If you guys are into the Real Housewives multiverse, I’m sure you’ll want to read every dirty detail in Vanity Fair’s long-awaited “exposé,” in which VF details all of the calls for a Bravo “reckoning.” As someone who barely engages with any of these shows, let me just say that this VF piece gave me a massive headache, but I get it. These shows are massively popular and frankly, these women are totally being underpaid for making asses out of themselves constantly on television. Bethenny Frankel wants a Real Housewives union – after hearing how little new cast members make, I kind of think there should be a union too. Anyway, the VF piece starts off with exhaustive reporting on whether Bravo was responsible for Sonja Morgan’s multiple alcoholic relapses and by the end of it, I just couldn’t believe that Sonja kept coming back for more and more. Some of the most damning and disturbing sh-t about RHONY’s Eboni K. Williams and Ramona Singer. Singer, surprising no one, is a racist wackjob.

RHONY season 13 featured Williams, the show’s first Black cast member. In 2020 and 2021, Singer’s alleged racial hostility and use of the N-word in conversation with a Black crew member during season 13 production were the subject of complaints within Shed Media, Warner Bros. Discovery, Bravo, and NBCUniversal.

That was immediately clear to Williams, a lawyer and TV host who, in 2021, became the first Black cast member on RHONY. A virtual education session before filming season 13 covered topics including “Black Women” (“How Black women are treated in larger society and the Black community”), “Microaggressions” (“What are they? How do you recognize them?”), “Lexicon” (“Appropriate vs. Harmful/Offensive language”), and “Missteps” (“What to do when you say something offensive? How do you move forward in that relationship?”).

Eboni Williams, Leah McSweeney, Sonja Morgan, Ramona Singer, and LuAnn de Lesseps were on the call, as well as an NBCUniversal communications executive, a Bravo publicist, and two representatives from a racial justice organization. Williams had never previously met Morgan or Singer. Before the one-hour session officially began, according to McSweeney and Williams, Morgan commented on the natural hair of the Black woman leading the session.

Williams, 40, interpreted the meeting as a “cover your ass” move—she says it mostly focused on the kinds of things cast members should avoid saying, like the racist trope that Black fathers are not present for their children. “What if they don’t have a father? Why can’t I say that?” Singer said during the meeting, according to Williams. “Most of them don’t.” The RHONY publicist, who is also Black, told Singer that she has a father, but Singer said she’d read a study that confirmed that most Black children do not. McSweeney corroborates Williams’s account. “The training included ‘open dialogue,’ ” Singer said to VF. “In that spirit, I asked a question about a statistic I had read about single-parent households, where children with single-parent households were statistically less likely to succeed than two-parent households.”

Later, while filming a scene that did air, de Lesseps and Singer expressed on camera their squeamishness around words such as dick, which they attributed to their backgrounds as “churchgoing” and “conservative.” Williams said that she had no discomfort with sexual language, noting she was the most educated person at the table, with a BA and a JD. De Lesseps, who is a high school graduate and licensed nurse, said, “I don’t like the way you talk.” When Singer also got upset, Williams said, “Your white fragility is killing me right now,” then had to explain the term.

De Lesseps called Williams an “angry woman,” which Williams understood implicitly: an angry Black woman. “I never referred to your color,” de Lesseps said. Williams left, Singer stayed behind. The scene that viewers saw ended there. But the emotional momentum continued. One of the people who remained told Vanity Fair, “Ramona slammed her hands on the table. She goes, ‘This is why we didn’t need Black people on the show…. This is gonna ruin our show.’ ” (Singer emailed VF this “absolutely” did not happen. “In fact, I supported adding diverse cast members well before before [sic] Eboni was added.”)

That season, Singer also allegedly told a Black woman staffer, “There’s so many of you guys here now, please don’t change your hair as I’m not gonna be able to remember anybody’s names.” Singer says this was the kind of thing she commonly did: “It was a [sic] strictly a commentary on my inability to remember names. […] As an example, just last week I saw a photo with me and Travis Kelce from 2016 on Watch What Happens Live and I thought he was Jax Taylor,” she emailed Vanity Fair, referring to a Vanderpump Rules cast member. According to two people familiar with production, Singer exclaimed, “There’s so many Black chicks!”

During a filming session later, [Black producer] Darian Edmondson remained at Ramona Singer’s session. Singer told Edmondson that her interaction with Williams reminded her of when Jewish colleagues used a “Catholic slur” with her when she was a young woman and called her a “shiksa,” a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. Edmondson hadn’t heard the word before and later had to ask her mother what it was. According to Edmondson, she said, “Ramona, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” to which Singer said, “Oh, it’s literally like somebody calling you a n–ger.” (Singer says she “never” said the N-word and that this account is a “misrepresentation.” “I did describe an incident where I was called a shiksa while working in college,” she wrote, “but I did not compare the the [sic] two experiences.”)

[From Vanity Fair]

Good lord. I had to look up Ramona’s age because she’s giving Aggressively Racist White Woman Of A Certain Generation. She’s 66 years old, born in 1956. She likes things when they’re separate and unequal. She didn’t want a Black castmate, she was mad that Eboni is better-educated and she dropped the n-word to a producer for good measure. Seriously, though, reading through the VF piece, it’s like… it’s not worth it. You’re not being paid properly, everyone ends up getting divorced, all your businesses fail and producers try to get every cast member blackout drunk on a regular basis. Just… stop. Stop doing it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.