Teri Copley Responds to Claim She Cheated on John Stamos with Tony Danza: 'I Felt Sideswiped'
In a new YouTube video, Copley maintains she and Stamos were broken up at the time — and shares her side of the story
Teri Copley is sharing her side of the story amid John Stamos’ claim that she cheated on him with Tony Danza.
In his new memoir If You Would Have Told Me, which released last month, the Full House alum, 60, claimed that he walked in on the model-actress, 62, in bed with Danza, 72, while they were dating in the 1980s. Stamos described the incident to PEOPLE as “physically painful” and “worse than anything.”
When the claim surfaced ahead of the memoir’s release, Copley denied cheating and said she and Stamos were already broken up. Now, she has shared her full side of the story in a 19-minute YouTube video.
Related: John Stamos Hints That Dating Lori Loughlin Was a Real Possibility Before He Met Rebecca Romijn
In her response, Copley recalled the timeline of their relationship, which lasted “about a year.”
She said that shortly after meeting Stamos’ parents and spending time at their home, she received a phone call from his mom, Loretta, who told her, “Teri, I know that you love John, but don't plan on marrying him because he has no intention of marrying you.”
“I remember like it was yesterday,” Copley said of the phone call.
She said she “thought that John told her that, and she was a mother looking at me like a daughter type and thinking, ‘I better warn this girl not to get her hopes up.’”
As a result, she “thought he doesn't love me,” and went to Stamos’ home to break up with him. “I just said to him, ‘John I don't think we should see each other anymore.’”
“I was young. I didn't know how to communicate with him to tell him, you know, your mother told me you didn't ever want to marry me,” Copley said, adding that she “lived with that regret.”
Copley said the incident with Danza occurred about “three or four days later,” and that it happened very differently than Stamos described in his book.
She claimed she saw Danza on the cover of TV Guide at the store, and in the magazine, he “said that Teri Copley was the only girl that he'd ever loved.” After reading this, Copley called Danza and he came over to her house, she said.
In his memoir, Stamos claimed that he walked into Copley's guesthouse and found the actress asleep in bed with Danza, both of whom were not fully clothed.
According to Copley, she did not have a guesthouse. Rather, Stamos knocked on her door while Danza’s car was parked outside, and she answered the door “fully dressed.”
“[He] just shook his head and looked at me like, ‘How could you?’ Well I looked at him and didn't say anything either,” she said. “I just looked at him like, ‘What do you care?’”
“He certainly didn't come in my house and find me in bed naked with a sheet over… I mean none of that happened,” she added.
Copley also claimed that later in life, she and Stamos reconciled their relationship more than once, but it never lasted. After his divorce from Rebecca Romijn, she said she decided to meet up with Stamos and come clean about the reason for their initial breakup.
“I wanted to because I’d grown up a little bit and I wanted to tell him what happened. And so I went to his house and I sat down and I said, ‘John, did you know that your mother called me and told me that you would never marry me?’”
"And he looked at me and he said, ‘I didn't know that, Teri.’ He said, ‘I would have married you. I was madly in love with you.'"
Copley said that from then on, she and Stamos had a “mutual friendship and love as friends.” She became teary-eyed while recalling a moment when she got to speak with Loretta years after their initial split. She also said that she attended her funeral.
Copley ended her response by revealing that she felt “sideswiped” by Stamos’ claims of infidelity.
She also shared that “seeing him carelessly throw me out there like a dirty dish rag for people to just make fun of" and "make all these assumptions" about was "very hurtful and surprising to me.”
“That's not the John that I ever knew,” she added.
“I wanted to come on and share from my heart — just from my heart, just transparent — what happened as I lived it, and just to say to John that I forgive you,” she finished. “I forgive you, John. I prayed for you to get married and have a beautiful family and I'm so happy. I'm so happy for you and I will continue to pray for you and your family, your beautiful wife, your beautiful son.”
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Copley has been married to Charles Wahlheim since 1992, per IMDB. Stamos married Caitlin McHugh in 2018, and they share a 5-year-old son, Billy.
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