’ve been married to her for a long time, and I would just hope that after this many years, she would at least say, ‘He’s a good father, and I hope he changes down the road,’ not be so negative. I don’t understand.”
He continued, “I think she really wants to see me fail. I really, really do. I think she wants to see my fail. I think she wants to prove everyone right.”
While Taylor is upfront about not being the best husband during their marriage, he told Baskin that since leaving the treatment center, he’s been “nicer” to Cartwright than he was while the pair were married.
“I’ve been nice to her more now than I was when I was married,” Taylor said. “I go out of my way for her.”
Taylor also said that Cartwright has been quite friendly with him since their split, calling her recent negative comments “funny” given she — per Jax — asks him over for drinks and to “hookup.”
“Which is weird that she says all these negative things about me, yet she’ll call me, two days ago, ‘Come over, you wanna have some drinks? Come over, you wanna hookup?,'” Taylor claimed. “She’ll go out and publicly humiliate me and call me every name in the book, but three days ago she’s like, ‘Hey, you wanna come over and have dinner, you wanna come over and have drinks. Don’t tell anybody that I’m doing this.'”
He continued, “People don’t know that. She talks all this s–t and then be like, ‘Come over. Come and hangout, come and this.’ I don’t mean to blow her cover, but I’m not all that bad. She wouldn’t be calling me over, she wouldn’t be saying, ‘Hey, let’s go to the pumpkin patch with Cruz. Let’s go to Disney with Cruz. Let’s take Cruz together to school.’ If I was that bad of a human being, do you think she would do all this?”
As for Cartwright, while she has yet to publicly respond to Taylor’s comments on the podcast, his candor comes after she herself sat down with Baskin and said she doesn’t buy what her ex is saying when it comes the “changed” demeanor he says he has after leaving the treatment facility he was at earlier this year.
“I don’t feel like he changed at all in those 30 days. I’m sure it will be on the show as well, but a lot of rage texting was going on the entire time he was in rehab,” Cartwright claimed. “So, for me, I was just noticing, ‘This is just going to be constant.'”
“If you’re in therapy seven hours a day and you’re still finding time to call me names and cuss me out and send me rage texts, then you’re obviously not ever gonna change,” she continued, calling it an “eye-opening” moment in their marriage that ultimately led her to file for divorce.
Cartwright filed for divorce from Taylor in August six months after the couple announced their separation in February 2024.
