This column originally appeared in Brian Moylan’s newsletter, The Housewives Institute Bulletin. Sign up here to be the first to read the next edition.
Brynn Whitfield (The Real Housewives of New York City), Katie Ginella (The Real Housewives of Orange County), and Stacey Rusch (The Real Housewives of Potomac)
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images/Bravo (Phylicia J. L. Munn, Nicole Weingart), Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images
Lately it seems like all our shows are consumed by lying liars telling lies. This season of RHOC has been a merry-go-round of accusations about how Katie Ginella bent the truth in various ways and Gretchen Rossi and Tamra Judge accusing each other of assassinating the other’s character. RHOP opened with two story lines surrounding Stacey Rusch: whether she paid TJ Jones to be her boyfriend last season and if she was lying about creating a cannabis line to compete with Eddie Osefo’s Happy Eddie. (Not to mention Eddie and Wendy Osefo’s recent arrest for fraudulently reporting burglary and theft.) RHOM rounded out its season with Julia Lemigova saying she slept with Adriana de Moura, but now they’re both accusing the other of lying about the details.
This all got me thinking about the place lies have on these shows. This franchise is built on he-said-she-said arguments — though there are rarely any hes, and that’s just the way we like it — but if everything is obfuscation, when does trying to figure out who is telling the truth become not fun to watch or, even worse, damaging to the whole enterprise? Can the shows continue to exist if there is no such thing as a shared reality?
In an attempt to bring clarity to the matter, we here at the Housewives Institute have whittled down the myriad lies in which the ladies engage to seven broad types to determine whether or not they should be allowed for the greater good of this reality-television experiment many of us have spent 20 years enjoying. We’ll start with the silly delusions that keep our shows humming and work our way up through the fireable offenses.
There are times when viewers or cast members think a woman is lying and it turns out that she was just very bad at communicating the truth. The most recent example is Stacey Rusch’s divorce. Based on the evidence Ashley Darby presented on the show, combined with Stacey’s caginess about what Ashley dug up, it sure looked like she was lying about things being finalized with her husband, but it turns out they’re as divorced as Sonja Morgan is from reality. Last season it seemed like Whitney Rose had been caught dead to rights shipping jewelry from Alibwwwaaaaabwwwaaaaaa, as Meredith Marks pronounces it, but come reunion time, she had a very plausible explanation for why the allegations were false. These aren’t really lies at all; they just seem like they are based on what the show is displaying and the women being bad at making cases for themselves.
Sometimes the ladies will tell a little lie to cover over a rough patch or make themselves seem a little bit more fabulous than they are. These are the silly, inconsequential fibs that affect them and no one else and become an issue only when they get called out by the other ladies. For example, the Real Housewives hill I will die on is that Heather Dubrow called the paparazzi to take pictures of her and husband Terry at Disneyland so it would look like everything was great in their marriage. This didn’t even happen on the show but became a part of RHOC when Katie Ginella accused Heather of lying about it. Heather denied it repeatedly on the show and this season even had a photographer “meet” her, Emily Simpson, and Gretchen Rossi on the street in Beverly Hills in an attempt to substantiate the lie. Please. Or take Bronwyn Newport’s lie about buying a $4 million necklace: It only became an issue when Lisa Barlow called her out for it at the reunion, and nothing got hurt other than Bronwyn’s pride. Housewives are known for being delusional and we love them for it, so as long as they’re not implicating other people, this sort of lie will always have a place on our shows.
We all know there are Housewives who make up entire story lines out of thin air just so they’ll get more time on our screens. Unlike a harmless delusion, this is something that is concocted with an arc in mind, like Stacey’s relationship with TJ, Kenya Moore’s relationship with Walter Jackson her first season on RHOA, and Drew Sidora’s maybe-relationship with Dennis McKinley on this most recent season. It doesn’t have to be about romance, either: Remember when Melissa Gorga was on the hunt for a long-lost sister who didn’t exist or was considering having another child that we knew wouldn’t materialize? Rather than one-off fibs, these are stories that are perpetuated over time, which makes them harder to disprove and therefore more insidious. However, this sort of behavior is a natural result of a reality-TV ecosystem in which the women are constantly fishing to keep their jobs and, since the cast (and the fans) calling them out on their grasping for relevance has become part of the fun, we’ll allow it.
This is by far the largest category, comprising things that women bring onto the show that they “heard” from an unnamed and possibly imaginary source. They’re not doing any sort of verification; they’re just repeating any claim that may have landed in their DMs. This can include everything from RHONY’s #Bookgate to rumors that Eddie Judge is gay, to rumors that Angie K’s husband, Shawn Trujillo, is gay, and that every married woman on every single show has cheated on her husband and maybe even did it with a member of 98 Degrees. This category is so expansive it covers everything from the downright silly, like that Angie K is in the Greek mafia, to alleged criminal behavior, like when Phaedra Parks said that Kandi Burruss drugged Porsha Williams so that she could sexually assault her. These are my least favorite kinds of lies because we can’t make a knowing inference on who is telling the truth if we can’t question the real source. Sadly, as long as we have Housewives we’re going to have this sort of rumormongering, but taking it as far as Phaedra did was unacceptable behavior deserving of serious consequences. (And while those consequences may have been temporary, since Phaedra has been back on Married to Medicine and RHOA she seems to have learned her lesson.)
Lately there have been cases of women getting caught in so many seemingly innocuous lies over the course of their season or seasons that it’s permanently damaged their standing on the show. I’m thinking of Mia Thornton and her constantly shifting stories about her personal and professional lives; Brynn Whitfield, who often stretched the truth even before she made a gross accusation about Ubah Hassan; or Katie Ginella always having an unbelievable excuse no matter what she’s confronted with, even a polygraph test. Once the women reach this point, it becomes tough to keep them on the cast, usually because everyone, including the fans, has turned against them. These shows run on conflict and conflict resolution, and part of the fun, as viewers, is taking sides in those conflicts. The problem with pathological liars is they essentially break the format because no one can have their back in a conflict. Monica Garcia is a prime example of this phenomenon, not because she was telling a host of lies on the show but because her pattern of deceitful behavior as Reality Von Tease made it so that any argument against her could be won by saying, “We all know Monica lies.” So far everyone in this category has been fired — save Katie, who got downgraded mid-season — and for good reason.
Yes, lies of omission are also lies, and there are some that rise to the level of the woman being shown the door. Robyn Dixon said on her podcast she knew that her husband, Juan, met up with a woman before the seventh season of RHOP and then spent the entire season sitting on that information. Luann de Lesseps spent the season-nine reunion taping defending her marriage to Tom D’Agostino and then filed for divorce three weeks later, just days before the first part of the reunion aired. Robyn lost her job because of what she did, and Luann probably should have lost hers but instead was chastened by Andy Cohen in a hastily filmed special interview. This isn’t to say that the women don’t deserve some privacy, but they are getting paid to share their lives with the public; willfully mischaracterizing what’s happening in their lives during the course of filming goes against the very nature of the show. Even worse, it seemed like Robyn held on to the info so she could cash in on it herself on her podcast. Sorry, but that is a big no-no.
They say it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up, and as legal troubles have become more of an issue across the franchise, we’ve had more instances of the ladies denying the things that eventually send them to the clankety-clank, as Karen Huger ironically called it. How many times did Jen Shah say on-camera that she was innocent before pleading guilty and going on to become Elizabeth Holmes’s prison bestie? What about Karen claiming that she would be cleared in her fourth DUI until the court found her guilty and sent her to prison? Now we have Wendy Osefo faking an entire break-in, which, due to filming schedules, has yet to be an issue on the show. That makes its inclusion here still conditional, since this category is less about the crime itself, which should be tried and punished by the courts accordingly, than it is about how the ladies discuss it on the show. To Teresa Giudice’s credit (and I rarely want to give her any credit), she never flat-out denied what she and her husband, Joe, were accused of. Maybe that’s why Bravo allowed her back: She committed a victimless crime, showed a suitable level of remorse, served her time, and returned to a secured berth on RHONJ. That seems to be the treatment Karen Huger is getting, considering cameras were there to capture her release from prison, though fans have yet to see her show anything approaching remorse or even taking accountability. With Wendy, it’s too early to judge, but the real test is going to be what happens when Jen Shah gets out in just over a year. Obviously, I’ll be interested to watch or read an interview about her time in prison, but her lies both while committing and covering up her crimes should preclude her from infecting the perfection of RHOSLC ever again.
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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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