Photo: Martin Schoeller for New York Magazine
Andy Cohen thinks about his cancellation a lot. What will it look like? When will it come? âItâs fascinating to me, the idea that you could say something and everything would be pulled away from you,â he says. It was a bright afternoon in May, and we had been talking about an event he had coming up, âAn Evening With Andy Cohen,â at the 92nd Street Y.
Cohen had been thinking he might read an excerpt from his 2012 memoir, Most Talkative, but now he was having second thoughts. âItâs called âCry Indian,â and itâs about a prank I played on my parents where I convinced them that I thought I was a Native American,â he says. It was a sweet, relatable story â about a joke gone too far and how being funny can sometimes tip into being mean â but he worried that the title and nature of the prank wouldnât land with a 2024 audience. âYou have to be smart about what you say because thereâs no nuance anymore,â he says. âPeople are just waiting to be outraged by every little thing.â
This a is healthy concern for any public figure to have, particularly one who, like Cohen, has built his career skipping up to the line of propriety. As the host of the reunions for the various franchises of The Real Housewives, which he executive-produces, a daily live radio show, and the nightly Watch What Happens Live, heâs known for his willingness to go there, plowing into sensitive subjects, addressing unspoken issues, and asking devilishly impertinent questions with his charming, crooked grin.
âI mean, he asked Shaq how â big he is,â sputters Anderson Cooper, who often plays the straight man to Cohenâs instigator, most famously on the duoâs annual New Yearâs Eve broadcast from Times Square, during which Cooper once memorably held Cohen back by his collar as he ranted drunkenly against outgoing mayor Bill de Blasio. âI would never in a million years ask that question or even think to ask it,â Cooper continues needlessly. âBut Shaq not only answered; he gave a really funny answer. With props.â
Cohen wouldnât have it any other way. âI like being provocative,â he says. âIt makes me feel alive in a weird way. Itâs dangerous. Itâs spontaneous. I think it sometimes gets to the heart of who a person is. If you navigate it well, it can become something incredible and intoxicating. Itâs like dancing on the water: Are you going to go over or not?â
On the whole, Cohen has navigated it very well. Since leaving his desk job as a Bravo executive over a decade ago, he has managed to ascend to a level of fame that feels increasingly difficult to achieve. Heâs Americaâs gay best friend, as his friend John Mayer put it. Sesame Street had him on to define popular for Elmo. In the weeks I spent with him, nearly every stranger who approached him began with some version of âI love you.â
Still, he worries. âSometimes at night Iâll be in bed and Iâll think, Huh, did I say something?â Cohen says. âIâm always waiting for the thing thatâs going to make it all fall down.â
Earlier this year, it seemed as if that time might have come after attorneys for former Real Housewives filed lawsuits against Bravo and its parent company, NBCUniversal â the product of a long-simmering âReality Reckoningâ that pointed to Cohen as, among other things, an âomnificent ringleaderâ with a âproclivity for cocaine usageâ whose âdiscriminatory and retaliatory conductâ created a ârotted workplace culture.â
âIt is inconceivable that Mr. Cohen remains in his post in spite of this behavior and harkens back to the bad old days of Matt Lauer and NBC News when profits were prioritized over people,â wrote Bryan Freedman, one of the Los Angeles entertainment lawyers leading the Reckoning. There would be more lawsuits to come, he added, telling Variety, âThis is going to end up being a war, and Iâm going to lead the war.â
NBCU and Cohenâs lawyers sent out the usual statements denying the accusations, specifically demanding a retraction of the cocaine allegation. But to a casual observer, it looked like the beginnings of a familiar story: the unraveling of a powerful man in an industry that was already widely regarded to be toxic and depraved. Lord knows it wouldnât be the first time Elmo had put his furry mitts in the wrong hands. NBCU announced it was conducting an investigation, and rumors swirled that Cohen was hiring a crisis-PR team and negotiating a âdeparture package.â Chairman Frances Berwick delivered a chilling line: âAndy is a very sort of specific and exceptional talent, and he really is the face of the network,â she told Variety. âBut Iâm also happy to say that â and I think weâve proved this over and over again â weâve got 160 talents here who are also big faces of the network. And weâve also been able to replace them.â
But then nothing happened. Instead of quietly disappearing while the courts worked out his fate, Cohen kept up his regular patter on the radio and on television. He went to parties, posed for pictures, helped Sarah Jessica Parker see her way down the red carpet at the Met Ball, and continued asking impertinent questions.
âThe other night, we went to a party for Stephen Colbert,â his friend Amy Sedaris recalled recently. âAnd I turn around and heâs asking Colbert, âIs there anyone in your family that you donât get along with?ââ
Eventually, Bravo and NBCU announced that Cohen had been cleared in their outside investigation and that they were renewing Watch What Happens Live through 2025. Although no retractions of any legal claims were issued and the lawsuits were still pending, Cohen reacted as though that were the end of it, appearing on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter straightening his tie above the headline WHAT, ME WORRY?
Still, maybe itâs better not to tempt fate: âI was thinking about reading an excerpt from my first book,â Cohen says to the audience at the 92nd Street Y in a way that suggests heâs still considering it. But then he changes his mind. âSaturday, January 1st, 2022, New York City,â he reads instead. âClaire McCaskill texted the trashing of de Blasio was epic âŠâ
There arenât many things anyone can tell you about Andy Cohen that he hasnât already said himself. Things he reveals in his memoirs (there are four, three in diary form) include:
That he is a âpower top.â
That he accidentally called Snoop Dogg âSpookâ but deleted it from the broadcast. (It turned out fine; they smoked a blunt afterward).
That he once told Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripaâs kids about sleeping with a guy who had a uniball.
That he and Sedaris once did ketamine before going to the Polo Bar.
That he has seen the boobs of at least three Housewives: Vicki, Tamra, and Kim.
âI mean, itâs like he blabs everything,â says his mother, Evelyn Cohen, 87, who, on a Zoom call with his sister, Emily, struggles to come up with a story her son hasnât told about his childhood growing up in St. Louis.
âDid he tell you about the Indian boots?â says his mother. âThat was bad.
Despite the confessional nature of his books, Cohen is less forthcoming in interviews, maybe because his line of work has made him fearful of allowing anyone else control over his story. In any case, Cohenâs story is at this point well known: Growing up in St. Louis, he was a soap-opera-obsessive kid who wanted to be on television âas himself,â but when he landed in New York in the early â90s, someone told him he couldnât because of his wonky eye. So instead he got a job as a producer at CBS News and became a fun party-boy-about-town. âHe has that magnetic energy,â says Sedaris, who met him through Parker. âHe canât sit still. I donât know the type of dog he is, but heâs always, like, walking down the street, looking around, ears flopping. Always promiscuous, always has his eye out.â
He met Cooper when someone tried to set him up on a date. Cohen blew it: âI was like, âYour momâs Gloria Vanderbilt.â And he was like, âIâm not into you.ââ
Their mutual friend Barry Diller eventually hired him at Trio, which merged with Bravo after both were absorbed into NBCUniversal. Cohen was working as the vice-president of programming in 2004 when a California production company came in with the tapes of what would become The Real Housewives of Orange County: âOrange County to me was the Knots Landing of The Real Housewives,â he says. âTheyâre in cul-de-sacs. They all go to the same club.â But he got nervous when he saw the now-famous format the production company had come up with for the intro, which featured the women alongside contextless quotes from the show (âI donât want to get old,â â85 percent of the women around here have had breast implants,â âHeâs pretty much keeping meâ).
âI was like, Oh my God, the women, theyâre going to hate this,â he says. But when it premiered, in March 2006, they loved it: âSo that was my first sense â Oh, these women are in for the ride. So okay, letâs go.â
Cohenâs enthusiasm for that show and others on the network led his boss to suggest he start blogging about them on the Bravo website, which led to his doing guest spots promoting Bravoâs programming and eventually hosting the networkâs reunion specials, which was how he caught the eye of Michael Davies, a British producer who had imported the wildly successful Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to the U.S. âHe was asking Flipping Out host Jeff Lewis about the implants in his lips,â Davies recalls. âAnd I had one of those moments where I could see the future.â
Obama had just taken office, and the national mood was optimistic. Cohenâs irrepressibility felt right for the moment. âI saw him as a kind of poster boy for post-ironic, positive television,â says Davies, whose company, Embassy Row, produces Watch What Happens Live.
The show, which started as an experiment in the summer of 2009, mirrored the loose, chatty vibe of the early internet in both its tone and format: On Thursday nights from midnight to 12:30 a.m., Cohen and whatever Bravo personality or celebrity he could wrangle played drinking games and took calls from viewers and questions over Twitter from a tiny studio in Embassy Rowâs offices. The set was modeled on Cohenâs apartment, decorated with his own furniture. There was no air-conditioning.
âIn the beginning, I was like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News,â Cohen recalls. âI couldnât control my sweating.â
Afterward, they would review the tape and then head to the Boom Boom Room, the club at the top of the Standard that reminded Cohen of Nexus, the favored haunt of Erica Kane on All My Children. âWe would roll in at 1:15 a.m. and stay until four,â Cohen says. âIt was great.â
He knew he was famous after Teresa Giudice shoved him to the side during a heated altercation on the season-two reunion of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. âI was out at the beach on vacation, and it was on Access Hollywood, and there was a big picture of it in the New York Post, and people were talking about it on Twitter,â he says. By then, Watch What Happens Live had hit 2 million viewers. Bravo extended it to two, then five days a week, which afforded Cohen more time to discuss non-Bravo subjects and host bigger and better guests. Meryl Streep came on and played Marry, Shag, Kill. Hillary Clinton drank from the âShotskiâ â a ski with shot glasses attached to it, a gift that had been given to Cohen by Jimmy Fallon and his wife. Oprah told Cohen he âcarried the light.â
In 2013, Cohen was finally able to drop his day job and negotiate a deal for a mostly on-air role at Bravo that allowed him to remain the host of the networkâs reunion specials and retain his executive-producer credit on The Real Housewives, which was rapidly becoming its own multiverse with six active franchises and numerous spinoffs. (There are a lot more now.)
Cohen likes to refer to The Real Housewives as a âsociological time capsule,â and as the start-up era roared into being, the series gained a reputation as a launching pad for businesses, largely due to the success of The Real Housewives of New Yorkâs hustling chef, Bethenny Frankel, who had famously sold the beverage division of her company, Skinnygirl, for $100 million. The Housewives, newly redefining themselves as âentrepreneurs,â began using the platform of the show to hawk everything from brands of flavored vodka to their (questionable) singing careers.
âThey are mothers, they are entrepreneurs, they are wives, they are women,â Cohen told Gloria Steinem on Watch What Happens Live in 2015.
âIt is women all dressed up and inflated and plastic surgery and false bosoms and not getting along with each other,â Steinem replied stonily.
Cohen was visibly dismayed at the time, and nearly a decade later, this point of view still bothers him.
âI think itâs a feminist show,â he says. âAnd I know a lot of feminists, by the way, who view this as a great feminist show â Roxane Gay, Camille Paglia, Sarah Paulson â just women that are very active in womenâs issues, who view this as a great feminist show. The other great thing that I love about this show is that I love that we have put more women over 50 on television.â
Cohen loves women, he adds. âWomen are precious to me,â he says, rattling off a list of the many who made an impact on his life, including but not limited to his mom, his mentors at Bravo, Madonna, Diana Ross, and Cher.
And he respects women, especially the Housewives. âI really respect the Housewives so much because they open up their lives in a sometimes very raw way, and I think that would be really hard to do,â he says. âI donât know if I have the constitution to do that on television. So the strength of these women ultimately to share that and then open themselves up for all sorts of conversations is something that I admire. So thatâs why if someone says itâs about fighting or Gloria Steinem says this, I just think itâs a lazy trope. I think that if it was just about women fighting, it would not still be on the air 18 years later and there wouldnât be ten shows going. There has to be humanity and there has to be humor, and you have to connect with these women. And so, obviously, there is drama and conflict, but thereâs a whole lot more.â
As the Housewives rolled on, becoming an even bigger cultural and economic force, so did Andy Cohen. He started his own book imprint and his own radio channel with SiriusXM and, in 2017, replaced Kathy Griffin as Cooperâs CNN New Yearâs Eve co-host. âEvery day when I turn on my phone, I see content that Andy Cohen is responsible for,â says Cooper. âMuch more so than any late-night host. He makes it look easy. But he is paddling really, really fast under the water.â Said like the true son of a swan.
âFor the record, I would like to point out that I have wound up being the straight man of the two of us,â Cohen says. âMaybe except for the year that I went off on de Blasio. But itâs usually him in a puddle of giggles and Iâm hitting the commercial breaks and Iâm moving it along. I mean, thatâs what winds up happening because heâs a lightweight.â
Hi, Andy Cohen,â says Cohenâs 5-year-old son, Ben, scooting into the park near his apartment in the West Village. âHeâs totally taking the piss out of me,â Cohen says. âBecause he thinks itâs so funny that people come up to me all the time and are like, âAndy Cohen, Andy Cohen.ââ
Cooper likes to say Cohen has more fun being famous than anyone, and Cohen agrees. âI lived in New York for 15 years without being able to get reservations at restaurants,â he says. âSo yeah, of course Iâm going to enjoy it.â
Cohen had a lot of famous friends by the time he became famous. âSo I had a sense of how to behave,â he says. âAnd then I had a lot of people who were normal people who were becoming famous, Housewives who were turning into beasts as a result. So Iâm ultimately very appreciative of the whole thing. And you have to keep that perspective. You canât go all in on it. Because it can all go away tomorrow.â
After he published his third memoir, Superficial, in 2016, Cohen found himself at a crossroads: âWhen you see what you did every day for two and a half years, as fabulous as it was, it does make you look at your life: Okay, well, is this what itâs going to be? I had just turned 49, and I was like, This is like the last exit to having kids. I was financially to the point where I knew that I could do it and have the help that I needed if I did it alone. And I also felt like, You know what? If I never go to the Vanity Fair Oscar party again, Iâm going to be okay.â
Two years later, in December 2018, he summoned five of the most important women in his life â Housewives Teresa Giudice from New Jersey, Kyle Richards from Beverly Hills, NeNe Leakes from Atlanta, Ramona Singer from New York, and Vicki Gunvalson, âthe OG of the OCâ â to Watch What Happens Live to announce he was going to become a father via surrogate.
The following month, they threw him a Star Is Bornâthemed baby shower in Beverly Hills. It was the first time so many different Housewives had been in the same room, and the event was instantly hailed as historically significant. âIt was like the Avengers finale,â Cohen later said.
And it was a finale, in a way.
The year was 2019. The world was a different place from when Cohen and the Housewives started out. A reality star had been elected president. The country was divided. The world felt increasingly unstable, and so did the world of The Real Housewives.
âThe show went from silly humor about middle-aged women getting drunk and being delusional about their status and having funny, petty arguments, to Housewives investigating and doing opposition research and making up false story lines and leaking stories on each other and trying to get one another other fired,â says one former New York Housewife. After she was fired, she came across a widely circulated online video of Cohenâs baby shower in which Lisa Rinna encourages the Housewives to get up on the tables and dance. âDance for Andy and his baby,â she instructs. âDance like your fucking lives depend on it.â
âI just thought it was such a cringe moment,â says the former Housewife. âBecause thatâs the dynamic. Everyone just dances for Andy Cohen.â
It is a testament to Cohenâs great interpersonal skills that he was able, for many years, to preside over a large number of exceptionally volatile personalities before they began to turn on him. By the end of the decade, the divide between them was clear. Cohen was beloved and rich, so in control of his narrative that even his own mother couldnât tell you something he hadnât already said himself.
The Housewives, meanwhile, were essentially gig workers who had forfeited control of their images in service to jobs that offered them high status but didnât even provide them with health insurance. So far, the $100 million payout hadnât materialized for anyone but Frankel.
Evelyn Cohen didnât really watch the Housewives, but even she could see where this was going. âPeople were just becoming themselves on steroids,â said. âYou play with fire, you get burned with these people.â
âHW this year is literally a microcosm of what the country is going thru,â Leah McSweeney texted Cohen on December 30, 2020, presumably in reference to now-infamous social issues that arose during the filming of season 13 of The Real Housewives of New York, the details of which would eventually become part of the mudslide mess that slowly fell into Cohenâs lap over the next few years.
It was, of course, the pent-up resentment of the pandemic that set the ball rolling: Leakes, the breakout star of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, frustrated with her contract negotiations with the network and her co-stars, slammed her laptop shut during a virtual reunion in the spring of 2020. Leakes had quit before, but this time, things spiraled into a public feud and eventually a lawsuit that had her accusing Cohen, Bravo, and NBCU of racism and sabotaging her career. âOle racist,â she tweeted. âNo one knew you until YOU knew me. Iâm ICON.â
Leakes eventually withdrew her lawsuit for reasons unknown (she declined, through her lawyer, to comment), but she resurfaced her claims during the so-called Reality Reckoning last year, appearing on Frankelâs podcast. âI thought we had a good relationship,â Leakes told Frankel of Cohen, but âI donât think he ever liked me.â
According to Cohen, he was taken by surprise when Frankel, apparently inspired by the Hollywood writersâ strike and out of the goodness of her heart, took to TikTok this past July to urge her fellow â well, poorer â reality stars to form a union and to direct their complaints about exploitation to her lawyers, Bryan Freedman and Mark Geragos, who were sharpening knives that might as well have had Cohenâs face on them.
âPlease be advised that the day of reckoning has arrived,â read the startlingly verbose letter Freedman sent to Bravoâs parent company. âThe sordid and dark underbelly of NBCâs widely consumed reality TV universe has remained under wraps for far too long.â
Out of all of the Housewives, Cohen had been especially close with Frankel. They talked all the time, and since they both lived in New York and had houses near each other in the Hamptons, they met up occasionally. In their last text exchange, they had talked about taking a beach walk together.
This âsustained attack,â as Cohen referred to it, went on for months. Vanity Fair published a huge story about it, which included, among other things, details about Real Housewife of New York Ramona Singerâs tone-deaf behavior with new Black cast member Eboni K. Williams and other Black employees at the network, which were so damning it wasnât even okay to joke about how hilariously bad at texting Singer was.
Then the lawsuits started coming. Marco Vega, a butler at Dorinda Medleyâs Bluestone Manor in Massachusetts, sued Bravo and NBCU claiming he had been sexually assaulted by Brandi Glanville, a former Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, during the filming of Ultimate Girls Trip: Return to Bluestone Manor in 2021. This prompted Glanville to go on a Twitter rampage in which she blamed producers for encouraging her to get drunk and rip off the butlerâs shirt. Caroline Manzo, a Real Housewife of New Jersey, then filed a lawsuit against Bravo and NBCU saying she had been sexually assaulted during a different Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, in Morocco, by Glanville, who obviously should never have been there because look what she did to the butler.
Then Glanville â who called the accusations of sexual assault âabsurdâ â felt like the network was hanging her out to dry and accused Cohen of sexual harassment for sending an inappropriate video that was obviously a joke, but he still had to apologize.
Then McSweeney â who had famously gotten drunk and nearly naked and thrown a lit tiki torch across Singerâs lawn in season 12 of Real Housewives of New York, then returned for the following season sober and Jewish â filed a 109-page lawsuit that accused Bravo, NBCU, and the production companies of a wide range of offenses, including, but not limited to, failing to accommodate her recent conversion to Judaism by serving her pork and retaliating against her when she refused to drink alcohol, singling out Cohen in particular for âengaging in cocaine use with Housewivesâ and other âBravolebritiesâ whom she alleged he gave more favorable treatment.
Cohen might have been a fan of soap operas, but he didnât like being cast in this one. He has never done cocaine with cast members, he says. âIf you read my books, I tell you every drug I do.â
âIt didnât feel great,â says Dierdre Connolly, the longtime executive producer of Watch What Happens Live, the office of which, incidentally, does not look like a coke den unless your jam is doing coke off laminated Uline cubicle desks with fabric walls. âIt feels like so disconnected to what our day-to-day is. I look around and I see real friendships, and people laugh every day. Itâs chill and then all of a sudden itâs kind of like, Wait, what are people saying? This is not our workplace. Thatâs not true. And itâs like something insidious can seep in even when you really try your best not to let it.â
Cohen kept doing his shows in the months that followed, but an almost visible Charlie Brown scribble of sadness hovered around his cartoon edges. âAndy Cohen has gone from a curious gossip with a twinkle in his eye to an exhausted peacekeeper with a show to run,â said one X user.
âThere was a lot of noise,â he recalls. âAnd I was definitely sad about it. But Iâm telling you â and it sounds like bullshit â but when I walked into BravoCon, it was like, Dude, get off Twitter. Thatâs a bunch of clickbait. This is sanity.â
Sane is not a word one might normally use to describe BravoCon, an event where, last year, 27,000 fans â otherwise known as Bravoholics â in hot-pink BRAVO-LOVINâ BITCHES T-shirts descended on Las Vegas to drink frosĂ© at panels like âThe Summer House Always Wins: Presented by State Farmâ and attend âPat the Pussâ dance classes.
Bravo fans had been watching the Reckoning unfold, and they had a different take on the lawsuits from the ones they had seen in the media. âI think the problem is that thereâs so many coming at the same time that people, especially people that are new to these, are taking it as a whole attack against Bravo,â says Angela Angotti, an Austin-based lawyer and a co-host of The Bravo Docket, a podcast that breaks down Bravo-related legal disputes. âBut when you really look at them individually, what are the arguments here? Who are the players? What is the context? What do we know? The fans of the show have all the context. Weâve watched all the seasons.â While some of the allegations were disturbing, like Manzoâs description of her interaction with Glanville, Agnotti says, âThere are others where, especially as a die-hard fan, you look at it and you go, This doesnât align with what we know from watching the show or other narratives that youâve put out there.â
Like that of McSweeney, who talked about her drinking history in great detail on the show. âLeah McSweeneyâs complaint had a lot of stuff thrown in there that really wasnât relevant to the actual claims she was making,â adds Bravo Docket co-host Cesie Alvarez. âMy opinion on that was that itâs attention seeking. They knew the press would jump onto that. McSweeney says that Andy Cohen did cocaine with other celebrities but not her. I mean âŠâ
âHe wonât do that because itâs expensive,â points out Ben Mandelker, one of the hosts of a different very funny Bravo-focused podcast, Watch What Crappens. âNo one is like, Oh, cocaine is free.â
âSomeone offering their coke sounds like a nice person to me,â adds his co-host, Ronnie Karam, âI think the man should get a fucking statue in Times Square ⊠Weâre vilifying him? Iâve never been this much of a fan.â
Bravo fans seemed to have fairly quickly reached a consensus on the real impetus for the Reality Reckoning, which comes up almost immediately during the Q&A portion of Cohenâs talk at the 92nd Street Y, where a woman in a button-down shirt stands up and says, to uproarious applause, âFuck Bethenny Frankel!â
According to the Bravoholics, who have examined the evidence with the feverish attention of Heather Gay, it all goes back to a December 2022 episode of Watch What Happens Live. Cohen had invited Frankel onto the show to âhash out,â as he puts it, a public feud theyâd been having in the tabloids over a new, Housewives-specific podcast Frankel had started called ReWives.
Cohen said he thought it was hypocritical that Frankel, who had âbeen trashing the Housewives publicly for the last three years,â was suddenly embracing the franchise.
Frankel seemed offended. âI actually havenât been âtrashingâ the show,â she said. âIâve said it wasnât for me. Because I do think it was toxic ⊠How could I be on for more than a decade and not have reflections to share? Iâm not trashing people on the show.â
âWell you called it boring, toxic, women against other women.â
âI didnât call it boring,â Frankel said. âI called it toxic, which I think it has â â
âYou called RHONY Legacy boring ⊠on your TikTok,â Cohen said, turning to the programâs other guest, Jeff Lewis (the guy with the lips). âJeff, are you enjoying this?â
âI actually am uncomfortable,â Lewis said.
By the end of the show, it appeared to a civilian that they had smoothed things out, but hard-core Bravoholics knew better. The knew Bethenny. Theyâd been watching her. For years. âThis is a woman who we have never, in 14 years, seen her maintain a friendship with anyone. She cannot be close to anyone,â reported the host of a popular fan podcast who asked not to be named because she is afraid of Frankel. Itâs a popular sentiment. âShe cannot be close to anyone. She has done incredible work with charity, but when it comes to interpersonal relationships, we have not seen her hold one friend. This is the next turn of the screw for her. Sheâs turning on the person who has championed her. Who loved her.â
âShe felt like, Oh, they insulted me,â the anonymous host went on. âSo now she is creating this role for herself as a vigilante.â
âOnce you see it, you canât stop seeing it,â said Karam, of Watch What Crappens, pointing to Frankelâs suspiciously self-serving decision to bring Rachel Leviss â the other woman at the center of Scandoval, who is now using Freedman and Geragos to sue her ex and his ex-girlfriend â into her podcast network. âHer fingerprints are on everything!â
Frankel did not respond to a request for comment through her publicist, whose response, âThis story is so old lol,â suggests she may have moved on. Frankel last week was crusading against Chanel, which she claimed had treated her differently when she went to the store in regular clothes than the staff did when she went back in a Chanel suit.
âWe all know what happened here,â says Casey Wilson, co-host of the podcast Bitch Sesh. âWe know these women. They are our friends. They are our insane aunts. We have watched them for hundreds of hours on TV and on social media. In this world, everyone is who they are, all the time.â
Including Andy Cohen. âThis is my happy place in this universe,â he says, meaning Bravoland, which isnât really a place at all but maybe more a state of mind. He was on his way to an event in D.C., where a member of Congress was interviewing him about his most recent book. (âYou have no idea what kind of refuge you provided us through January 6th,â a member of the Foreign Relations Committee said on his way out.)
âItâs a glorious world. Itâs fun. I love Bravoland. If you want to go to a different world, great. Go to a different carnival, but weâre having a lot of fun in here.â
He isnât going anywhere. âIâll keep doing the Bravo stuff for as long as Bravo will have me. Listen, age is just a number, man.â
I try to make a joke about how he probably shouldnât quote R. Kelly, just in case.
For a second, he looks nervous. âIs that an R. Kelly quote?â he says. âI didnât know that. I didnât know that was an R. Kelly quote â wait, heâs not the only one who â I mean, as long as Iâm having fun, itâll be great.â