Julia and Adriana each share their version of their past hookup, and it sheds new light on their entire relationship.
Photo: Jocelyn Prescod/Bravo
The bombshell that Julia dropped at the end of the first part of the reunion was so major that we here at the Real Housewives Institute had to rush to our panic room to write an emergency recap of it for the Housewives Institute Bulletin. (What? You don’t know about our twice-monthly newsletter? Sign up here for free! Also, don’t forget to like and subscribe and follow me on Instagram.) As I said in that piece, the first part brought up more questions than it answered. After watching the second part, I still have a ton of questions. The biggest question is, does anyone know how lesbians have sex?
When Andy asks Adriana if she had sex with Julia, she says, “I don’t have a dick.” What in the Clinton administration, stained blue dress, “I did not have sex with that woman” is going on here? The stunned silence after her answer kind of says it all. Andy tells her that you can have sex without a dick, and she says, “Not really.” Not really? There are a million ways to have sex without a dick. If a guy gave Adriana the best oral sex of her life and didn’t penetrate her, would she not consider that sex? And if not, poor Adriana. She needs to go to the Ramona Singer school of gratification, where gentlemen are given directions south of the border, told to get a-munchin’, and then shown the door without their boxers even hitting their ankles. When Stephanie says they could scissor, Adriana says that she didn’t scissor anyone.
The ladies take a break for lunch, and Julia is in her dressing room talking to Alexia and Marysol, and Alexia says, “Did you eat her out? Did she eat you out? I don’t know what you guys do.” Yes, you do. That’s what they do! Adriana is talking to Lisa in her dressing room, and Lisa says, “Did you do this?” putting her two hands together in the universal symbol for scissoring. Adriana again says no. While there was a myth that lesbians don’t actually scissor, that has since been debunked. So, lesbians do scissor, but it’s also not the only thing they do. Sex is a wild and varied thing. A carnal buffet, if you will. Maybe not for the straight women on these couches who are only engaging in three to eight minutes of missionary and then turning the light out, but there are all sorts of things people can do to pleasure each other. If you think that the only things lesbians can do are scissor or go down on each other, then I’m sorry, but both your imagination and your access to all the pornography on Al Gore’s internet are sadly lacking.
The other crazy reaction is when Lisa first hears the news, she says, “Why were you sleeping [together] if you were married?” Oh, you poor, ignorant Canadian. Married people have sex with people other than their partners all the time. What does she think Lenny was doing on all of those plastic surgery conventions? Tons of people cheat, so yes, Julia might have been married, but that doesn’t mean she’s wearing a chastity belt and that Martina is the one holding the key. (If she did, you know she would hide it inside a sliced-open tennis ball.) As Kiki points out, not all relationships are the same, and Julia could have even been having sex within the confines of her relationship. For a group of international women, they certainly have a cloistered worldview.
To answer some of these questions, we get a lot more details about what happened thanks to Andy’s astute questioning. (Hats off to our collective daddy, who is flying without a net on this one, with nothing on his cards to help him. But you can see by the sly grin on his face that he knows he’s making excellent television.) Martina and Julia are not in an open relationship, but Martina was aware of Julia’s hookup with Adriana because Julia had told her six months ago. She also told Martina that she was going to mention it at the reunion, which made Martina cry.
As far as what went down, when pressed by Alexia for the gory details, Julia demurs but says they “were intimate,” which is sort of all I need to know. To me, that means there was below-the-belt contact, and that’s enough to be considered “sleeping together” in my book. Adriana acknowledges that they hooked up, but she said it was nothing more than heavy petting. She even does us the courtesy of putting it in Bravo parlance and saying she “petted the puss.” She says that there was no scissoring and that she doesn’t know what Julia’s lady parts look like. To use another bit of Bravo parlance, was it a “no kiss fingerbang?” Anyway, I think what Adriana tells us paints a clear enough picture for the audience without getting into the nitty-gritty details of what went into it.
While they agree on the facts of the hookups, everything else about their stories is different. The way Julia tells it, she was in a dark place with Martina and she was vulnerable, and Adriana didn’t necessarily take advantage of her, but was working the situation in her favor. After they hooked up, Julia says Adriana asked if she would leave Martina for her and supposedly said, “Imagine the story line!” It was then that Julia thought that Adriana wasn’t really into her or her true friend and was just using her for the show. But also, Adriana isn’t wrong. Imagine the story line!
After that, Julia says that Adriana was always holding the secret of their hookup over her head. She said Adriana wanted her and Julia to be besties like Marysol and Alexia, and that if Julia ever tried to get close to anyone in the group or defended Marysol or Kiki, Adriana would threaten to expose her secret. Julia says that even during their fight at the finale party, when Adriana was threatening to “break the fourth wall” and “tell the truth” about Julia, she was alluding to their sexual past. The producers do us a solid by airing the unseen footage, and, well, it looks like Julia might have a point. Julia says that she’s coming forward now because she felt like she couldn’t be herself for three years because Adriana was muzzling her and emotionally blackmailing her with the information. Though she’s going to look bad for cheating on her wife, she says she wants Adriana and the public to know that she didn’t leave her old friend Adriana for her new friends, but that she needed to be free from Adriana’s control.
Adriana calls Julia a “fool” for sharing this of her own volition because she would have taken this secret to the grave. In Adriana’s telling, Julia was a seductress who always had a crush on her. The first time they met, Adriana says Julia took her to the bathroom to see her boobs (which everyone with a Peacock subscription can see throughout the course of the show), and Julia showed off her butt. Adriana says that Julia is an imposter who changes based on who she is around and that she even changed her name. Her real name is, wait for it, Yulia. Oh, the eye roll that Andy Cohen hit her with when he heard that name reveal.
Adriana says that she was always going to keep Julia’s secrets, but now that Julia brought it up, she feels like she has carte blanche to say everything. “She was cheating with a Haitian mortician!” she shouts, adding that Julia had to buy him a coffee maker for a gift. She says Julia had another lover who was a cop. (Based on Adriana’s pronoun usage, these sound like male lovers, if that matters.) Andy, doing hard-core journalism for the people, only has one follow-up: Why did she have to buy this Haitian mortician a coffee maker? Exactly! Julia! Answer the question!
This adds to Adriana’s narrative that Julia is a liar, a cheater, and a “whore.” She also says that when they were in Spain, Adriana came to Julia’s room and Julia once again tried to sleep with her, but Adriana said “no.” This is when Andy brings up that the two of them had both wanted to repair their relationship at the start of the day, but it seems impossible now that Julia brought this up. That’s when Adriana delivers her prop, her heart in a wooden box, which she was going to give to Julia again. Ugh, this is the problem with Adriana: She pulls these stunts, and they never quite land, and we’re all just cringing from our teeth to our taints.
Now that we have the whole story, who do we believe? I’m inclined to think that most of what each woman said was entirely true, mostly because they both acknowledge it. Adriana agrees they hooked up, Julia says that she had some indiscretions other than Adriana that Martina knows about, and Julia also agrees that she showed Adriana her butt when they first met. I also believe, based on all we know about her from the past, that Adriana would likely use her knowledge of Julia to keep her on her side and attempt to achieve better outcomes for herself on the show. Did she ever blackmail her by saying explicitly, “If you don’t do this, I’m telling everyone”? Maybe not, but from the clip we saw, it certainly was heavily implied. The one thing I don’t believe is that Julia tried to hook up with Adriana in Spain, but maybe. At this point, who knows?
Based on what we now know, the other big question is: Do we care? I mean, not really. Julia isn’t painting me a picture of Adriana that is too unlike what I already assumed about her. Julia seems to have discussed this with her wife and worked through it, so it’s between them. Is Julia a liar, manipulator, and a cheat like Adriana says? Well, she certainly hasn’t been faithful, but again, this is Julia’s business. So, I care in the sense that this is a reality show and these are some really juicy details, and of course, I am seated, but I don’t care in the sense that it didn’t change how I feel about either of them, really.
The rest of the episode focused on Kiki, her relationship with her father, and everything she had gone through this season. Love Kiki, glad she’s happy, and she also wins best dressed. Then it’s onto rehashing what happened with Stephanie and Alexia, but it seems like they’re both over it and have moved on as friends. Same with what was going on with Larsa and Lisa, two wicks in the same candle. I was interested in what ChatGPT had to say about Larsa’s reputation, and, honestly, it was spot-on. Is Sam Altman a Bravoholic? Do Alexia next!
But after the pyrotechnics between Julia and Adriana, all of these conversations seem strange and stilted. It’s like trying to go to McDonald’s after a funeral. No one is in the mood, and the fun and enjoyment you’re supposed to take in it has been sapped by the upheaval of the emotions we just went through. I don’t know if all of this coming out is going to create the kind of shift in the group dynamic (or the casting for next season) that Julia thinks it will or that Adriana is afraid it will. Still, anytime we can expose an affair between co-workers and get kinky queer sex front and center on my television (or wherever it is that I’m streaming Peacock), then I am always happy to talk about scissoring.
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Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
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