‘The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ Season 14: The Divorce Lawyer Cometh

It was Matt Rogers of “Las Culturistas”—don’t ask me when or where, but I know it was him—who said that each Real Housewives city has a distinct theme, and the theme of Beverly Hills is “cracks in the China.” The women of that specific Californian enclave are ostensibly the wealthiest of any in the franchise, and they quite literally wear it on their sleeves with their designer labels. Therefore, the plot of their show has always been about exposing the seedy underbelly of such wealth and power. In the earliest seasons, Taylor Armstrong was struggling to leave her physically abusive husband, who eventually died by suicide due to his abuse of his wife being exposed. Kyle Richards and her sister Kim Richards fought like cats and dogs for years over Kim’s alcohol addiction, which is still ongoing. Erika Jayne was quite literally married to the bad guy from Erin Brockovich, who was very much also a bad guy in real life and may or may not have funneled the money owed to families of plane crash victims into his wife’s “Pretty Mess” popstar fund. Lisa Rinna was, well, Lisa Rinna.

Divorce is the inevitable climax for most of these people. We’ve been watching Kyle—at one point, half of the longest-running Bravo power couple—go through it for over a year now. Kyle’s tactic has been to sweep everything under the rug until cameras are rolling and then freak out, cry a little, and say she doesn’t want to talk about it. For all of her years in Hollywood and on reality TV, this is a woman who lacks media training. But her frenemy, Dorit Kemsley, does not. If anything, she’s had too much of it.

Dorit’s separation—not, as she keeps emphasizing, a divorce—from her husband of nine years and Boy George’s manager, Paul Kemsley, is the big story of Beverly Hills season 14. She announced it on Instagram right when filming began, so the viewers knew it was coming, and so it was practically the first thing out of her mouth the first time she appeared on screen in the premiere. From that moment on, she had her story and she was sticking to it: Paul, or PK as he’s commonly referred to, is a raging alcoholic and on a journey to sobriety and she just can’t fight with him anymore. She said it to Erika; she said it to Kyle’s other sister Kathy Hilton after kissing her ring; she said it to newbie Bozoma Saint John five minutes after meeting her at a surrealist-themed party.

It’s not for me to say if PK’s alleged alcoholism and new sobriety are indeed the cause of his marriage to Dorit falling apart, but what I’ll say for PK is that we’ve seen him getting sober over a couple of seasons now—this isn’t new information—and throwing alcoholism in someone’s face has long been a common thread across the franchise that makes me uncomfortable.

All I know is that I’ve never truly believed a word Dorit Kemsley has ever said if she wasn’t talking about Chanel or Versace. She’s like a walking, talking marketing campaign; everything she says sounds insincere, like she rehearsed it in the mirror before she got there. In the premiere, when PK had lunch with Kyle’s ex, Mauricio Umansky, the day his separation was announced, I believed him when he said he was struggling and when he told his friend that his getting sober, not his prior drinking, was the beginning of the end. When Dorit talks about it, it sounds bitter and shallow, like her publicist told her what to say after consulting with a divorce lawyer.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to handle themselves during a divorce, but at least when Kyle gets weepy and storms out of the room, you know how she really feels.