Evasive Maneuvers: Kyle Richards and Shannon Beador at BravoCon

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | November 6, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | November 6, 2023 |

Bravo’s convention of panels and fan service went down this past weekend, an interesting moment in time for a handful of Bravolebrities to be giving interviews. The cast of Ultimate Girls Trip Rhony Legacy avoided any mention of their costar Ramona Singer, who was cut from the convention after last week’s controversy—which Andy Cohen addressed by saying “Bravo and the shows on Bravo bring people so much joy and so much happiness, which is why we are all here, to have fun,”—but Kyle Richards and Shannon Beador couldn’t avoid the hard questions about their current situations.

Kyle has lately been very open about the state of her marriage with Mauricio Umansky. She went on Watch What Happens Live recently and basically said they’re still in love and living in the same house but they’re figuring out what their relationship is going to look like going forward. She admitted that she was hurt by rumors that Mauricio was having an affair with his Dancing With the Stars partner Emma Slater, and couldn’t speak to the veracity of the rumors. She got choked up at BravoCon when asked where they stood now.

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“We’re just trying to figure it out, we know that we love each other,” she said, then had to stop to blink back tears. “This was not my idea of a fairytale,” she said before thanking the fans in the audience for their support.

Meanwhile, Shannon has clearly had some serious PR training since her DUI arrest. When answering questions on the Bravo Blue carpet, she said, “I’ve spent the last month focusing on myself and I went to a program for 28 days, and I have started and am continuing to eliminate toxic and unhealthy things in my life.”

When the interviewer pressed her, asking if she meant she was eliminating alcohol from her life, she said, “I mean I haven’t been drinking, and you know there’s certain relationships that have ended as well.” She revealed that she and her ex, John Janssen, haven’t spoken in over a month. No mention of the verdict that came down on Thursday before the weekend’s events, which sentenced her to three years of probation, including “40 hours of community service and a nine-month alcohol program.”

At a later panel, she elaborated on her statement. Well, kind of.

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“It’s been a rough last six weeks but I’ve been focusing on myself and I’ve started to make a lot of positive changes in my life—eliminating toxic and unhealthy things—so, I’m looking forward to the future,” she said. Luann de Lesseps, who went through a similar experience to Shannon’s during her time on Real Housewives of New York, had a knowing look on her face from her perch in the back row.

The words “toxic” and “unhealthy” are doing a lot of work here. Notably absent is a clear statement on her sobriety plan moving forward. It’s as if someone told her not to use the words “sobriety” or “alcohol” because that would trap her into a narrative that she doesn’t want. Read: she doesn’t want the narrative to be that she has an alcohol problem because she doesn’t think she does. Instead, she’s blaming her behavior on “toxic” relationships. We’ll see how that pans out in that court mandated alcohol program.