If you’ve been down the internet rabbit hole searching for “Brett’s wife on Tanked,” congratulations, you’ve stumbled into one of reality TV’s most confusing relationship mysteries. The good news? We’ve got answers. The bad news? They’re complicated, and there’s a whole lot more going on than what Animal Planet showed you.
Let’s clear up the confusion once and for all, because the story of Brett Raymer’s romantic life is way more layered than a 15-gallon reef tank.
Wait, Who’s “Mel”? (Spoiler: She Doesn’t Exist)
Here’s where things get weird. If you’ve googled “Brett Raymer wife,” there’s a good chance you’ve seen the name “Mel” pop up. Some articles and forum posts have speculated about this mysterious woman for years.
Plot twist: Mel is not a person. She’s a hamburger joint.
The confusion stems from Season 14, Episode 5 of Tanked, which was titled “Mel’s Drive-In Tank.” In that episode, the ATM crew built a retro-themed aquarium for Mel’s Drive-In, the famous diner chain. Search engines, being the chaotic entities they are, started associating “Mel” with “Brett Raymer” in metadata, and suddenly the internet thought Brett was married to someone named Mel.
He wasn’t. There’s no Mel. Just burgers and an algorithm gone rogue.
Brett’s Actual First Wife: Melissa Bradford
Brett Raymer was married to a woman named Melissa Bradford. She wasn’t just his wife, she also worked as Acrylic Tank Manufacturing’s office manager, which meant she had a front-row seat to all the chaos that came with building custom aquariums for celebrities.
The couple had three kids together: daughter Kayla and sons Bruce and Chandler. For nearly a decade, they were a unit, navigating both family life and the demands of running a business that would eventually become a national TV phenomenon.
But the marriage didn’t last. After they divorced, Melissa gave Brett full custody of the children and resigned from ATM. And then? She basically disappeared from the public eye. The show never explained where she went or what happened, she just stopped appearing on camera, and that was that.
To this day, her whereabouts remain largely unknown, which only adds to the mystery surrounding Brett’s personal life during the Tanked years.
Enter Trisha Chamberlain: The Girlfriend Who Became a Fixture
After his divorce from Melissa, Brett started dating Trisha Chamberlain around 2011, right as Tanked was taking off. Trisha worked as the internet marketing manager for ATM and also owned Donut Mania, a business Brett would later take over.
Trisha wasn’t just arm candy for the cameras. She was a legitimately stabilizing force in Brett’s chaotic world. Remember that episode where Brett wanted to build a backyard water feature “as big as the Empire State Building” for his 12,000-square-foot Las Vegas mansion? Trisha shut that down immediately with a simple, “I want it to be nice back here!” It was classic Brett and Trisha: him dreaming big and impractical, her bringing him back to reality.
In 2017, after six years of dating, Brett proposed to Trisha at a surprise party on the set of Tanked. It was sweet, romantic, and very much on-brand for a reality TV proposal.
But here’s the thing: as of 2025, Brett and Trisha still aren’t married. They’re engaged, they’re together, but they haven’t officially tied the knot. Maybe they’re just taking their time. Maybe after everything that’s happened since the show ended, they’re being cautious. Either way, the wedding hasn’t happened yet.
The Heather King Confusion (Because Yes, People Mix This Up)
A huge chunk of the confusion around “the wife on Tanked” actually has nothing to do with Brett at all. It’s about his sister, Heather King.
Heather was married to Wayde King, Brett’s business partner and brother-in-law. She was the accountant and office manager for ATM, and she was a prominent cast member on the show. Because Tanked leaned so heavily into the “family business” narrative, Heather’s role as both wife and co-worker made her one of the most visible women on the series.
When people search for “what happened to the wife on Tanked,” they’re often actually looking for information about Heather, not Brett’s romantic partners. And Heather’s story is, unfortunately, way darker than anything the show ever hinted at.
The 2019 Collapse: When Everything Fell Apart
In March 2019, the carefully curated image of the “bickering but loving” family business exploded in spectacular fashion.
On March 6, 2019, Heather King was arrested in Las Vegas on misdemeanor domestic violence charges following a physical altercation with Wayde. According to police reports, the argument escalated, with Heather allegedly slapping Wayde in the face and kicking him in the stomach twice.
Two days later, on March 8, Heather filed for divorce. Just over a week after that, on March 17, Animal Planet officially confirmed that Tanked would not return for another season.
The timing? Not a coincidence. The show’s entire premise relied on the chemistry of the King-Raymer family unit. Once that dynamic shattered publicly and violently, the brand was unsalvageable. You can read more about what Wayde King is doing now and how he’s moved forward since the divorce.
Trisha’s Strategic Move (That Everyone Missed)
Here’s something interesting that didn’t get much attention at the time: in November 2018, right as Tanked was wrapping up filming, Trisha Chamberlain registered a business called “Mattress Mania” as a sole proprietorship in Las Vegas.
The timing is significant. It suggests that Trisha saw the writing on the wall and was already establishing financial independence before the show officially ended. While she appeared as Brett’s supportive partner on screen, behind the scenes, she was quietly building her own safety net.
Smart move, honestly.
Brett’s 2024 Confessions: The Story Gets Darker
For years after Tanked ended, Brett stayed relatively quiet. But in 2024, he started doing podcast appearances where he opened up about things that were never discussed on Animal Planet.
In interviews on The Heroes Journey Podcast and The Pond Digger Podcast, Brett admitted to struggling with substance abuse during his time on the show. He also confessed to having an extramarital affair, which he described as “the heartache of a hidden extramarital affair.”
This revelation forces a re-evaluation of his relationship timeline with Trisha. If the affair happened while they were together, it adds context to why they’ve been engaged since 2017 but still haven’t gotten married. Trust takes time to rebuild.
Brett also discussed the “financial scandals” and “business in turmoil” that followed the show’s cancellation, confirming that the 2019 sale of his massive Las Vegas mansion wasn’t a simple downsize, it was a distress sale.
The Mansion Sale: A Symbol of the Fall
Speaking of that mansion: in April 2019, just weeks after the show was canceled and Heather’s divorce made headlines, Brett listed his custom-built Vegas home for $3.2 million.
This wasn’t just any house. Brett had bought it in 2014 for $1.15 million and spent another million turning it into a Tuscan-style villa complete with a 700-gallon “Lost City of Atlantis” aquarium in the kitchen, a shark tank, a movie theater, and a ridiculous man cave.
The listing agent openly admitted that Brett was “moving to smaller digs” because he “no longer needs the large property.” Translation: without the TV money, the mansion was unsustainable.
The “Lost City of Atlantis” theme in his kitchen? A little too on the nose as a metaphor for what was happening to his life at that exact moment.
What Is Brett Doing Now?
As of 2025, Brett is no longer building six-figure custom aquariums for celebrities. Instead, he’s pivoting into education and product development within the aquarium industry. He’s working on a training platform and a potential line of aquarium products aimed at hobbyists, not just the ultra-wealthy.
He’s also teased the development of a new aquarium-focused TV show, though whether that actually happens remains to be seen. Former reality stars talk about “new projects” all the time, and most of them never materialize.
After Tanked ended, Brett also ran Donut Mania for a while, but that venture folded in 2019 after a lawsuit over trade secrets and intellectual property infringement. In 2022, he pivoted again and opened Stallone’s Italian Eatery with business partner Louie Zweifach. The restaurant brought New York Italian food to Las Vegas, and if you’ve ever wondered whether he actually went into business with Sylvester Stallone, the answer is more complicated than the name suggests.
As for whether Brett and Wayde still work together, the short answer is no. The partnership is over. The friendship, if it ever truly existed outside of the cameras, is gone too.
The Relationship Map: Who’s Who
Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, here’s the definitive breakdown of the key relationships in Brett Raymer’s life:
- “Mel”: Not a person. A diner chain. Does not exist in Brett’s personal life.
- Melissa Bradford: Brett’s first wife, mother of his three children. Divorced, whereabouts unknown.
- Trisha Chamberlain: Brett’s longtime girlfriend and fiancée since 2017. Still together as of 2025, but not yet married. Business owner who strategically established financial independence as Tanked ended.
- Heather King: Brett’s sister, not his wife. Married to Wayde King until their messy 2019 divorce. The “wife drama” that dominated headlines was about her, not Brett.
Why Reality TV Breaks Families
The story of Brett’s relationships, and honestly the entire Tanked cast, is a textbook example of how reality TV distorts everything it touches.
Acrylic Tank Manufacturing started as a legitimate family business. But once the cameras showed up, everything changed. The demands of television required them to scale up, build faster, create bigger spectacles, and manufacture drama where none existed. The business became secondary to the show, and the show became more important than the relationships.
When the cameras finally left, the entire structure collapsed. Brett and Wayde’s partnership ended. Wayde and Heather’s marriage imploded. Brett’s massive mansion became a liability. The business closed.
And the audience? They were left searching for “Brett’s wife” on Google, trying to piece together what happened to people they thought they knew but really didn’t.
The Bottom Line
So what happened to Brett’s wife on Tanked? The answer depends on which wife you’re talking about.
His first wife, Melissa, divorced him years ago and disappeared from public life. His longtime girlfriend and fiancée, Trisha Chamberlain, is still with him in 2025, though they’ve been engaged for eight years without making it official. And the “wife” that most people think of when they search for Tanked drama, Heather King, was never Brett’s wife at all. She’s his sister, and her story is the one that actually made headlines when it all fell apart.
The confusion is understandable. Reality TV thrives on blurring the lines between real relationships and manufactured storylines. Tanked sold viewers a version of the Raymer-King family that was fun, chaotic, and ultimately fictional in all the ways that mattered.
The real story is messier, sadder, and way more human than anything Animal Planet ever showed. And now, finally, you know the truth.
