God is aware of, it wasn’t her solely downside.
However as Brandi Glanville stood amid the wreckage of her life for a 3rd time, she lastly acknowledged at the least one of her issues.
It was a friendship. Or, higher put, what she had considered for practically a decade as a friendship.
“I realized I was involved in a very abusive, manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen,” she tells The Put up.
At one time, Glanville had been one of many standout stars of Cohen’s “Real Housewives” actuality franchise on Bravo, on the cusp of constructing $500,000 for a season with adoring viewers hooked on her trademark “truth bombs.”
At present, she’s a few months from not with the ability to pay hire, blighted by a perplexing, disfiguring sickness, all however unemployable, determined and panicking.
The trail to her break led additionally to her epiphany about Cohen.
Their unusual bond dissolved in an excellent stranger confluence: they have been each accused of sexual misconduct at virtually precisely the identical time.
They each denied wrongdoing.
However Bravo quickly introduced that an investigation had discovered the claims towards Cohen to be unsubstantiated, and that he would proceed to work there.
In the meantime, Glanville hasn’t labored since, for Bravo or anybody else.
Their completely different fates, Glanville says, revealed all the pieces she wanted to know to lastly perceive the reality about their relationship.
Sitting in a make-up chair about two years earlier, she felt a flush of pleasure.
Glanville, a former star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” was in a studio in Manhattan in June of 2022. She’d simply received a video message from Cohen, a former senior govt at Bravo who, by then, was the manager producer of Bravo’s whole “Real Housewives” franchise and the host of the community’s late night time present “Watch What Happens Live,” amongst different exhibits.
Within the video, Cohen was goofing round with a mutual good friend, Kate Chastain of Bravo’s “Below Deck,” at a piece occasion within the South of France, just a few time zones forward. They have been clearly hammered.
Referring to Chastain, he mentioned, “We’re f**king tonight, and we’re going to talk about you the whole time.” He added, “If you’re around in like 90 minutes, two hours, do you want to watch us on FaceTime?”
Glanville confirmed her fellow “Housewives” forged member Tamra Decide, who was preparing subsequent to her. (They have been doing promotion for spin-off “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.”)
Glanville remembers Decide — one of many first “Housewives” ever employed, again in 2008 — as saying: “Wow. He really likes you. He doesn’t send videos like that to me!”
(Decide informed the Put up she doesn’t keep in mind Glanville exhibiting her the video. “I do remember her mentioning it,” she mentioned, “We both thought it was funny.” Decide is one among many, many “Housewives” forged members who adore Cohen. “I’ve had a close friendship with him for 17 years, and he’s been nothing but kind to me,” she mentioned.)
“I felt special,” Glanville says. As an govt producer, he was each ladies’s boss (or, at the least, one among their bosses — there’s a complete constellation of Bravo executives and producers-for-hire who run the sprawling franchise), however, she thought, the video confirmed that he was additionally her good friend. Her actual good friend.
Seven months later she accused him of sexual harassment.
In February 2024 her attorneys — Bryan Freedman and Mark Geragos, Hollywood legal professionals who took the case up as a central plank of their “Reality Reckoning,” a marketing campaign that, they mentioned, would expose all method of malfeasance within the actuality TV enterprise at massive — despatched a letter to Bravo calling the video “an extraordinary abuse of power.”
They demanded that NBCUniversal hearth him on the spot as, they mentioned, it could hearth “any other supervisor who engaged in this behavior.” They mentioned Bravo and Cohen ought to put together to be served with a lawsuit.
New York Journal wrote that “it looked like the beginnings of a familiar story: the unraveling of a powerful man.”
Cohen responded by tweeting: “The video …was absolutely meant in jest, and Brandi’s response clearly communicated she was in on the joke. That said, it was totally inappropriate and I apologize.”
The identical month, Leah McSweeney, who had appeared on “The Real Housewives of New York City” and a distinct season of “RHUGT,” additionally filed go well with towards Cohen and different producers.
Within the go well with, McSweeney — a recovering alcoholic — accused them of pushing her to desert her sobriety, believing she would make higher TV if she have been drunk. She additionally claimed within the go well with that she was “forced to work in a sexually hostile work environment” during which “Cohen repeatedly commented on [her] breast augmentation surgery,” amongst different issues.
However Bravo introduced that an outdoor investigation had discovered the allegations towards Cohen to be unsubstantiated. (Legal professionals for Bravo and Cohen have filed a movement to dismiss McSweeney’s go well with and his legal professional has referred to as the allegations “categorically false.”)
And… that was it. Everybody went again to enterprise.
Then, at virtually precisely the identical time, Glanville’s “RHUGT” co-star, Caroline Manzo additionally sued, claiming that Glanville had sexually harassed her. She claimed that whereas filming a boozy occasion scene, Glanville went manner, manner over the road, kissing her and aggressively touching her physique when she didn’t need her to. (The defendants in that go well with have filed a movement to dismiss it, and Glanville has strenuously and repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Bravo informed the publish it wouldn’t touch upon ongoing litigation).
After a abstract investigation, Glanville was instantly pulled off the Bravo airwaves.
Glanville grew up in “the ghetto of South Sacremento” in California and signed with Elite Fashions at 16. She wrote in her 2013 e-book “Drinking and Tweeting” that she retired in 2001 to turn into a “trophy wife to a little-known but relatively successful, made-for-TV-movie actor,” Eddie Cibrian.
The couple had a six-bedroom house in a salubrious suburb of Los Angeles, and two sons. However in 2009 their marriage collapsed in a tabloid scandal when Us Weekly revealed a video of Cibrian kissing nation star Leann Rimes.
In response to “Drinking and Tweeting” the divorce price Glanville over $250,000 and left her with no financial savings, no credit score, no expertise and a not-terribly-generous alimony settlement, that was, in any case, because of expire just a few years later.
“I was desperate to maintain some semblance of my former lifestyle — not for me, but for my children,” she wrote.
In 2010, she discovered a method to do it: the producers of the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” gave her a name.
At present, 14 years later, Glanville is a small-business proprietor.
It turned out that she is overflowing with a number of the qualities that make good actuality TV.
She’s extraordinarily impulsive, for one factor — susceptible to make the sort of choices that others may contemplate catastrophically ill-judged; it’s virtually as if she’s lacking the chip that registers awkwardness; she might be virtually scarily, virtually naively trustworthy.
She’s discovered easy methods to make belongings of those, easy methods to deploy and market them, and he or she has turned that right into a modest residing.
“I call alcohol my reality juice.”
Glanville
Glanville says that her actual business worth within the actuality market is that this: she’s a utility participant. She’s not the sort of “Housewife” who’s there to lend an air of wealth and glamour to the present — forged members like her and McSweeney (i.e. those who “need the paychecks”) do the grunt work, she says. They’re those who producers can depend on (and generally direct) to drive the motion.
In some methods, this line of labor comes at a price. She’s no person’s concept of shy. However she is delicate; insecure, even. Alcohol helps. “I call it my reality juice,” she says, “It gives me courage to act like a fool on TV.”
That’s difficult, although, as a result of Glanville has had an uneasy relationship with consuming at occasions. In her e-book she mentioned she scared herself with how a lot she drank throughout her divorce — particularly when she discovered she needed to drink to have intercourse with new companions.
“That makes me sound like an alcoholic,” she wrote, “Maybe I was, but it wasn’t the booze I was addicted to; it was the need to escape my problems.” (She says she’s “fine” now.)
That hang-up about intercourse could also be a shock. “The public perception of me is being wasted with no bra on,” says Glanville. “My nipples had their own Twitter account.”
With “Housewives,” got here Cohen.
Nevertheless it wasn’t till two years after Glanville joined “RHOBH” that they grew to become mates.
Earlier than that she’d trade businesslike emails with him on his NBCUniversal electronic mail tackle.
Having a texting relationship with Cohen is a serious standing image among the many “Housewives” — it conferred intimacy, and maybe affect.
“A lot of the ladies would say, ‘I texted Andy blah blah blah.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, Andy just emails me — I’m not cool enough to get a text.’”
On Might 2 2013, he despatched her an electronic mail with the topic: “What’s your cell?” (She despatched it, including, “Am I in trouble again?”)
So when he started texting, she says, “I wanted to keep that relationship alive.”
“It was [from my side], ‘I need a job’ or ‘What do you think about this season?,” she mentioned, including that he usually requested about her love life.
She says that was primarily the course of their relationship for the following decade: he’d allegedly ask about her romances, she’d trouble him about work. “It was never like, ‘Hi, how are you?’”
Can a friendship be as significant as a fling?
Can a friendship gone dangerous be as painful as some breakups?
Can a good friend have actual energy over a good friend?
Glanville’s story raises these questions. As a result of if the reply to some or all of them is, pretty clearly, “yes,” it raises one more: Since we’ve interrogated the intercourse/energy dynamic so rigorously over the previous few years, isn’t it additionally price contemplating the friendship/energy dynamic a bit of?
If friendship might be simply as highly effective as intercourse, can’t it even be abused? And when it’s combined with cash and energy, can’t it – identical to intercourse – be devastating?
There may be, maybe, no person who ought to perceive the facility of friendship higher than Andy Cohen. In 2011, the New York Occasions wrote that “for years, an unusually star-studded social life has been for Mr. Cohen a perk of his work in television… Since he has become a popular talk show host on Bravo his social life has been a perk for his work.” Cohen cajoled his A-list mates into happening “WWHL” — the sort of stars who would often solely go on a lot grander exhibits. It was “low-budget bliss for Bravo.”
And thus did Cohen’s friendships and Bravo’s backside line turn into entwined.
In the meantime, he’s lengthy seen the leisure in friendships. He wrote in his first e-book, “Most Talkative” that his feminine mates in adolescence “were training wheels.” “‘Lil’ Housewives – lots of entertainment and… turmoil packed into training bras and junior high botherations,” he wrote. “I… stirred up plenty of sh*t between them, constantly putting my foot in it, telling one something that the other said about her, getting involved where I shouldn’t.”
Glanville hardly ever noticed Cohen in individual. The few occasions she did, it was backstage earlier than she appeared on “WWHL.”
“He would always ask me about who am I f–king,” she mentioned. “It was very odd, but that was what we talked about. And of course, kissing the ring, I talked about it.”
Glanville says she made $14,000 in her first season on “RHOBH.” By her fifth, she was making $350,000 and he or she anticipated $500,000 for her sixth.
“I was going to buy a house,” she says, “I was just excited to do something like that without Eddie. And then I got fired.”
Followers of the present may say that Glanville was lower in 2015 as a result of viewers had fallen out of affection. She’d turn into the star of the present, however, in accordance with a consensus, it went to her head and set her on a bell-curve trajectory — rapidly reaching a “Housewives” Corridor-of-Fame peak within the firm of Luann de Lesseps, Lisa Rinna et al, however simply as rapidly returning to the “Friend of the Housewives” shadowlands. Glanville would say that she was fired as a result of she “went on Twitter and told [Cohen] to f**k off” after which
“wrote all the heads of Bravo that they were ruining my life… and, again, they could f**k off.”
She went on a tour of the truth bush leagues. “I just did every reality show that asked me,” she mentioned. However “Real Housewives” was all the time the prize she had her eyes on.
Cohen would pop up in her texts from time to time with the supply of a visitor spot or extra on “RHOBH,” she says. She’d do it, then really feel exploited as a result of she’d receives a commission $5,000 for an look, then they’d appear to string the footage throughout a number of episodes, wringing the worth from the pittance they’d paid her and even crafting main season storylines from her fleeting shoots. She says it made her really feel “discounted.” (In additional methods than one).
“I couldn’t say no because I needed the money,” she says. “After I got fired from ‘Housewives,’ I got sued by Joanna Krupa.”
When Glanville joined “RHOBH,” she was bought to viewers as having “no filter.” It grew to become her factor. In 2013, Glanville was on “WWHL,” and doing that factor. She mentioned {that a} lover of “Real Housewives of Miami” star Joanna Krupa had informed her that Krupa’s genitals smelled dangerous. If Cohen thought she’d crossed a line or unfairly injured Krupa, or that she ought to take a breath and apologize, you couldn’t inform from his apparent glee. It was nice TV.
Krupa sued Glanville for defamation in 2015.
Glanville’s life was ruined for a second time. Nevertheless it didn’t should be that manner.
A supply acquainted with that case says, “Her comments… [were] made on Andy’s show [and] were part and parcel of her role as a Bravo star. As such, [it would have been fair to expect] Bravo… to indemnify her.” (In different phrases, assured she wouldn’t personally should cough up cash, though, it appears, it wasn’t legally obliged to take action).
However the community by no means truly needed to decline to indemnify Glanville — ultimately, it was she who protected the community.
“I went to Bravo, and I said, ‘Hey, listen… [my lawyer and I are] wondering if Bravo would help with this lawsuit, you know, financially, and they were like, ‘No, stay away from that if you want to continue to work for Bravo.’”
“I spent $500,000 on that,” Glanville says. “So I’m starting again from zero dollars. And I [had] been able to work myself back up to have a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank,” she says. “Not right now,” Glanville provides, “because I haven’t worked in a year and a half.”
On January 29, 2023, Glanville’s life was collapsing for the third time.
In 2022, Bravo employed Glanville for the brand new present, “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.”
It was a a lot shorter model of the present – a “vacation” filmed over just a few days, and aired in a handful of episodes on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock. Glanville would get a verify for $200,000.
“It felt like [Cohen] was throwing me a bone because he’d promised to bring me back to the ‘Housewives’,” she mentioned.
The season, filmed in rural Massachusetts, went nice. She was on a excessive, she says, “Getting that money gave me a little relief for the next couple of years,” she says. Plus, “I felt kind of important to him again.”
However Glanville was decided to make use of the foothold to search out her manner again onto the principle present.
So when she received suggestions, she listened — rigorously. And she or he received it from the highest of the highest. On the night time the primary episode aired, she and the opposite forged members received an electronic mail from Susan Rovner, then chair of leisure at NBCUniversal, and Frances Berwick, then the president of its varied life-style networks. “A huge congrats… on a fantastic season… which really ups the ante in every way!,” it mentioned. It was the primary time she’d received a notice like that. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow – we really must have impressed someone.’”
After which she was forged for an additional season of “Girls Trip,” this one to be filmed in Morocco.
She figured, naturally sufficient, it was one thing to do with how happy they’d been with the primary season. “So I wanted to do [on the second] what we did on the first one: get drunk and high and make out.”
“I wanted to leave them with, ‘She did so good’,” she says.
This time, Glanville says there was one thing of a conflicting message. “We hadn’t had HR on any of the Bravo shows [before her second season of ‘RHUGT’]. And on this one, we had HR,” she says, “So they’re sitting there telling us we can’t talk about anyone’s age, we can’t call anyone fat. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry — how are we going to make ‘Housewives’?’”
When the cameras rolled, evidently no person else had a great way to resolve that dilemma both.
“Producers are saying ‘Bring the party,’ to me, specifically — because they knew that I would do something,” she mentioned. Glanville claims that producers informed her of Caroline Manzo, a longtime member of the forged of “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” who was doing her first “RHUGT,” “‘Make sure she participates. We want her to have fun.’ I got her doing shots – she doesn’t drink.”
“I wanted to do on the second what we did on the first: get drunk and high and make out.”
Brandi Glanville
A couple of months earlier, Berwick had despatched out new tips to corporations like Shed, the manufacturing outfit that makes “Girls Trip” for Bravo, saying, “we will require that you deliver an expanded alcohol-related training to the cast, crew and production team, which must include details on how production will monitor alcohol, including when consumption limits may be appropriate and when and how to intervene to maintain cast and crew safety.”
One night after two or three days of unusually intense filming, Glanville and different forged members have been, in accordance with courtroom papers, good and drunk. Many had been smoking weed for a lot of the day. (It’s not clear the place the weed got here from).
“[The producers were] like ‘bring the party,’’” says Glanville, “That’s the reason I gave her a lap dance.”
What Glanville describes as a drunken lap dance learn in another way in very sober courtroom papers Manzo filed a 12 months later.
A “clearly intoxicated” “GLANVILLE [kissed] MANZO with a closed mouth,” learn her
lawsuit, “GLANVILLE then proceeded to mount MANZO on the couch holding MANZO down with her body, forcibly squeezed MANZO’s cheeks together and thrust her tongue in MANZO’s mouth, while humping her.”
In response to the go well with, Manzo, “distraught, scared and confused” went to the toilet. However “GLANVILLE entered the bathroom and came behind MANZO, forced her vagina against MANZO’s buttocks, breasts against MANZO’s back, wrapped her long arms around MANZO forcibly restraining her.”
The go well with claims Glanville “pinned” Manzo towards the locked toilet door. “MANZO [cried], “HELP, HELP, HELP, HELP” however nobody ever got here,” the go well with claims.
(Glanville adamantly denies any tough conduct and maintains that Manzo seemed to be snug together with her advances).
The subsequent day Manzo informed Shed workers that she had been uncomfortable with the way in which Glanville acted the earlier night time.
Manzo filed the go well with towards Bravo, Shed, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros., which owns Shed. However, notably, not towards Glanville — it addressed her virtually like a prop slightly than a human. It alleged these corporations “ply the Real Housewives cast with alcohol, cause them to become severely intoxicated, and then direct, encourage and/or allow them to sexually harass other cast members because that is good for ratings.”
(In September 2023, just a few months earlier than Manzo filed her go well with, Frances Berwick despatched out new tips to its manufacturing corporations like Shed saying, “we will require that you deliver an expanded alcohol-related training to the cast, crew and production team, which must include details on how production will monitor alcohol, including when consumption limits may be appropriate and when and how to intervene to maintain cast and crew safety.”)
It claimed that Bravo and Shed had “overwhelming prior notice of Ms. GLANVILLE’s prior deviant sexual proclivities and sexually harassing conduct” however employed her anyway and “allowed, condoned and even encouraged Ms. GLANVILLE’s sexually aggressive and offensive conduct.”
(The defendants have filed a movement to dismiss the go well with).
In an affidavit, Shed staffer Lisa Shannon, who produced the Morocco present, mentioned that after the incident, Manzo had informed producers that she had been sexually abused as a toddler and that the Glanville incident had triggered recollections of the assault.
“She told us that she did not feel sexually violated, she felt ‘disrespected’ by Glanville,” Shannon mentioned below oath.
Shannon testified that “the next day, Manzo… wished to talk with the opposite forged members, partly, so she may clarify why her exterior response through the occasions didn’t match how she was feeling.
“[Manzo] told us that she did not feel sexually violated, she felt ‘disrespected’ by Glanville”
“RHUGT” govt producer Lisa Shannon about forged member Caroline Manzo
“Manzo explained that her prior sexual trauma dramatically affected her conduct during, and feelings about, the incident,” she mentioned. In the meantime, the opposite forged members “explained that although they were sympathetic to Manzo’s prior trauma, they had perceived the events very differently than Manzo had just characterized.”
One forged member, Gretchen Rossi, who was with Manzo within the toilet the place Manzo mentioned in her go well with that she was “distraught, scared and confused”, mentioned that her reminiscence from the toilet was that “we were all having fun.” One other forged member, Alex McCord, mentioned she remembered “giggling” within the toilet. Shannon claimed that Manzo mentioned throughout that dialog: “I can’t explain my non-reaction” [at the time to Glanville’s actions.]
Simply earlier than 6pm on January 29, just a few days after she received house from Morocco, Cohen texted Glanville. The Manzo story was leaking to the press, and the model of occasions that was forming within the minds of the general public was ugly for Glanville. She was anxious to get a extra optimistic spin going within the press.
“Hang in there,” he wrote, “and don’t lose your mind.”
“OK, thank you,” she wrote again.
“Say nothing now,” he wrote, “There’s no gain in it. This thing is airing so long from now.”
She informed him Dave Quinn, a Folks author who additionally wrote Bravo-approved e-book “Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of The Real Housewives” and has appeared onstage at Bravo large fan occasion, BravoCon, was writing a narrative, as Glanville put it, “from Caroline’s perspective.”
Cohen requested if she’d spoken with high NBCUniversal public relations govt, Jennifer Geisser. “Yes,” wrote Glanville, “She said to send him a… text saying I’m really sorry I’m too stressed out and I can’t talk about this because of legal.”
“EVERYONE tells me I’m stupid for thinking this, but I do love you.”
Brandi Glanville to Andy Cohen
“Good,” Cohen wrote.
“Just stay off social media and clear your head for right now,” Cohen texted her, “Take a breath and let the plates settle for a bit.” He added, “OK I’m a little stoned and that betrayed it.”
“There are so many fake things out there,” she wrote. He replied: “And they will evaporate. It’s not going to work to play it out in the press.”
“OK thank you so much,” wrote Glanville, “I feel so much better.”
On January 30, a narrative appeared with Quinn’s byline. The headline learn: “Brandi Glanville and Caroline Manzo Exited ‘Ultimate Girls Trip’ Early After ‘Unwanted’ Kisses.”
“Well, I’m canceled,” she wrote on February 2.
“You’re not canceled,” wrote Cohen.
She mentioned that Geisser had simply let her know she wasn’t going to be invited to movie the reunion present for “The Traitors,” one other Bravo present she’d labored on. She anxious that the exclusion would make her “look guilty.”
She collapsed into their decade-long friendship. “I can’t sleep I can’t eat I’m overwhelmed with anxiety I don’t understand why I wouldn’t be able to do the the reunion. it’s gonna look so bad for me.”
She added, “I know you’re pushing for me and I appreciate that so much.”
“Sorry to text you,” she mentioned, “But you’re the only person I trust.”
“A. You should speak to the psych we offered you,” he replied, “B. Hold tight because I will get further into the reunion thing tomorrow.”
“I do believe that you and I are ‘actual friends’ & we give 2 f**ks about each other a bit. EVERYONE tells me I’m stupid for thinking this but I do love you I also know your priority is the show and I get it however I’m on level zero mental stability today,” she informed him.
“She has been a puppy for Andy Cohen.”
Mia Hasche on Brandi Glanville
She didn’t do the reunion. “Girls Trip” was the final time she labored.
Glanville says now that she felt as if she have been “the fall guy for their HR crisis.”
“Andy would call me and say, ‘Trust me, [Manzo’s] not going to serve Bravo a lawsuit,” Glanville says, “I’m like, ‘Yes she will.’ He was like, ‘Trust me. I just saw her. We were talking. She’s not going to do anything.’ That’s his mindset – he thinks he’s so powerful that he has the control that Caroline’s not going to file a lawsuit.”
Right here he was once more — placing his foot in it, “telling one something the other had said about her, getting involved where [he] shouldn’t.” Besides now it wasn’t junior excessive botherations at stake, however livelihoods – even perhaps felony prices.
Glanville’s second of pleasure within the make-up chair was fleeting. “I was like, ‘How do I respond [to Cohen’s video]?’ And [Mia] said, ‘Say, “You’re disgusting.’ And I said, ‘What — and never work again?’ You have to play along.”
She says she responded to the video by saying that she’d “get my vibrator” and that she had a “magic p–sy” — presumably a reference to the space-transcending powers that’d be required to participate.
(Because of this Cohen believes, as he mentioned within the assertion, “Brandi’s response clearly communicated she was in on the joke.”)
The third individual within the room was Glanville’s finest good friend and longtime hair stylist, Mia Hasche.
“She thought it was cute,” Hasche tells The Put up. However, she says that, “coming from a place of owning businesses and stuff and going through trainings,” Hasche felt the video was manner, manner over the road for a boss.
Hasche has additionally been with Glanville when she’s frolicked with Cohen in individual. “It’s always him wanting to know who she’s having sex with,” Hasche says, “Just inappropriate things to ask an employee.”
“She has been a puppy for Andy Cohen, in the sense that she wants him to like her so that she gets her next job – he holds the key to her livelihood,” she says, “She’s a single parent.”
“I’m like a trinket to Bravo.”
Brandi Glanville
She calls it an “unfair power dynamic.”
So — we arrive on the video as soon as extra.
“What people need to understand is that it wasn’t a friend sending me the video,” Glanville says now. “If a friend sent me that video, who wasn’t my boss, and didn’t have power over me, I probably would have reacted like, ‘No big deal’.”
She felt, ultimately, it was all about energy.
He felt free to ship the video as a result of, she believes, “[He thinks] I’m never going to get a lawyer and be like, ‘You f**ked me over.’ But I did,” she says.
“Enough is enough,” she mentioned, “The last year and a half has shown me that Andy doesn’t care about me. I’m not special.”
Nevertheless it went manner past Cohen.
“Nobody [from Bravo or Shed] coming and stepping in and having my back,” Glanville says.
Up to now, Glanville has described the producers and crew of “Real Housewives” as being like household.
“That was my wake up call,” she says, “I’m like a trinket for them.”
“He wants me to beg, and I have in the past. I’ve groveled to that man and its disgusting.”
Brandi Glanville on Andy Cohen
In response to Leah McSweeney’s go well with, this wasn’t an opportunity – Glanville, and the opposite forged members, have been speculated to have felt as if Cohen and the producers cared about her.
“Producers individually exchange personal texts and phone calls with [cast members], stay as guests in [their] homes, and take personal vacations with [them],” reads McSweeney’s go well with, “[until] they have developed a ‘friendship.’”
“The goal: to weaponize vulnerabilities, insecurities, dark secrets, and confidences,” it says.
Glanville grew to become unwell. Her face started to swell alarmingly, which her physician has identified as “stress-induced angeodema”. (Angioedema is a swelling of the deepest layers of the pores and skin). One other physician believes it might be attributable to a parasite. She’s nonetheless combating it, and says it makes it troublesome to depart the home as a result of – maybe due to a type of agoraphobia – it flares up if she makes plans to exit in public, additional limiting her employment alternatives.
“I had to get help, on all levels,” she says.
“[I started] talking to a therapist and telling them about the relationship – the non-relationship – that I had with this man, over a decade, was really, really abusive,” she says.
With assist from her therapist, she concluded that “I should completely separate myself from him and all others around.” (It needs to be famous that it was fairly clear by this level that Bravo had no plans to work together with her both, making this choice, maybe, simpler for Glanville).
“And through that I realized I was involved in a very abusive, manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen,” she says.
“He wants me to beg, and I have in the past – ‘I really need a job. You said last year you were going to hire me back.’ I’ve groveled to that f**ing man and its disgusting,” she says.
“[A fellow cast member] and I have talked about this a ton,” she says, “We almost love him, but then he would treat us horribly, and then we would still want validation from him.”
Glanville right this moment is within the throes of a extreme monetary disaster. “I joke with my kids that we have four months left until we’re homeless,” she begins, although right here – for the primary time in our three lengthy interviews, she breaks into tears, clearly panicked – “but that’s sort of true, and it scares me, and it stresses me the f**k out. I’m not ever going to be homeless, because I have friends. But I haven’t had income for two years. I just paid my taxes with my credit card. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
To supply some sort of context for the differing penalties of the sexual harassment allegations towards she and him, Cohen’s West Village house was lately figured to be price $14million.
“We almost love him, but then he would treat us horribly, and then we would still want validation from him.”
Brandi Glanville on the Housewives’ relationship with Andy Cohen
Why did Cohen survive so totally unscathed?
There are various variations within the allegations made towards Cohen and Glanville that may have an effect on how they have been dealt with. For instance, in Cohen’s case, there was no alleged bodily contact, however in Glanville’s case, there was; Cohen is ready of huge duty as an govt producer; no person requested Cohen to ship the video, however Glanville was being overseen, and arguably guided, by a producer; there are a lot of different variables.
Nonetheless, their completely different fates are so stark that the circumstances warrant some comparability. (Anyway, different on-air expertise for Bravo – which is, at the least technically, what Cohen is – have been fired for transgressions that concerned no bodily contact. “Vanderpump Rules” star Stassi Schroeder, plus lesser forged members Kristen Doute, Max Boyens and Brett Caprioni, for instance, have been all fired for racist tweets and different non-violent conduct in 2020.)
“As we’ve said,” a Bravo spokesperson informed The Put up, “an outside investigation was conducted into allegations against Andy Cohen, and the claims were found to be unsubstantiated.” (Bravo declined to offer any additional details about the investigation, and consultant for Cohen didn’t reply to our request to interview him for this story).
Sources acquainted with the investigation say that, in essence, it discovered that the tone of the video was in keeping with the tone of Cohen and Glanville’s textual content exchanges on the whole – the video was about intercourse, however they talked about intercourse.
However this, puzzlingly, seems to disregard what Mia Hasche referred to as their “unfair power dynamic” totally. So what of Glanville’s declare that she and Cohen solely talked about intercourse within the first place as a result of that’s what Cohen wished to speak about, and he or she felt she couldn’t say no if she wished to maintain that relationship going? If Cohen set the tone of their trade, what does it matter that the video was constant? Doesn’t that imply the video was merely extra of — and, certainly, and escalation of — one thing she says she didn’t need within the first place?
The reply might lie on this: there’s an rising (maybe handy, given the trickle of allegations towards him) orthodoxy amongst Bravo executives that Cohen actually isn’t that highly effective. Specifically, they level to the second in 2014 when he stepped down as a Bravo govt to turn into on-air “talent,” because it’s referred to as within the biz, because the host of “WWHL,” amongst different exhibits. In that sense, the argument goes, he and Glanville are actually friends.
Glanville calls the suggestion “ridiculous.”
Whether or not he has an workplace or only a dressing room at NBC Common’s 30 Rock headquarters, Cohen is the one individual listed as an govt producer – probably the most senior determine on the manufacturing workforce – on each episode of the “Real Housewives” ever broadcast. However the pondering goes that he’s simply one among a number of EPs on the “Housewives” exhibits, and he doesn’t have – at the least on paper – unilateral energy to rent or hearth anybody.
The largest purpose that Cohen survived with no scratch is, maybe, that NBC Common had the luxurious of deciding what to do concerning the allegations towards him amid little, if any, public outrage.
He has some actual benefits within the courtroom of public opinion.
First, his personal work has made his accusers horrible witnesses for the prosecution. His “Housewives” exhibits body the forged as unstable, unreasonable and, maybe greater than the rest, susceptible to wildly overreact. So when forged members accuse him, viewers have already got purpose to imagine that they’re in all probability being unstable, unreasonable and choosing a battle over nothing. It’s, in spite of everything, what they do finest.
Second, the person is irresistible. Cohen has mentioned his idol Oprah Winfrey “is someone whom everybody wants as her or his best friend.” He has the identical reward, so any expression of intimacy on his half, it appears, is taken into account fascinating. Anybody would wish to get, as Glanville did, a private video from Andy Cohen! And if it’s filled with his trademark cheek, all of the extra envy-inducing!
“NBC has mistakenly given Andy too much power across their network. NBC has clearly decided that he is too big to fail.”
Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman
Third, he’s homosexual. Cohen has mentioned of his early days on the air, “I was… talking to women about boob sizes and plastic surgery and their love lives. These were topics I probably couldn’t get away talking about if I were straight.” However wasn’t it an axiom of #MeToo that sexual harassment, usually, is about energy not lust: that utilizing intercourse — from catcalling to rape — is a dependable method to make somebody really feel susceptible and powerless? Why, then, does it matter if the accused are sexually interested in their accusers?
Fourth, #MeToo is, maybe, merely over – it was an period, not an awakening.
However fifth — possibly Cohen’s ace within the gap – is that the accusations made towards him are kinda boring. Or, at the least, when in comparison with the “Housewives’” ever-more visceral, endorphin-igniting drama. In Glanville’s case specifically, the heroes and villains are hazy, in the event that they actually exist; it’s unrewarding on a synaptic degree, there’s no screaming, and what crying that there’s isn’t the enjoyable sort of crying — it’s the unhappy sort, and it occurs in non-public. Greater than something, the video he despatched is tame, its penalties refined and inscrutable, its alleged hurt, quiet — at the least when in comparison with the high-schizodrama of the exhibits.
Both manner, there have been few requires his head from “Housewives” followers.
Glanville’s attorneys as a substitute supplied a less complicated interpretation of why Cohen didn’t get canned. “NBC has mistakenly given Andy too much power across their network,” Freedman and Geragos wrote, “NBC has clearly decided that he is too big to fail.”
And what of the “friendship” between Cohen and Glanville?
Glanville says now that he was by no means actually her good friend. But when not her good friend, then what was Cohen all that point? In some methods, the reply could also be apparent: a producer. Was he simply producing her, all the time? Backstage at “WWHL,” when he talked about her intercourse life, was he curious, or having enjoyable? Or was he giving Glanville her script? Was he, as Hasche put it, silently telling her: “‘You’re a slut and I’m going to talk to you like you’re a slut.”
Then once more, if he was simply being a very good producer and Glanville was getting paid to be produced, maybe there’s no hurt in any of this.
However there’s one other method to see it: possibly they have been merely in enterprise collectively, however in enterprise there are belongings and liabilities. A automotive, to a taxi driver, is an asset — a supply of revenue. Nevertheless it’s additionally a legal responsibility — an unwieldy expense when the engine blows up. Glanville’s no-filter, impulse-indulging manner has been an asset for Bravo and Glanville each – however when these issues have turn into a legal responsibility, when the engine has
gone haywire, the results have been on Glanville’s shoulders alone. It’s a bit of like a cab driver wanting a magic cab that pulls out its personal bank card and pays for its personal components and labor invoice when the engine blows. How did Bravo strike such a magic cope with Glanville?
And when Cohen launched conversations about intercourse to this uneasy combination of friendship and cash, was it for enjoyable – as his defenders say, “just a joke”? Is it potential that Glanville’s proper – that it was about energy: to punish her for telling him to “f**k off” that point on a “Housewives” reunion, or that different time on Twitter, or to check her loyalty or present how weak she was subsequent to him?
Ultimately, are they simply buddies who fell out, or are the curveballs — their respective sexuality, the truth that it was in a video not in individual, his allure — merely hiding a fairly commonplace, boring noxious office relationship of precisely the type we have been speculated to have discovered to worry and be careful for?
These questions might merely be too arduous to reply. And even when they have been potential to reply, what, actually, may even be accomplished about it? Ban individuals from being mates with their boss?!
Glanville, definitely, does Cohen and Bravo favor after favor by making herself next-to-impossible to root for. For instance, a few months in the past, she let unfastened that money-making, ruinous impulsive streak, inexplicably tweeting — clearly in reference to Manzo — “Happy Sunday funday! It’s been almost 2 yrs now since a lying, short red haired closeted old lesbian ruined my life. Girl lean into the [rainbow]. it’s a beautiful space. When you come out ur family will be able to finally speak their own obvious
truths.”
In October 2024, Glanville’s legal professionals, Geragos and Freedman, withdrew from her case. It had been a high-profile matter that generated numerous headlines — and would little question have generated many extra if Cohen had been fired, and so they’d have been heralded because the attorneys who’d slain the truth large — and so they had been representing her professional bono.
A supply acquainted with the case informed the Put up that the Manzo go well with “complicated” Glanville’s personal criticism towards the community. They’ve declined to serve Cohen with the summons that they had so menacingly promised. She at the moment doesn’t have a lawyer. She’s in search of new authorized illustration.
A decide in McSweeney’s case heard oral arguments late final 12 months. The courtroom will rule quickly on whether or not it should proceed to trial.
NBC Common plans to not air Glanville and Manzo’s season of “RHUGT.”
Since McSweeney and Glanville made their claims, Bravo has renewed Cohen’s “WWHL” via the top of 2025. CNN additionally employed him to host its 2025 New Yr’s Eve present. (CNN didn’t reply to our request for remark).
