While I was watching this very Becky Minkoff–centric episode, I thought to myself, Now we are finally playing Housewives. There’s a scandalous secret, it spreads through the group like chlamydia at Coachella, they’re stumbling over each other to find out the truth, and it looks like Becky Minkoff is finally going to get not boring. I was thinking about all the possibilities for the rest of the season, how a secret like this and how it got out would realign the group and rearrange their dynamics. I got so excited. RHONY is back, baby!
That is until the final seconds of the episode. Erin Mew Mew Lichy and Becky have gotten into a tiff at the group dodgeball game and walk off the field (Court? Playground? Pitch? What the hell do you play dodgeball on?) and Erin smiles at Becky and says, “That was good,†and then Becky laughs.
Guys, it’s a trap. This whole fucking thing is a trap, and the two of them made it up as a prank, and I have never been madder at Housewives in my life. I was a blogger in the earlier days of the internet, where we always had to post, “If this is true, then it’s crazy†because people would perpetuate hoaxes all the time, and I fell for more than one of them, including Becky’s stupid April Fools’ joke where she said she was joining the cast of RHONY but she wasn’t. I am not falling for this one.
Almost the entire episode hinges on something that Becky told Mew Mew when the two of them had lunch together. The next day, Erin has lunch with Jessel and Brynn and tells them that Rebecca told her that she’s pregnant again. She adds that she heard a rumor, but doesn’t say where, that Rebecca and her husband Gavin are swingers and that Becky got knocked up by another man. It’s a story so wild as to be titillating, but also not so unbelievable that it is definitely false.
As the ladies start filing into Sai’s dodgeball event in a various states of athletic dress, Brynn decides to spill the beans and tells Sai … and Jenna … and Racquel … and Ubah. Oh no. Wait, Sai told Ubah. But the gist is that everyone found out, loved the scoop, and was all worried about Becky playing dodgeball because they didn’t want to hit her stomach. Brynn went so far as to tell everyone that she used to work with Gavin, and she called a mutual friend, and that person at least confirmed that they have some kind of non-exclusivity arrangement. As Brynn says, it’s 2024, baby.
Jenna was the only one upset to hear the news that had all the other girls tittering. She says that partners and kids are off limits, so this unfounded gossip hit her the wrong way. At the end of the game (Match? Set? Distraction? What do you call a unit of dodgeball?), Jenna tells Becky that everyone is talking about her and she should be very careful. Jenna doesn’t want to repeat the gossip, so Becky tells Jenna to tell her with her eyes. Jenna looks at Erin, and that is when their tiff starts.
I was so excited for a moment, but here is the evidence that it is not true. Firstly, Becky Minkoff has not been pregnant or had a child since the show aired, at least that I could tell from an extensive Google and a cursory look at her Insta. She could have miscarried, she could have had an abortion (are those still legal in America?), she could have given it up for adoption, but there is no baby. Also, we never see Becky tell Erin that she’s pregnant and we know the lunch was filmed. Don’t you think they would have at least dusted off the footage of Becky telling Erin that she’s expecting?
There is plenty of other circumstantial and character evidence. We know that Becky likes bad April Fools Jokes and that she tried to get Jenna to have a fake fight with her, an offer that Jenna refused because she is a thinking person and seems to know how to play reality television better than we initially gave her credit for. We also know that Erin does not know how to pull off a prank and has a sense of humor as bad as Jessel’s shopping addiction. Her first prank ended up in a hot tub fight with Ubah. Her second prank ended up with Ubah puking up Jenna Lyon’s perfect pavlova (not a euphemism). This is the kind of unfunny bullshit that she would totally think is a riot.
The only complicating factor is what Brynn heard from her source close to Gavin, as People magazine would say. There are two possibilities. One is that Brynn knew about this gag and went along with it, which makes her a much better actress than I would suspect. The other is that she did call someone, they did say that Gavin and Rebecca get up to some funky stuff, and she embellished the rest of it. Just look at how she got caught out twisting things that Jenna said about Jessel. At lunch, she tells Jessel that Jenna didn’t say that Jessel was basic … but wouldn’t say she wasn’t basic. When we see footage of the actual conversation, Jenna in no way said it or implied it, Brynn is the one who started the whole thing and then told Jessel to get a rise out of her. Jessel, like a grown-up, brings it to Jenna who tells her the truth and Jessel is just like, “Yeah, that’s Brynn.†(Jessel also gets MVP for the episode at the end when Becky is “mad†at Erin for “telling†“people†“about†“her†“pregnancy†and Jessel says, “Congrats?†with a tone that construes both befuddlement, sadness, and exasperation all at once.)
Becky’s swinger pregnancy (which would never have happened with “soft swingingâ€) might be true or partially true. We might wake up from the “To Be Continued†coma that starts at the end of this episode and find out that Becky is a swinger and all of her kids have different fathers. I don’t know. It could happen. But right now, I am operating from a place that this whole thing is faker than Kim Zolciak’s 19th face.
Frankly, I am hopping mad about it. It would be one thing if Kyle Richards and Lisa Vanderpump cooked up a story on RHOBH where Lisa found Kyle in bed with a woman. (It surely would have been good foreshadowing.) But in this hypothetical case, it would have been a bit of one episode, and they would have told the girls, and they all would have laughed. After all, the diamond holders always brought enough drama that one fake story, especially if we were in on the joke, would have been cute.
The problem here is that RHONY is currently giving us nothing. It didn’t let us in on the joke because, if we were, this would have been nothing. Even worse than Erin and Becky deciding to play this trick is the producers, editors, and executives who went along with it and based a whole episode around it because the only good drama that we have had all season is this bullshit fakery that looks like a Gooci bag that Sai bought on Canal Street as a teenager. Pranks are one thing, and games are another, but manufacturing storylines for kicks and then getting the whole network to go along with it is, I’m sorry a fireable offense.
Now, neither woman can ever come back on ideological reasons, just as I was kind of warming to both of them. I loved that Mel and Abe decided their partners should go on a double date together to a “dyke bar.†Mel has even taken to calling him Gabe because he’s like Gay Abe. He even admits that he thought about kissing other dudes in college and, well, if he would like to try now, I know that he has never kissed a mustache as luscious (and slutty) as mine. Erin showed up to this, was game, and seemed to have an actual good time. This is an Erin I wouldn’t completely despise.
The real star of this scene, however, was Racquel. We find out that she didn’t really know she liked women until she was living in Italy in a model house and was working her way through the hot young ladies that were her roommates. What is Racquel’s life? Every time she tells us a tale, it’s the most honest, hilarious, outrageous tale that has ever been told. Where is her memoir? The Housewives Institute is busy, but we volunteer to ghostwrite this book for free just so that we can hear the rest of Racquel’s stories.
Then there is the great scene where Sai brings her daughter London to Becky’s studio to look at the props from Wicked that she used to design a shoe and bag collection inspired by the movie. Yes, I know that the movie opens in a couple of weeks, and this is totally spon-con (and much savvier, I might add, than when Dorinda Medley and Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Universal Pictures Morgans went to see The Hustle in the middle of an episode) but it was nice to see Sai in loving mother mode and Becky giving London a free purse is the only nice or interesting thing she has done since haunting our television screens these long months.
This isn’t just about me hating Erin and Becky. This behavior threatens the entire enterprise. Yes, part of the fun of Housewives is figuring out who is lying, who is telling the truth, and who we want to back. But in those fights — like the Katie Ginella–versus–Heather Dubrow skirmish on RHOC — one or both of those parties truly believe their side of the story. Erin and Becky made this up because they thought it was funny and now we can never believe another thing that they ever say.
As the women filtered out of Chelsea Piers after their game, a black Escalade was parked on the side of the West Side Highway. The redhead in the back seat watched as Jessel strolled by in her padded pants. She clocked Jenna Lyons and her ball-dented sunglasses scurrying for an Uber. She saw Sai’s curls bounce as she started to schlep back to Brooklyn where she is trying to raise a family in this economy. Finally, her target emerged. “Gary, pull up alongside her,†the redhead said. As the car rolled past Becky Minkoff, the door opened and the woman in back snatched her inside and closed the door. Becky freaked out a bit as she heard the doors lock behind her. “Listen here, missy. I didn’t invent this whole fucking show for you to go and fucking ruin it. You’re going to knock this fucking fake storyline shit off right now, or you’re all going to fucking pay.†The doors unlocked, and as if there was an eject button, Becky was back on her ass on the curb before she could belt the opening notes of “Defying Gravity.†The car sped away, and Jill Zarin was never happier to intervene.