Approximately three minutes into the premiere episode of the sixth season of Vanderpump Rules, Bravo’s wildly popular and often sickeningly boozy restaurant-bar reality show, Jax Taylor told a lie. Taylor is the 39-year-old on-and-off bartender at the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump’s Sexy Unique Restaurant (SUR) in West Hollywood, and a longtime star of Rules. He was attending his co-worker’s masquerade-themed birthday party with his girlfriend, Brittany Cartwright, when the trouble began. Like most parties that are filmed for reality shows, this one was full of drama and rumors; at this party, specifically, the rumor was that Taylor had cheated on Cartwright with another SUR employee. Oh no. Did he really? Well, yes, he did. But when he was presented with evidence of this cheating on camera, he denied it.

I have been puzzling over this moment since it aired on Bravo over a year ago. Very quickly, Taylor was forced to tell Cartwright the truth (or at least most of the truth) about his cheating, because so much evidence was already recorded on camera. His first instinct was to lie, even though he knew, eventually, that he’d be caught.

Of course, people lie all the time for all kinds of reasons. But reality stars tell these kinds of easily fact-checked lies frequently. They say they are faithful to their significant others even when there is video evidence of them fooling around with people who are not their significant others. They profess to be sober when they are really only sort-of sober. They tell everyone they are working very hard on their perfume lines when we can see that they are actually on vacation. Why? What motivates these beautiful people to lie to the camera when they know, at some point, they’ll be found out?

I had hoped to ask Taylor directly why he lied about cheating on Cartwright, especially since this was not the first time on Vanderpump Rules that he’d denied an accusation that could quickly be proved true. In previous seasons, he lied about having a one-night stand with a woman in Vegas, hooking up with fellow cast member Kristen Doute, and stealing a pair of designer sunglasses from Freaky Tiki Tropical Optical in Honolulu on a cast vacation. (One could argue that lying has become an integral part of Taylor’s character, in life and on the show.) Unfortunately, Taylor’s representative did not respond to my requests for an interview.