The RHOBH Reunion Extravaganza

Not all the news, but all the news you actually care about.

Photo: Bravo

THE CUP RUNNETH OVER: You thought the drama at BravoCon was over, didn’t you? Well, here comes the cup that launched a thousand blog posts. A Twitter user posted a video of Jennifer Aydin throwing an empty plastic cup at longtime adversary Joe Gorga and his wife, Melissa, in the lobby of the Gansevoort Hotel, where all the “talent� from BravoCon were staying. (I heard that some of the ladies used the Gansevoort room for members of their entourages and found other accommodations for themselves, but that is only a rumor.)

As soon as that started going around the web, Jen’s “social-media manager� posted a since-deleted TikTok showing her side of the story. She claims Melissa called Jen “a loser, fucking loser wannabe,� to which Jen responded with everyone’s first line of defense: “Shut the fuck up.�

Apparently Joe then said, “Shut the fuck up, you dirty bitch,� which is when Jen threw the cup. We also see Frank Catania separating Jen and trying to de-escalate things. Was the whole cast there? In Twitter parlance: We need Andy and a camera.

In response to that (God, I am already exhausted), Melissa got on her podcast, Giggles Down the Shore with Missy G, and, well, she basically corroborated everything Jen’s assistant said. She admits both she and Joe said those awful things about Jen, but also says that it started because Jen was talking shit about Melissa at BravoCon. They weren’t even on the same panel because the feud between Teresa Giudice and her brother has gotten so intense that they won’t share physical space. Oh, Melissa also says the whole thing kicked off because Jen gave her the stank eye. Has she ever seen Jennifer’s face? She got a resting stank eye installed when her Turkish doctor botched her latest nose job.

So, yeah, Jen threw a cup, both sides were awful. How are we supposed to feel? Probably the same way Andy Cohen did when he heard about the kerfuffle. “It’s gross. Period. Dot.�

THE HOUSE ALWAYS LOSES: Over the years I have likened Heather Dubrow’s enormous mansion to many things: a Duty Free lounge that only sells bad perfume, a trampoline park with all the equipment repossessed, a haunted house that’s too basic for even the ghosts of avocado toast and SoulCycle classes. But now there is a new thing we can call the house: sold.

Yes, Heather and her husband, Terry Dubrow, offloaded the 22,000-square-foot house that was her personality for $55 million, the third-highest sale in Orange County history. Keeping it in the Bravo family, Josh Altman from Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles brokered the deal. But not so fast! When the couple bought a new condo in L.A.’s Century City, their broker was none other than Selling Sunset’s Heather El Moussa. Daddy Andy is gonna be PPPPPIIIIIIIISSSSSSEEEEEDDDDD.

Some articles are trying to spin this as Heather moving to Beverly Hills, but anyone who knows L.A. knows Beverly Hills is as close to Century City as Staten Island is to Manhattan. There’s also speculation that this means Heather will trade in her orange for a diamond, while some articles are positing that the sale of the house could mean there’s something to those “Terry Dubrow is cheating� rumors. Sorry, but I believe these two will be doing the splits before Kyle “The Splits� Richards ever lets them on her show.

RAMONA IS NOT A LOSER: She never fails to disappoint, does she? Ramona Singer (whom I want to call the “OG of the GOP,� but that seems mean to Vicki Gunvalson) went on Reality with the King podcast, hosted by former Housewives super-producer Carlos King, and had a whole lot to say about whether she would be part of RHONY: Glue Factory.

“No. 1, I don’t know if I will be [asked]. And No. 1, I don’t know if I want to do it again,� she said in classic Ramona fashion, where there are two No. 1’s and the only No. 2 is the one she left on the floor. She tells King that the show, the press attention, and the public recognition made her “unhinged.� Um, that’s what did it? I mean, chicken and egg, sister.

Ramona doesn’t have high hopes for the series anyway. “I’ve been there for a long time. I mean, never say no, never say never, but I also feel like the Legacy — how can it be really good?� she said. “The people who they’re going to bring back are people they didn’t want to renew anyway. So now what are you gonna call it? The Loser Show? The Loser Legacy?�

When asked about Ramona’s supposed racist comments, Andy Cohen said at BravoCon that the network hasn’t worked with her since those allegations surfaced, so maybe that is his way of saying she won’t be back. Oh, and if you want to read about how she backtracked those allegations on the same podcast, “Page Six� rounded up that grossness for you.

DIVORCE, OC STYLE: After coming out in 2020 and parading a string of girlfriends in front of the paparazzi like her Wikipedia page depended on it, Braunwyn Windham-Burke officially filed for divorce from her husband, Sean, a Survivor immunity-necklace collector. They say their “open relationship� didn’t work. Um, an open relationship means you have sex with your partner and other people. Since Braunwyn is exclusively swimming in the lady pond now, that’s not an open relationship; that’s just being roommates who share kids. We are now at the stage of this story where even Braunwyn’s exes are announcing new girlfriends, so I think maybe it’s time we erase them from the Great Book of Housewives and start ignoring them entirely.

HOUSEWIVES INSTITUTE SOCIETY PAGES

• We would like to welcome Alexis Bellino’s trans son Miles to the Institute’s LGBTQIA+ affinity group. His mother left a supportive and loving message about his transition on Instagram. I did not see this for uber-Christian Alexis’s journey, but I am so happy we’re here.
• A belated “Get Well Soon� to NeNe Leakes’s son Brentt, who suffered a stroke and congestive heart failure at 23. What an awful year for this family!
• Cynthia Bailey and Mike Hill: divorced.
• Monique Samuels and Chris Samuels: not divorced (yet).
• The latest Bravoleb to have her property stolen is Dolores Catania, whose Porsche was lifted from her new boyfriend’s driveway in the middle of the night. Seriously, can we get Paul Blart: Mall Cop to take care of these ladies
• RHOP friend-of Katie Rost is in rehab and hopefully getting the help she needs so she can make more hilariously unhinged visits to her old show.
• The progressive Working Families Party is trying to use fandoms to get out the vote, and its first fandom is all of us Housewives lovers. Quick, get Tinsley Mortimer to do a PSA.
• I’m sure your mom already told you, but Porsha Williams was on NPR quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, of all places.
• My friend, fashion designer Patrick McDowell, released a new collection inspired by Versailles, his native Liverpool, and Real Housewives. The video for the collection is amazing and features all sorts of tagline-esque musings. If She by Shereé needs a new designer, maybe they should give Patrick a call.
• LOL IRL Tweet of the Week: this ingenious Halloween costume idea.

The three-part RHOBH reunion gets boiled down to a feud between sisters … and Rinna

Photo: Bravo

There is something about the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion that is really sticking with me. There’s a point that I have been dying to make for three weeks now. No, it is not about Crystal’s darkness, Diana’s bots, or Kathy Hilton’s meltdown. It is about Kyle Richards’s earrings, which look like they were drawn for some kind of Dazzler reboot comic. Kyle clocked in wearing full-on weapons that only the deftest of Ninja Turtles could correctly deploy. And then there was that dress, which looked like it was made out of the same material as those glittery inflated balls that you can buy for $3 in a giant cage in the front of the supermarket. And why on earth did it have Dora the Explorer backpack straps in the same fabric? It’s like the official school uniform of the Barbarella Academy.

Usually my favorite thing to do is go around the horn and talk about the ladies’ outfits, but I fear that Kyle’s hideousness is the only one we will have the time or space to get to, because there is so much going on over these three houses. The whole thing became about the Kathy-Kyle-Rinna feud. Some of that is because of the structure of the reunion, with all the Kathy stuff coming last (as it should because that’s how it happened chronologically), but I also think the promo egged it on by showing Kyle at the end of the reunion in pieces. Many tuned in just to see how this was going to play out. Haha. JK. We tuned in because we’re fools and nothing would make us miss this.

Before we get to Kathy, there are a few things from the first two parts that I need to get out of the way. (No, none of them is about Jamie Lee Curtis’s kinda gross cameo.) First is that Garcelle — this whole season, but particularly during this reunion — solidified that she is a top-tier, all-time-great Housewife with a capital H. The way she just flat-out accused Diana (who has been upgraded from Princess of Liplikia to the Queen of Floplandia) of hiring the bots and terrorizing her son was God tier. The way she turned on all of those women, particularly Kyle, when they tried to even explain where Diana was coming from gave me tingles. Garcelle is now so powerful a fan favorite that even our dark lord Andy Cohen had to come forward and apologize after he steered the conversation too quickly away from Lisa throwing Garcelle’s book in the trash and Erika posting it on social media.

Everyone is stanning Garcelle these days, but I am also stanning for Crystal Kung Minkoff, who I think got the end of the stick that is so shitty Ramona Singer thinks it belongs on her floor. (Yes, this newsletter is all Ramona Singer poop jokes now.) For both of her seasons on the show she has been combating the controlling cabal known as the Get-Along Gang (since Quentin Tarantino sued for trademark infringement and general cringiness over everyone calling them the Fox Force Five), who keep telling her how to feel her feelings. It happened once again at the reunion. Just as they told Crystal she couldn’t have felt “violated� for Sutton seeing her nude, Kyle once again told Crystal that what Sutton said to her could not have been “dark.� Kyle is accusing Crystal of making something up, and Crystal is saying it doesn’t matter what Sutton said; if she feels it was dark, then it was dark. They’re arguing two different points, and Kyle has no interest in trying to understand Crystal’s.

Crystal didn’t defend herself as well as Garcelle, but she did make the point that Kyle will never understand where she’s coming from because Kyle, as a woman of privilege, never has her thoughts or emotions questioned. It was a little infuriating to me that when Diana said Garcelle should have taken Diana’s name out of the texts her son Jax posted about the bots, Kyle was so quick to try to explain her reasoning. Kyle wasn’t agreeing with Diana, but I wish she would have spent just a fraction of the time trying to figure out Crystal’s perspective as she did defending someone who sicced the internet on a 14-year-old kid. Sorry, just like I choose to believe that Lorde is really 73 years old and Lea Michele can’t read, I am choosing to believe Diana sent those bots even if it is proven otherwise.

I think Garcelle and Crystal (and Sutton, to some extent) really highlighted how there is a double standard between the “old guard� and the new. Garcelle pointed out that if one of Kyle’s kids were yelled at the way Erika yelled at Jax, it would have been a different story entirely, and she’s right. We would have heard about it from everyone. It would have been like Lucy Lucy Apple Juice didn’t wear panties to a party and then had a lesbian affair with Denise Richards. It would be all we would ever hear about, and I think, considering this is coming from the two women of color on the cast, that deserves to be interrogated a little bit more deeply.

Photo: Bravo

Okay, now for the Kathy Hilton of it all. [Deep breath.] I simultaneously think a lot of things are true and what I think is true is going to be different from what you agree is true, but, hey, this is a safe space. Well, as safe as it can be considering we’re gathered here to yell about total strangers we are oddly invested in. (For a breakdown of all the accusations more specifically, check this out.)

I believe that Kathy was more upset at Kyle for not having a tasting for her tequila at the Kemo Sabe party than she was at Lisa for ordering Kendall Jenner’s tequila. I believe that Kathy Hilton said to Erika “that DJ is an old fucking f—-t� when he refused to play her request. I believe that Kathy Hilton had a total freakout at the club and to Lisa Rinna. I believe she said she would ruin Kyle and her family, and I believe she said that Dorit is an idiot, that everyone should be fired, and that they were all peons. I also believe that Kyle gets blamed for everything that goes wrong with Kathy and she’s sick of dealing with it. I firmly believe all of that is true.

What I do not believe is that Lisa Rinna didn’t order the tequila to taunt Kathy. I do not believe that Lisa Rinna was traumatized or abused by what Kathy was saying. I do not believe that Kathy didn’t text Rinna to stay silent because Kathy, a person who doesn’t even understand how Instagram DMs work, just deleted the messages off her phone. I also do not believe that Lisa Rinna has any business being in Kathy and Kyle’s feud.

Everyone thinks Kathy “ate� when she accused Rinna of getting Lisa Vanderpump and her sister thrown off the show and that she’s the biggest bully in Hollywood. From what I remember, the cast (led by Kyle) being sick of Lisa’s lying is what made her leave the show, and Kim wasn’t asked back because her addiction issues were getting too dark. What Kathy should have brought up was Denise Richards. With both Kathy and Denise, Lisa took something that happened outside of the show, brought it on-camera, and then kept drumming on it as if a situation that didn’t involve her somehow had a great impact on her life. Yes, Lisa Rinna is enacting a familiar pattern; it’s just not any of the patterns that Kathy exposed.

We’re stuck in the weird situation where we know Kathy said something horrible about the DJ (which in hindsight makes Lisa’s accusations a lot more sensical), but also not really caring too much about the other charges leveled against her. Okay, so Kathy freaked out about Kyle. So what? That’s her prerogative, and the fact that Kyle is as mad at Kathy as she is at Lisa for bringing it up shows that their dynamic was obliterated before Lisa Rinna ever showed up.

This also leaves us in a weird place when it comes to the leaks. Both Erika and Kathy don’t believe that her publicist Jack is the one who leaked the rumors about Kathy. Rinna points out that as soon as she got back to Beverly Hills, she already had a call from TMZ that something happened. As she said, it was a busy club. This crew would have stuck out, cameras or no. Was this leaked by someone in “the group?� Maybe. I would think it was more likely someone from their circle since some of the key details — the slurs Kathy made, who they were made against — don’t line up with the official facts we hear at the reunion. So who was it? No clue, but I’ll be curious to see if this happens again when they film next season and if Kathy, indeed, won’t sign up again if Erika and Rinna are on the cast.

What is certain is that Kyle is devastated. It does seem like she’s always the one at fault when it comes to fights with her family. That means either she is the bad sister and can’t see it or her sisters are nuts. Or both! But her feelings are real, and they come from somewhere, and, even if you hate Kyle, I think we can muster up some sympathy for a woman who sacrificed her relationships with both of her sisters for this stupid reality show that we all love so much. The part that really got me was when Dorit went into Kyle’s dressing room after the reunion and told her the warm, fuzzy feeling that everything between her and Kathy was good was never going to happen. They need to do the work now, while the cameras are off, to get back to a good place.

But Kyle knows it won’t happen. She’s been around this particular block one too many times. She knows Kathy will run to Kim, Kim will agree with Kathy, and they’ll both team up on Kyle, always Mommy’s favorite, always taking the brunt of the abuse. Dorit is pleading with her, telling her she will help, and Kyle doesn’t hear it. She just thinks of herself in their childhood home, playing alone in front of the television while everyone paid attention to Kim, the star. She thinks of herself with her original nose at Kathy’s glamorous wedding — to a Hilton! — somewhere in a corner trying to fit in. She thinks of herself, finally the biggest star of the three, the linchpin of this show that neither of them could navigate as successfully as she is. She thinks of her husband and her kids and the grandkids who are certainly on the way. She thinks of her co-stars and her friends on charity boards and Jamie Lee Curtis. She thinks of Andy giving her the biggest hug and the fans rushing to her side. But it’s not enough, because without her sisters, her life is just as empty as this now-deserted soundstage where she cried off her makeup for two hours.

Photo: Bravo

Real Housewives of Potomac, Season 7, Episode 2: We have been watching Karen’s face shapeshift over the years like an Animorphs chapter book, and I say that with all praise due to the medical community.

Real Housewives of Potomac, Season 7, Episode 3: What does Ray mean when he tells Karen she can have eye candy? Is she allowed to hire hot fitness instructors and contractors to remodel the house? A pool boy? A manny?? I need answers!

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Season 3, Episode 4: After her nighttime routine of a burrito and some Kit Kats, Lisa tells us she decided to put the drama aside and focus on the original purpose of the trip, which is being there for Jen.

Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Season 3 Episode 5: It’s clear that Whitney and Heather are in the battle of their lives to be Mormonism’s Leah Remini. Whitney saw Heather’s exposé book deal and raised her a notarized ticket to hell.

Below Deck: Mediterranean, Season 7, Episode 15: Is it necessary to tell Natalya that you called her a bitch behind her back to Dave? No, but Kyle reveals this in such a cheeky yet honest way that I have to applaud the decision.

Below Deck: Mediterranean Recap: Season 7, Episode 16: I will deem Storm MVP for the sole fact that he left the drama to go on a McDonald’s mission.

Winter House, Season 2, Episode 2: Here is a girl who is putting all of her money in crypto; what does she know of good investments? Making out with Luke makes way more sense than dogecoin ever will.

Winter House, Season 2 Episode 3: Jessica then tells Kyle, “Don’t spread that around.� Sister, you said that with a microphone on while on camera. Do you still not know how a reality show works? Do they have these in the metaverse where you sell all of that real estate?

Highlighting the best insight from our lovely Institute members. This one is from a recent Winter House recap.

LH29: I would love to have been in the pitch meeting for this show.

“Kyle Cooke. Bedridden Paige. Pillow Craig and boneless-face Austen. A few rando, horny, tri-state area influencers. A wholesalers pallet of LoverBoy. Bachelor in Paradise meets The Shining. Think about it.�

“Not today, Satan. Not today, Neck. Not today, Ankles.� — Candiace Dillard Bassett