Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Emma Chance | TV | October 31, 2023
Ever since Bethenny Frankel called for the unionizing of Bravolebrities earlier this year, there have been rumors of a “reckoning.” Former Housewives have complained about filming conditions—especially excessive alcohol consumption encouraged by producers—for years, but those complaints have taken a more litigious tone of late. Enter Vanity Fair.
I first heard about the article that dropped yesterday a couple of weeks ago. It was being hyped as a “probe” into the Housewives franchise. Words like “tell-all” and “exposé” were being bandied about. As an avid fan of the shows and a fierce defender of some of its stars (anyone who comes for Sonja Morgan comes for me), I was looking forward to what I hoped would be a new, compassionate look into what it’s really like on the inside. I’ll admit that I did not trust Frankel’s initial motives for unionizing because I don’t generally trust Frankel, who loves to call herself “The most successful Housewife of all time.” She’s a businesswoman first, and she knows what she’s doing in hitching her wagon to the most vulnerable Bravo stars, like Rachel Leviss and Nene Leakes. That being said, there is definitely manipulation at work in reality television, and that deserves to be uncovered.
Well, some of it was. But mostly it was more of what we already knew: lots of casual racism and lots more alcohol, the former being Eboni K. Williams’s story about Ramona Singer using the N-word and just generally being a terrible person, and the latter being the story of Leah McSweeney, whose battle with alcoholism and sobriety was documented during her time on Real Housewives of New York City and Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.
McSweeney’s downfall is, unfortunately, the major revelation of the article. We knew some of it—we saw some of it—but we didn’t know the extent of her suffering. She told VF that she had relapsed after nearly a decade of sobriety shortly before auditioning for RHONY and downplayed her relationship with alcohol from the start. Then she was told by a producer, “This sh** is boring as hell, you better turn it up,” while filming at Singer’s house in the Hamptons, and turn it up she did. That night became legend in the Bravoverse, with a naked, drunk “Hurricane Leah” screaming and throwing lit tiki torches across the lawn.
She says the only time production intervened was when Singer complained that she’d been too disruptive while filming a cast trip to Rhode Island, during which she threw a martini glass and a ravioli at Singer at two different dinners. An executive producer called her and said “We need you to be lucid” and set up a call for her with “a mental health professional, though they did not mention alcohol.”
Come season 13, McSweeney was sober again, but her grandmother was dying. The cast went to Singer’s house in the Hamptons again, and she made it clear to producers that if her grandmother died while they were there, she couldn’t miss the funeral. That’s exactly what happened, and the fact that she went to the Hamptons at all when her grandmother was so close to death became a topic of conversation and criticism within the Housewives universe for many months after. Meanwhile, producers were telling her there was a “stark difference between you when you were drinking versus this season, and that’s why the audience kind of didn’t like you.”
She quit the show in 2021 after season 13 aired and suffered a “major depressive episode related to the show and her grandmother’s death” weeks later. Her family checked her into Silver Hill Hospital, where she stayed for eight days because that was “the longest amount of time insurance would cover.”
In March 2022, she was on the upswing again, so Bravo reached out, wanting to cast her in a new season of Ultimate Girls Trip, filmed in Thailand. She says they “swore it would be different this time” and also promised she was “being considered for RHONY Legacy, a RHONY franchise with veteran NYC Housewives.” But the other women on the trip, including Marysol Patton of Real Housewives of Miami and Heather Gay of Salt Lake City, were for some reason obsessed with her sobriety and hell-bent on making light of it, saying things like “I wish you were still drinking” (Patton) and “Let’s get Leah drunk!” (Gay) She told them that relapsing on the trip would “ruin” her life. The cast criticized her for her attitude all throughout their time in Thailand and continued the conversation about her grandmother’s death. This eventually led to a panic attack, which prompted medical staff to give her a “makeshift IV clipped to a clothes hanger on the bed frame, which then fell and pulled the needle out of her wrist.” She was later taken to a hospital, where she cried to nurses, “Just keep them away from me,” in reference to members of production.
McSweeney and her lawyers filed “an employment discrimination complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission” against Bravo and the other production companies involved in Housewives in March of this year, but it was vehemently rejected.
Will this be the downfall of Bravo? No. Will they have to comment on it and maybe even have conversations about alcoholism on their shows (most likely Watch What Happens Live and Housewives reunions)? Probably. With RHOC star Shannon Beador’s recent DUI arrest, that has already started somewhat. Will Leah get a formal apology and maybe even some kind of reparation? Unfortunately, probably not.
