There’s been an exorcism on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s the kind of thing you’d think producers would have made a point of including, but it wasn’t filmed and has gone largely unremarked on. How else, though, to explain the transformation in series star Erika Jayne, whose sudden rage and gritted-teeth threats have given way to compassion, humor, and humility? At the height of her dark power — season 11, amid her divorce from disgraced lawyer Tom Girardi — Erika “channeled Beelzebub himself,” as the Daily Beast put it, her guttural drawl lowered down into the depths of hell. Now, more than three years later, there’s been a spiritual cleansing. Season 14 Erika is lighter, focusing on her personal growth and independence, and serving as a (mostly) neutral mediator between the warring forces of Kyle Richards and Dorit Kemsley. Her new persona has made her more sympathetic and, frankly, less scary than she’s ever been. Whether through priestly intervention or hours of therapy, the demonic voice that once told Sutton Stracke to “shut the fuck up” has been banished.
That may sound like an overstatement — if you’ve heard Erika’s demon voice, you know it’s only slightly hyperbolic — but it speaks to how successfully Erika has rebounded from her season-11 nadir. When I wrote about her car crash of a performance in 2021, I concluded that “whatever hope Erika had of emerging triumphant is buckling under the combined weight of the allegations and the expectations of being a Housewife.” Ruthlessly lashing out at her enemies, both legitimate and perceived, she lost control of the narrative. The sympathy she hoped to find (and, with the benefit of hindsight, likely deserved) for leaving a controlling husband dwindled with each new vitriolic outburst and head-scratching story. It was hard to take Erika seriously as she denied any knowledge of her husband’s wrongdoing when she was simultaneously spinning a tale about how Tom’s house was broken into and he confronted the burglar and then had to go have eye surgery.
The seasons since have been an exercise in one step forward, two steps back for the Pretty Mess, whose attempts at getting back in the audience’s good graces were repeatedly derailed by, among other things, her baffling insistence on keeping a pair of $750,000 earrings purchased by her ex-husband — now indicted for embezzling millions of dollars from his clients. Even as Erika was cleared of wrongdoing in a lawsuit that accused her of “aiding and abetting” Girardi, she’s continued to struggle in the court of public opinion. In season 12, her castmates again expressed concern for Tom’s (then-alleged) victims, widows and orphans still waiting to receive their missing payouts. Erika’s status as her own worst enemy was never more apparent than when she spat back, “I don’t give a fuck about anybody but me,” a drunken declaration that has haunted her since. It’s hard to square that Erika with the current iteration, who has spent most of this season as an active listener to both Kyle and Dorit. As mocked as she was for her sudden discovery of the concept of empathy (she blames that on bad editing), there’s been an undeniable shift in how Erika interacts with her castmates and the cameras. It may not have catapulted her back into being a fan favorite, but she’s certainly on her way.
With the lawsuits (mostly) behind her, Erika has moved her focus to image rehabilitation. Whether the changes she’s made represent true character development or a shift in her RHOBH strategy is sort of beside the point — I’m here to celebrate Erika being good at her job, not Erika being a good person. What’s perhaps most surprising about the way she’s thriving in season 14 is that she’s doing so largely from the sidelines. Her role was established in the premiere, as she meets first with Dorit and then with Kyle, letting each woman vent her frustration with the other and not offering much perspective beyond acknowledging that she sees where they’re each coming from. Playing Switzerland is a dangerous game for a Housewife — never choosing a side is seen as a cowardly position that quickly wears thin. But throughout the season, Erika has shown herself to be less a fence-sitter than a voice of reason. Keeping her head level while a vein pops out of Kyle’s, she’s backed up her position with confessionals that perform the age-old trick of “saying what we’re all thinking.” When the seemingly extinguished drama between Kyle and Dorit reignited in a recent episode, Erika spoke for all of us: “I can only last so much longer, I’m tellin’ ya. And I have stamina. This shit is exhausting.”
The voice of reason may not be the first role that comes to mind when thinking about Housewives, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle that makes these shows work — you need Housewives who throw glasses, and Housewives who survey the wreckage and sweep up the shards. What Erika has underlined this season is that being that voice of reason works best when you’re also providing color commentary. You can’t just observe that the women around you are behaving badly; you also need a steady supply of zingers and well-timed sips of soda to keep the audience engaged. Ultimately it’s Erika’s sharp communication skills, both as her friends’ go-between and to the viewers at home, that have helped her deliver career-best work outside of the spotlight. She’s picked the side of being consistently entertaining.
Meanwhile, her personal storyline this season — she’s redecorating her home — sounds like the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel plot that gets Housewives fired. Against all odds, though, Erika has turned it into a story of overcoming adversity and getting her life back. As she tells her therapist Dr. Jenn in the season-14 premiere, “With Tom’s trial that’s coming up, I’m ready to let go, I’m ready to move forward, I’m ready to turn the page, and part of that, symbolically, is getting new furniture.” This isn’t just very expensive furniture; it’s a very expensive metaphor. And that, along with her season-long work with celebrity designer Martyn Lawrence Bullard, is in service of her real storyline: reinvention. “To be able to start over is a big deal,” she shares in a confessional. “I’m excited about life again.”
Much of the work of crafting a successful Real Housewives narrative is in recontextualization. It’s how you turn upgrading the look of your post-divorce bungalow into a story of freedom from a domineering ex-husband and the legal drama he left you with. Erika’s season-14 tagline — “In Beverly Hills, money buys a lot, but my independence? Priceless” — certainly helps in that regard. But Erika has also been able to re-contextualize the divorce itself. Back in season 11, the story of her contentious marriage was quickly overwhelmed by the five-alarm fire of the allegations against Girardi. Now with some distance, she can circle back, placing her divorce alongside Kyle’s and Dorit’s separations from their respective husbands, and treating her loss as something worth mourning. In doing so, Erika can also give herself some retrospective grace for her darkest moments. “When you are experiencing something like what Dorit is going through right now, you’re quick-tempered, you’re short, you’re overwhelmed, so you say things and yes, they come across really angry, but I know her heart,” she says in a confessional. And while she may be discussing Dorit’s rage, it’s clear she’s also explaining her own.
None of this would work as well as it is if Erika weren’t pairing it with some overdue self-awareness. After Sutton Stracke helps throw a pizza party for a lonely Kyle, Erika laments to her therapist that no one threw her a pizza party when she was reeling from her divorce. “You didn’t get a pizza party because your divorce wasn’t clean,” Dr. Jenn notes. “The earrings and all of that crap made you into the villain, and then you—” Here, Erika jumps in with “participated.” Or, as her therapist puts it, “made it worse.” This may not be the level of accepting responsibility that fans had hoped to see from Erika back in season 11, but it’s at least an acknowledgment that she and the demon voice were complicit in her ostracization. When she does finally get her pizza party — a spon-con trip to Chuck E. Cheese that represents an exciting new low for product placement on RHOBH — it feels like something she’s earned and the natural progression of her arc. “In all seriousness, what you’ve done to pull yourself up is remarkable, and I’m proud of you,” says Sutton, the most frequent target of Erika’s ire in seasons past. Even with Charles Entertainment Cheese lurking in the background, it’s a moving moment that shows how firmly Erika’s new narrative has taken hold.
Erika showing her softer side in season 14 doesn’t mean she’s lost her bite completely — that would be its own kind of miscalculation. Instead, she’s finally using it appropriately, most often when she slips into lawyer mode as the former Mrs. Tom Girardi. Over the last several episodes, Erika has taken what Paul “PK” Kemsley once called being “inherently cold” and turned it into being a stoic adjudicator. As the women demand that Kyle enter into evidence her communication with PK, Erika points out that you need a warrant for that. “As the person who’s been investigated the most here, I don’t like that shit,” she explains. Later in the episode, when Dorit notes that Kyle’s text implies some past shit-talking of Dorit (it does), Erika refuses to jump to any conclusions. “Dorit may not need proof, but I need proof, and you know what, I was married to a trial lawyer for over 20 years,” she says in her confessional. “He taught me a few things.” Amid Erika’s serenity season, there’s a thrill to these reminders that her steely edge is still right there beneath the surface.
The reality is that when Erika is tapping into her power, she’s captivating. And there’s something especially satisfying in those moments when she’s using it for good instead of reducing Eileen Davidson to tears for no reason. In season 14, she’s only really gone on the attack against an absent PK, becoming a fierce advocate for Dorit amid their separation. At a Kathy Hilton–hosted dinner with Dorit and new Housewife Bozoma Saint John, Erika taps into her fiery core — her inner Girardi — when she bluntly tells her friend to “get a fucking lawyer.” Her subsequent tough-love monologue is her best moment all season, a stirring plea to go to the mattresses that’s as much a message to her pre-divorce past self as it is to Dorit: “You have to protect yourself. You have to go, hold on a second, the price of poker has completely changed. This is not my partner, this is not my friend, this is my adversary now. And let me tell you, that is a fucked-up place … to be, but that is where you are.” It’s not demon voice — though it’s the closest she’s come all season — but it is proof that even in a supporting role, Erika commands attention.
The true demon voice is probably not gone for good, of course; anyone who has seen the various Exorcist sequels can tell you that Pazuzu never rests for long. More to the point, Real Housewives is reliant on conflict, and the more Erika is forced to film with trigger co-stars like Sutton, the more likely she is to snap. That’s necessary for her continued survival on the show; she can’t exist above the fray forever if she wants to keep getting a paycheck. For the time being, however, Erika can take a beat. Her performance this season might be calculated, but she’s put in the work — after a few years of taking some well-deserved hits, she’s earned this provisional comeback. “It’s taken a while to get the want to even try because it was so much about survival,” she tells Dorit, “and now I want to thrive instead of simply gasping for air every day.” What a blessing to discover, a decade into her run on RHOBH, that Erika keeping her head above water also happens to make for great TV.