“I hate getting these,” he said.

“Right,” I replied, assuming he meant he hated the idea of missing children.

“I mean, what am I going to do with this?” he went on, unconcerned. “I’m not Batman.”

Chris continued on with whatever he was in the middle of doing, unaware that he had gagged me utterly. Never before had I encountered someone so brazenly admit that they no interest in acting like they were going to intervene in a potential crime. I was an early acolyte of true crime culture, having listened to My Favorite Murder (I know, I know) in its first season, and consumed a steady stream of documentaries since they became popularized in the 2010’s. Even that summer I recall me and my best friend Paul working a shift late into the night at the box office, rehearsal still running strong on the stage just above us, while the Netflix documentary The Keepers scared the absolute shit out of us from my laptop screen. It was the very beginning of people familiarizing themselves with the nature of crime, the nature of so-called evil, and already we were creating quippy slogans about how one should act if they end up in a potentially dangerous situation. I could not imagine earnestly looking in the face of a woman with a “stay sexy, don’t get murdered” enamel pin and telling them: I’m not Batman, I’m staying out of this. It tickled me to no end.

Obviously, this isn’t the best frame of mind to have when looking down the barrel of a potential crime. If you see something, hear something, uncover something that indicates a person is in immediate risk of being harmed you should be more like a Batman than otherwise, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Of course, in order to be in the way of preventing harm you need to have close connections with people and exist in the world at large, which I understand a lot of people are finding very difficult these days. Hard to intervene to protect anyone when you’re afraid to go to bars. I think this is why we have a huge demographic of people where their intervention in crime and protecting vulnerable people does not actually translate to materially assisting anyone and instead focuses singularly on being online. An oft touted thing by people who have given Batman significant thought (lol) is that he is not just a vigilante beating the shit out of mentally unstable people by night, but that his primary skill is as a detective. Back when I wrote hundreds of pages of Batman fanfiction (don’t ask) with my friend in Middle School we would growl the sentiment in a Nolan!Batman send-up: “the wooorlds greaaatest detectiiive.”

People have really tried to take up this mantle in recent years, especially in online communities such as Reddit, X, and Threads, where a huge swath of the commenters are women who consume true crime content. I defend the right to engage in whatever activity you want online so far as it doesn’t harm anyone, but in the last ten years there’s been a distinct lean by a lot of people into acting like watching a true crime documentary and having thoughts on it makes them informed. These are the same breed of people that acted like calling the president a Cheeto put them on parr with Martin Luther King Jr. - it is not necessarily an elevated group. But this is the world we live in now, and people are seemingly more comfortable on the internet than anywhere else and that isn’t going away anytime soon. I blame COVID, but I also put a lot of blame on the true crime crime brain rot that has since eroded a huge part of our collective frontal lobe.

I can’t even really locate the first time I was made aware that there were people on the internet that were convinced that by commenting on Reddit threads they were solving crimes, but I definitely know the first time I knew it was becoming a problem was the documentary Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer. Don’t F**k With Cats tells the story of crimes committed by Luka Magnotta, who indeed would post videos of himself torturing cats and ultimately posted videos of himself murdering a man named Jun Lin in 2012. I had myriad problems with this documentary, not the least of which was the fact that people were more upset about the cat murders than they were about the human man that was murdered - there’s a particularly cringey scene in which one of our narrators tearfully watches one of the cat videos and laments how cruel and evil it all is, and then the human murder is barely discussed by anyone except the cops they interview. I say this as a cat lover: it was bizarre. In any case, one of the primary narrators in the documentary is a woman named Deanna who was galvanized into helping crack the case after she encountered the cat videos and subsequently began tracking down who was behind them by analyzing every object that was captured in the videos themselves. To be clear, Luka Magnotta was a monster and deserved to be captured and imprisoned, and it’s basically just happenstance that Deanna and her crew of sleuths zeroed in on a man who was also en route to committing a murder of people and not just animals. How many people every day just hyper-fixate on a person who is doing something they don’t like on the internet? Imagine watching out for this person every day and actually capturing them commit a murder. It’s crazy.

Unfortunately, it’s also rare. Don’t F**ck With Cats captured a lot of interest as the rare exception to a world in which most crimes cannot be solved by watching YouTube videos, and people really seized on this idea. You too can solve crimes from the comfort of your home, by doing nothing more than scrolling, or chatting, or combing through “research” (whatever that means in each individual instance). It seems most people didn’t watch to the end of the documentary, which featured an Insanely heavy-handed bit where Deanna looks directly into the camera and chastises the viewer themselves for creating a culture of consumption around criminality, that in fact we had created Luka Magnotta by watching his videos and giving him the attention he so desperately craved. I didn’t love this ending (I find it a little self-righteous to produce this whole documentary lionizing internet detectives and then try to tell me I did something wrong by watching the movie they handed me), but I took their point. People should be wary of engaging with content like this and casting themselves as the Deanna, because ultimately these things can really, really hurt people. There’s an extended segment of the film where the crew believes they’ve located the perpetrator of the cat crimes and they begin to harass him and out him to people in his life as a depraved cat torturer who deserves to be sent to jail, but in fact this man was innocent. This is the danger of trying to be the world greatest detective with nothing but the internet as your guide: you are only receiving a quarter of the information you need, and as such you will only discover a quarter of the truth. They thought because the superficial details of this innocent man’s life and Luka Magnotta’s life were similar they had cracked the case, but they had not. This is more common of internet detectives than most people would like to believe. It’s way less fun to pretend detective when you bear in mind the things you’re saying could have real life consequences for others.

When I learned of the death of Sam Neill in the middle of the night last month I compulsively started watching clips from A Cry In The Dark, my personal favorite of his filmography. Is it that good? No, but the story is addicting now the way it was when the story of Lindy Chamberlain was first being reported. If you aren’t familiar, you may recognize Lindy as the woman who famously reported that a dingo had taken her baby while the family was on a camping trip in the Australian wilderness. Many years would pass before it was decreed that she was actually telling the truth - her daughter’s bloody clothes in the center of a dingo lair is pretty hard to argue with. And yet, the film serves as a stark reminder of just how quickly and how cruelly the public turned on the Chamberlain family, deriding them as not seeming sad enough, that their religious beliefs led them to sacrifice their daughter, that Lindy herself was a cold-blooded murderer. Lindy Chamberlain spent four years in prison on the basis of what amounted to junk science and wild speculation, and yet today people still see no problem with allowing their imaginations to run wild with conspiracy theories on the internet. It’s like the Satanic Panic but worse - at least in the Satanic Panic we could all mostly agree the people doing the majority of the crowing about the devil were religious nuts trying to make the country conform to their own narrow worldview. Today the people who opine their conspiracy theories look like you and me. They post one day about The Valley, the next day about endorsing a centrist democrat in the primaries, and the next are espousing theories about how Amy Bradley is being kept alive as a 52-year-old sex trafficking victim in the Caribbean.

The lesson was not learned from Don’t F**ck With Cats, and it has continued to this day. This past weekend I watched the newest documentary on the Moscow Murders, and was reminded of just how rabid the internet became to solve the case, where four innocent college students were savagely murdered. Once again, they were trying to solve this intense, and surely elaborate, crime with just information that was made publicly available at the time, which was not a lot. Indeed, it would be like trying to re-wire the Empire State Building with nothing but a soldering iron and a box-cutter. As such, a lot of people began peddling ever more intricate theories about how the two surviving roommates of the massacre had actually helped orchestrate the crime because why else would two drunk, scared out of their minds, twenty-something girls not call the police immediately? They began to speculate about a man who had waited in line for food behind two of the victims before they went home from the bar that night, they accused an ex-boyfriend, a frat brother with a drunk driving record, and so on and so on.

I refer to this internally as the Amanda Knox Effect, where people are confronted with a situation so scary and upsetting that they begin to write fanfiction about it in their minds that validates how a. it could never happen to them, and b. that this was an act of such incomprehensible evil that it could only have been committed by Satan himself. In the aftermath of the murder of Meredith Kercher I think it was probably a lot easier for people to accept that Amanda Knox was this evil seductress who orchestrated it all because she was just that sick rather than accept that sometimes a man breaks into your apartment and rapes and murders you with no motive whatsoever beyond wanting to do so. It’s really, really scary to think we are surrounded by people who are perpetually just on the edge of violence, and we go around in circles inside ourselves trying to understand why these things happen when it just isn’t something people who don’t commit crimes understand.

People who commit crimes, including murder, aren’t monsters. Often they’re very sick people who need help. It does us no good as a society to act as thought this isn’t the case - in fact, it just makes us the worst parts of Batman, who beats on people who might otherwise need help themselves despite their participation in crime. It’s why conversations around the penal and justice systems are so fraught and so complicated - we want to pretend prison is where you go to either be punished forever or somehow rehabilitated, when often neither is the case. Most prisons lack the resources to rehabilitate people, and this is by design. We create criminals on criminals, and punish them for being criminals, like a never-ending circle of pain. But for most people that’s just a convenient period on a story. The bad guy was caught and sent to prison and we all lived happily ever after. It’s very nice, it’s very nice. But it isn’t really the truth.

By casting ourselves as detectives on the internet we create a divide between ourselves and the criminal justice system that buttresses many of the injustices of society, and many truly come to believe that it’s something that cannot also adversely affect themselves. You are helping catch the bad guys, and so you are further removed from being a bad guy yourself. It’s comforting to your world view, and it’s easy as hell to do - just log on and let fly on the first true crime content you see. After all, if you’re wrong nobody really gets hurt because nobody is real on the internet anymore.

In 2017 Lindsay and Patrick Clancy had their first child, a girl, on Christmas Eve.

They had been married a year, and had been together for three years before that, and this should have been the beginning of a joyous period of their lives together. However, all was not entirely well. The birth itself had been physically traumatic, with heavy bleeding and internal bruising. Lindsay also experienced some heightened anxiety around the baby - even fearing that a vein on her nose was indicative of a genetic abnormality - and she struggled to adapt to her new role as a mother despite her love for her child. One day, having rigged their baby cameras to feed directly to her after she had returned to work as a labor and delivery nurse, she became convinced that she was seeing the baby in distress on the cameras and even called the police to do a welfare check despite the baby being in the care of her husband. It’s normal to have an exacerbated sense of stress or worry after you’ve had a child, and especially after you’ve returned to work, but this was troubling sign of what was to come.

Lindsay was active in trying to be the best parent she could be, having belonged to several parenting groups on social media and reading several books on motherhood, but still she seemed to struggle. After the birth of their second child, a boy born two years after their first (another traumatic birth which necessitated a careful recovery), she described motherhood as “all-consuming” and found the experience of raising two children to be a far cry from what she had expected. She seemed to want to do everything and be everything for her children and couldn’t understand why she was not able to force herself to acclimate, why her mind seemed to occasionally drag her down. She struggled to bond with her baby son at first, and blamed herself. Her anxiety continued, and she managed it with meditation, exercise, and ultimately by seeking therapy. Despite her struggles, she and Patrick wanted a large family and she was excited to get pregnant again. Their final baby, a boy born three years after their last, was born in May 2022, and this time the birth was standard and smooth.

What happened to Lindsay did not happen overnight. Patrick would go on to claim that she displayed no symptoms of concerning behavior for the first four weeks of their sons life, and Lindsay reported that she had an extreme burst of energy that she had not had after the two earlier births, attributing it to a “positive mindset” as well as her healthy diet and exercise regimen while she had been pregnant. Just a few months after their son was born she and Patrick had run a 5K together. She appeared, at least from the outside, to be healthy and happy. Now this all reads to be symptoms of potential mania, and in the cycle of such things is a universal truth: what comes up must come down.

Things began to come down that Autumn. Her energy seemed to dissipate, leaving her confused and filled with familiar anxiety, and she sank into a depression characterized by severe insomnia. She described herself falling out of routines to her friends online, not helped by the fact that Patrick’s parental leave had run out and necessitated him returning to work before her and leaving her alone to provide stability and care for their now three children. As the time for her own return to work approached she found herself almost crushed by her anxiety, and she postponed her return in order to seek help. On evaluation by a telehealth psychiatrist she scored a 23 on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) - an evaluation with a maximum score of 30. She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and prescribed Zoloft, but after reporting lack of sleep and increasing anxiety and depression she was taken off the drug (this reaction is known to occur in people with Bipolar disorder, which Lindsay was not diagnosed with at the time).

After Zoloft she was given Lorazepam (Ativan) and Benadryl for help with sleep and anxiety, and at first it seemed to work, but she became concerned she was growing dependent on them to sleep and even suffered withdrawal symptoms after she attempted to wean herself off them. She was later prescribed Trazadone to assist with her sleep after she went to the ER claiming she had been unable to sleep for two nights. They increased her dose of the drug up to 150mg, but she still claimed it was not working and instead she went a round with Fluoxetine (Prozac) in November to help with her depression, but she stopped taking it after only a few days after it made her insomnia worse (again, something that can occur in people with Bipolar disorder). After the Prozac she received Ambien, Mirtazapine (Remeron), and Clonazepam (Klonopin), but these triggered a dissociative episode. Things became so fraught that her parents travelled up from Connecticut to assist her and Patrick with the kids and stayed through the holidays, witnessing her crying hysterically and beating her head against a pillow. Her sleep did not improve. She was prescribed Quetiapine (Seroquel) after a nurse practitioner suspected she could be presenting as Bipolar, but Lindsay claims this is when her symptoms peaked and she lost 15 pounds in just a few weeks of taking it due to feeling like a “zombie” and spiraling with auditory hallucinations. She called a suicide hotline, and Patrick asked if her psychiatrists could remove her from all medications until she recovered as they were both concerned she was over-medicated. She was given Hydroxyzine to help with her sleep, and her dosage of Seroquel was increased.

She was evaluated again by professionals that December after her symptoms did not materially improve, and it was concluded that she did not actually suffer from Post-Partum Depression (a conclusion disputed by the myriad other teams she had met with up to this point). After this her symptoms worsened, and she began to tell Patrick she was suffering suicidal ideation worse than before, despite having been prescribed Diazepam (Valium) and Lamictal (Lamotrigine) to help with stabilizing her moods. It’s disputed as to whether she also disclosed to him that she had thoughts of harming their children at that time - in her journal she records that she did, but in Patrick’s recollection she only indicated she herself was suicidal. In any case, she voluntarily checked herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Years Day in 2023, and she stayed for five days before being discharged with the understanding that she was not believed to be a harm to herself or to others. She checked herself out, it’s believed, because she wanted to attend her daughters birthday party, and she was released without diagnosis or treatment plan, but was again given Trazadone to help with her sleep, Buspirone for anxiety, and Amitriptyline for depression. Patrick questioned her shortly after whether she continued to have suicidal thoughts, to which she replied that she was not.

On January 23 she wrote in her journal that she was having a little anxiety about returning to work.

The next day, January 24, 2023, she journaled again that she had become severely depressed and was once again suicidal. That morning she took one of the children to a doctors appointment where by all accounts she was behaving normally. On their return home she built a snow man with the two older children while Patrick (who worked from home) received normal texts and updates from her in the basement. He stopped upstairs a few times throughout the day to check in, and he recalls Lindsay seeming extremely improved - he would go on to describe it as “one of her best days”. By 4:00 p.m. she had begun to Google “kids MiraLAX,” a restaurant in the area, and checked the travel time from her home to the restaurant. At 4:47 p.m. she called a pharmacy to ask whether they had children’s MiraLAX, and was told they had comparable medication. At 4:53 p.m. she asked Patrick if he wanted take-out for dinner, and they ordered shortly afterwards. Patrick left to get their dinner and to stop by the pharmacy around 5:15 p.m., and was later seen in the pharmacy looking at their products. He called Lindsay and spoke with her briefly to confirm the children’s laxative she wanted him to get in a 14 second phone call in which he described her as sounding as though she was distracted and busy with something. He collected their take-out order, and arrived home at 6:09 p.m.

The house was quiet. He saw blood, and went upstairs to find that their bedroom window had been broken, quickly discovering that Lindsay had slit her wrists, swallowed some of her 7 remaining medications, and thrown herself from the window. He raced to her side, asking where the children were, to which she was able to tell him that they were in the basement. She had strangled them, with the older two pronounced dead at the scene and their eight-month-old baby hanging on only a few days more.

Lindsay survived the suicide attempt, and is now paralyzed from the waist down. The trial for the murders of her children began last week. Lindsay has plead Not Guilty by reason of insanity, claiming she was in the midst of Post-Partum Psychosis.

Everything I’ve written above are facts. They are not disputed at this time by anybody save for the internet detectives who are desperately trying to turn this case into anything other than what it is.

And what is it? A pretty open-and-shut tragedy. It’s horrible, and part of what is horrible about it is how not unique it is. Lindsay Clancy is far from the first mother to kill her children while in the grips of a psychotic episode, and yet people generally are forgetting that we’ve already learned these lessons.

Well, perhaps not forgetting but misremembering.

The past few days on social media have been rife with cognitive dissonance, as I watched people cite misinformation from completely different cases of maternal filicide as though they were facts from the Clancy case. Details like Patrick being told not to leave her alone with the children by their doctors, that he had ignored warnings about the dangers of Lindsay being pregnant again, that Lindsay had been forbidden from seeking help from psychiatrists. These are all facts of the Andrea Yates case, which is only similar to the Clancy case in the sense that a mother is admitting guilt for murdering her own children. Everything else appears to be circling the drain as people cling to the comfort of having a concrete person to blame for this terrible crime. For a lot of women on the internet this person is Patrick, but this too is imperfect.

Patrick Clancy was, I’m sure, not a perfect partner because I don’t believe anybody is ever perfect. There are certainly things that keep him up at night, and things he wishes he had done differently or not done at all, and for a man who has endured what he has I feel like that should be taken as a given. However, the sheer amount of fanfiction being written about him on the internet is stunning - there are people convinced he was never in his house with his children, that he was having affairs, that he either killed his children himself and framed Lindsay or somehow coerced Lindsay into doing it by convincing her she was having a psychotic episode (?????). These people claim Lindsay herself has no memory of the murders, that she was simply convinced of her guilt by a shoddy investigation and a dastardly husband.

Absolutely none of these theories hold up modest scrutiny. Patrick went on one trip for work during the time Lindsay was beginning to spiral and it was his first business trip since 2020. He legally divorced Lindsay sometime after the murders and he remarried in April of this past year to a woman there is no evidence he knew prior to January 2023. Lindsay remembers the crime, and has admitted to committing it but claims that she was no longer in control of her faculties as a result of mixed medication and Post-Partum Psychosis. The attempt to portray both Patrick or Lindsay as family annihilators is absurd - by all accounts, and given the facts we have currently available, it seems like they were both aware that there was a problem and they did their very best to deal with it, and it just didn’t work. If Patrick was always going to frame his wife for the murders of his children so he could run off and begin a new life why would he have assisted in getting her help? Why wouldn’t he have simply allowed her to succumb to her demons and kill the children uninhibited? Why would he have called 911 when it was clear she had survived the pills, the cuts, and the fall instead of ensuring she was dead? For that matter, why would Lindsay not be trying to cast blame on him now that the trial is commencing if he had been having affairs, or had truly been an absent husband and parent?

None of these theories make sense in light of the fact that Patrick still publicly supports his ex-wife, and even appeared as a borderline hostile witness for the prosecution. He testified that he was aware of his wife’s struggles, that they did everything they could to address them, and that he made his own mistakes in how much he let her be alone with the children, but that no medical professionals had instructed him that it would be dangerous to do so. As indicated previously, it’s unclear to what extent Patrick knew she had been having thoughts of harming them, which I’m sure tortures him to this day. He and Lindsay are currently in the midst of two separate malpractice lawsuits against several of the medical personnel that Lindsay met with during her months of mental struggles - Lindsay’s as personal injury, alleging that she was overmedicated and it worsened her mental state into psychosis, and Patrick’s on behalf of their children filed as wrongful death.

It seems as though people are looking at Patrick Clancy and seeing anybody but who he actually seems to be, and in truth we don’t even have a clue as to who this man is normally let alone under these circumstances. When he’s perceived it’s as a borderline abusive misogynist like Rusty Yates, a murderous sociopath like Chris Watts, or as an adulterous pig like any number of the ex-boyfriends you superimpose onto his face. It’s a variation on the Amanda Knox Effect - Patrick Clancy must be made into the Ultimate problem because a mother murdering her children is something we in our infinite feminist thought cannot abide because women are above being murderers, unlike men. If a man seems odd, or sad, or unwilling to talk about the worst day of his life then his behavior is suspicious and he must be guilty of murder and being a cheater, which in some places on the internet is actually worse than being a murderer lol.

People, leave Patrick Clancy alone. The man is going to live with this for the rest of his life. His children are dead. He doesn’t need to be punished any more for what he should or should not have done - I’m sure he punishes himself enough.

It’s just so inane to attempt to divert blame onto anyone but Lindsay in this case, and I honestly look at it as a misplaced historical overcorrection. I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not I really want to talk about Taylor Frankie Paul on here because that case is also very dark, but I cite one of my favorite podcasters, Liz Bentley, when I say that people who are actively trying to paint Taylor as a victim being abused by the court system is a complete overcorrection by a culture beginning to recognize how fucked up it’s been to women at all stages of social existence. As a result, all women accused of crimes or misbehavior are given a very wide berth by the culture because it’s 2026 and all women are queens and all men are scum. And listen, I don’t even think this is 100% wrong because I understand the patriarchy and it’s many tentacles of influence - all woman are subjected to harsher scrutiny than their male counterparts, so I don’t care if I give women more grace. It’s the way it is. #subscribe #girlboss #paidpartnership

Subscribe now

However, this reasoning becomes tricky when the woman you’re advocating for has been implicated in a violent crime. You start having to jump through a few extra hoops in order to justify the act - maybe she did it, but it was probably because an evil man forced her to do it, so it isn’t really her fault. These arguments do miss the forest for the trees slightly, because there’s an argument to be made about the culpability of the medical system under the patriarchy. Women’s health generally is not treated with the respect and care it deserves because women are still seen as hysterical drama queens when it comes to our health. God forbid you turn up to a doctors office over 150lbs, they’ll send you away saying “lose some weight then we’ll take your pain seriously”. It’s maddening. If women’s bodies are not treated with decency then our minds are even less so, especially nowadays where we’re dealing with a population of people being told that mental health is not actually that big a deal and what you need to do to not be depressed is exercise and eat creatine or whatever you do with it. Therapy has made great strides in being normalized for most people, but it’s easier for a doctor to shake someone off with a prescription and a promise to get therapy and send her on her way than it is to go to the trouble of putting them in an involuntary hold. It’s a lot of work, it’s a hassle, she doesn’t want to go, so you let her go and write her a script.

To be clear, I think Lindsay Clancy was overprescribed, but I don’t think the medication is the sole cause of the murders. I think it’s very possible she is actually Bipolar, and it’s just that the two Bipolar medications they attempted to put her on didn’t work with her brain chemistry because this is more common than not. I hope that this case does not dissuade people from asking for help when they need it, because we should be educated and open to medication as a means of dealing with chronic mental health conditions. There’s no shame in it whatsoever, it’s just that in this case it was ultimately not what was actually going to stand in the way of her murdering her children.

When a woman has been proven to have committed, or admitted to, criminal acts then that’s the end of the road. Lindsay Clancy confessed to her crimes - what favor are we doing her by acting as though she didn’t actually do it? This is not a case of a woman who was abandoned by her family or her partner and left to wallow in her sickness, like Andrea Yates. By all accounts, her family and Patrick’s family were very involved in supporting her with the children while she was actively struggling and they were very close, it just so happens that sometimes even when you do as much as you can right it still doesn’t matter. Lindsay was a sick person who knew she was sick and tried to get help, and when she was arrested for the crime she confessed it - she has never argued that she did not murder her children. All the prosecution is currently attempting to do thus far is outweigh the validity of her claims that she was in the midst of Post-Partum Psychosis exacerbated by a cocktail of ineffective medication by reminding the jury at every turn how wrong it is to kill your children. Lindsay Clancy knows it’s wrong. She probably knew it when she was murdering them, but that’s what psychosis does - it convinces you that you have no way out except to follow the impulse it’s sending you. It tells you not to tell people you're hearing voices or they'll hurt you or your family. You have no choice but to listen to the voice, you have no recourse when everything else that was supposed to help you has failed. You lose hope. You lose the will to fight.

People also seem fairly confused about what psychosis even is, and act as though the fact that Lindsay appeared to premeditate the crime means she could not have actually been psychotic. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH - remember their rats?) characterizes psychosis as “a collection of symptoms that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality”. That’s about all that characterizes a psychotic state, really, but people often think of psychotic people as people muttering to themselves at bus stops, or Hannibal Lector. A true prolonged psychotic state occurs in around 15 and 100 people out of 100,000 each year, and NIMH states that Post-Partum Psychosis affects between 1 and 2 per 1000 women. It’s relatively rare, but it’s like rabies in that by the time you’re symptomatic you have a big problem on your hands. Lindsay certainly presented several of the traits in the four month period of mental unrest she suffered prior to the murders. Her capabilities drastically deteriorated after a period of mania, leading to paranoia, sleeplessness, weight-loss, dysregulated behaviors, depression, and delusional reasoning and thought patterns, which seems pretty cut and dried to me as a woman suffering Post-Partum Depression that withered into psychosis. It’s perfectly understandable to me that a person can have completely lost touch with the reality that you and I, reader, are living in, and have instead moved completely into a world where they are being convinced constantly that the only way out is to die. They may do this silently, carefully, and give no indication that they’re experiencing any kind of intrusive thoughts, or they may be one of those poor aforementioned people at the bus stop. Sometimes they just kill themselves, sometimes they kill others. There is no pattern, because the mind is a vast, unsolvable mass.

But if the story as we know it is really just as sad as it seems then why would we want to engage with it? What’s fun and interesting about a family with three young children being destroyed by a woman’s fractured mental state, a vaguely checked out husband, and a medical system that’s just used to writing scripts and sending you on your way? Nothing. And maybe that’s a good thing?

We are addicted to exposing each other. We want to expose Patrick Clancy for cheating on his wife and murdering his children, we want to expose the cancer influencer as a fake and a scam artist, when in reality the truth behind these things is just sad reality. You ripped the curtains down to expose a man who tried to support his wife, misjudged her needs, and has already paid the ultimate price for his mistakes. You pointed the spotlight at a woman who was actually sick and died knowing there were legions of people who didn’t believe in her illness. There’s no world in which we can act like this is some kind of righteous justice, it’s just malicious and attention-seeking. Who wants to be seen like this?

Women used to engage in true crime as a fandom under the auspices of wanting to understand monsters so they could better protect themselves, and I’m sure part of that is still true. Another overly cited claim for true crime fandomship is that women should not have to apologize for their interests, however dark they are, and again I half agree and half disagree. Clearly I watch these documentaries too - I follow the cases, I listen to the podcasts, I’ll talk about it over wine with my sister, and I won’t ever deny doing it. But I draw the line at engaging with the vast majority of it because I don’t think it’s appropriate to deal with things like murder, sex crimes, or violent acts in the same way that I have previously engaged in actual fandoms like Phantom of the Opera (don’t ask) or Bleach (really don’t ask).

Every crime has real people attached to it, and no matter how much time exists between the crime and now it is still painful and probably still hurts a lot of people, and so I don’t like that people hop on the internet and run wild with theories, or try to cast blame on loved ones, or try to blame the victim (the people who have talked about Chris Watts on Reddit know what I’m talking about). It’s déclassé. It's gross. We can all watch these things, and there’s even a way to respectfully discuss them, but don’t do it where anyone possibly attached to the crime can see it (this is an old, old fandom rule). I’m not advocating for the end of true crime as a genre, because I believe in the right hands it can be a vehicle for survivors and the loved ones of victims to get justice and to tell their stories - these are the people who should speaking out about crime and what it can do to people. It’s also important for the genre to go on because, as discussed, the justice system is an incredibly complex thing that doesn’t always actually serve us as people by sending human beings into the void and hoping they come back out better. Further, law enforcement are often taken to task via true crime documentaries, podcasts, and books, and further scrutiny on their practices will hopefully undercut the potential for mistakes to be made or repeated through time.

True crime is a varied and layered thing, and it has as many positives as it does negatives - in no way am I saying we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I grow increasingly concerned for the people who earnestly seem to watch these things with the same energy with which we watch anything on Bravo, or Love Island. These things deserve a different level of scrutiny, and a deeper understanding of the ways in which these topics should be spoken of. It isn’t acceptable to throw out the idea that Patrick Clancy murdered his children and orchestrated his wife’s psychotic break, or that Lindsay was faking the psychosis entirely to excuse murdering their children, when you have zero evidence save for ~vibes~. It isn’t acceptable because we already exist in a misinformation culture, and even if you are only “putting it out there” to put it out there, other people will see this and come to believe it is fact. It isn’t. We need to support each other with facts, otherwise we’ll have given up any hope of ever progressing beyond this sensationalist, cannibalistic call-out culture that has now found its way into every corner of our society, from pop culture into the highest branches of government.

We have to do better. We really, really have to.

There’s a pretty famous exchange towards the end of Batman Begins wherein Bruce Wayne is staring up towards the burning remains of his home, distraught and disbelieving of his abilities to go on as Batman, and his loyal butler Alfred prompts him with an old adage of the first Mr. Wayne.

“Why do we fall, Master Wayne?”

“So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

I think this is a pretty powerful sentiment, but as with everything in the Batman universe it isn’t without it’s complications.

Some people fall where others might rise up, some people are pushed down and stepped on and their attempts to pick themselves up are thwarted. Some people never fall at all, or become convinced that they have because they’ve experienced an inconvenience. It places the power to fix our problems in our own hands, which doesn’t do much good for people without the means or abilities to change their circumstances. In my view it’s just as powerful to hold systems to account for the way the odds are so often stacked against us as normal people in an increasingly hegemonic society as it is to understand our responsibility to ourselves. We may fall, yes, but if I can’t pick myself up then I would hope someone else would see me struggling and help me, not simply jeer at my inability to move. I feel like this is what the online true crime community has mostly become - nothing but ambulance chasers seeking out the next tearjerker, the next tragic murder, sex crime, or catastrophic event. Not because they want to help, but because they want to gawk at it, speculate about it, and inflate their own sense of superiority by inserting themselves in something that was bad to begin with and only made worse by their involvement. They’ve internalized the wrong messages about the heroes they fantasize about being - they push people down and act like it’s justice, just like Batman waiting in a dark alley for a sick person to cross his path so he can beat them down.

Lindsay Clancy fell. She fell despite a support system that did what they could to help her. She was let down by a mental healthcare system that too quickly prioritizes hasty prescriptions than ensuring their patients are receiving individualized treatment and therapy, and as a result her mental state worsened. She was a wealthy white woman, and she still fell and couldn’t pick herself back up. I think this is what scares women the most about this case, and why they are so quick to turn to conspiracy theories in this instance. She wanted help, she sought it out, and it didn’t work. That could happen to anyone.

It could happen to you.

There are certainly opinions that I’ve had that have not followed me into my adulthood, friendships that both changed me and are now merely things I suddenly catch onto in my memory like shiny little hooks, whole people that were I to see them on the street I might not even recognize. I’ve gained and lost weight, hair, enamel, thrown out my clothes, quit jobs, quit bad habits to make room for others, learned the things to say in front of people to make them think of me as Ordinary and realized I didn’t like it.

But have I changed? I don’t know. Inside I can still feel exactly what I felt when I was 14 and feeling Enormous feelings for the first time, and if I concentrate very, very hard I can even still feel what it was to be the child that I was. Everything was hot, everything was scary. Now that I’m older the heat is just familiar, but familiarity doesn’t always negate fear. How I felt then and how I feel now is something between terror and joy, like looking at the Grand Canyon. I can put a name to sensation, I can understand my own footsteps to better trace the steps of others, but does any of this signify that I’ve changed? Again, I don’t know. I’ve grown older, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Right?

It feels lame to navel-gaze, but there’s something gratifying to it, too. To a certain degree I think we all confuse self-obsession with self-awareness, and yet the line between them in my opinion is very, very fine. How do I assess whether or not I’m the same person I was even just five years ago if I don’t think of the past, if I don’t think of the myself that I was? There are so many days that pass where the ups and downs only happen in the space between one memory and the other, where the truth of the day feels less honest than what I’ve told myself about it, where I ride the bus home with the sun strong in my face and I think “I’m so, so sick of myself.” I analyze myself constantly, to the point where when I feel even the slightest hint of dissatisfaction or displeasure coming from myself or from the world at large I react like I’ve knocked my elbow against a doorframe: embarrassment, run.

People must move through the world like this, and they’re just too tactful or too wise to speak on it. I think it’s why I’m very drawn to selfish people - people who move through life like bulldozers, just running down everyone in their wake. I’ve long been obsessed with Cat Marnell, and Courtney Love, and Caroline Calloway for such reasons (by the by, my Caroline Calloway book finally came!!! It was a legitimate shock). There’s an element of jealousy to it, which should be obvious, because I have a mean streak of just wanting to do whatever the fuck I want and who cares about the consequences, the way I hope other people occasionally feel.

More and more these days I’m beginning to believe that I’m the minority, though. When I have these moments of wishing I could behave as recklessly as I sometimes feel I have to quickly remind myself there are people walking among us that see no reason to not just brazenly do whatever they like no matter how it affects other people. They don’t need to pause and think “maybe I should put this cart back in the correct place”, or thank a cashier, or wonder whether the person who was blocking their way on the sidewalk heard them muttering how stupid they were. There are far, far worse things than being a little self-absorbed - at least it’s something I try to work on instead of just being a whore to everyone in my life (lol).

I am profoundly happy that these moments of me either yearning to be or outright acting like my worst self are not immortalized in a public forum (save for some embarrassing Tumblr blogs circa 2016). Had I processed my dual urges to understand myself better so I can become a better version of myself with my deep need for destruction and selfishness on a T.V. show I’m sure I would have needed to move into a bunker by now.

It’s why, in my belief, if you are self-aware enough to want to be a better person you can’t be on a television show as it’s only ever going to ask you to revisit things that hurt you, or to indulge your base impulses, or to start fights over things that don’t matter. Staying on a show that is making you a worse person is a declaration of your intention to remain exactly as you are for the duration of your time on the show, and if you’ve entered the show a bad person you will stay a bad person. Thus, it becomes incumbent on your audience to delude themselves that you are a good person so that they can continue to stan you. You can help them along with some PC phrases, some therapy speak (make it a point to emphasize your boundaries), and it’s a great boon to you if you already have a built in system of fans to insist that the way you’re speaking on camera is proof you’re a different person.

But you’re not a different person, and you know you’re not. When the lights go out at night you’re the same unhappy, overheated, self-loathing person you always have been, you’re just fatter with longer hair and more adult responsibilities. Your coping skills have not changed, your emotional regulation has not changed, you’ve only grown better at hiding it. You’re better at hiding everything. You expect a lot from the wrong people and when they fail to deliver it lets you “amen” every bad thing you think about the world and the people that live in it - never mind that there are plenty of good people you’ve thrown away for nothing. Open your phone: there go all your friends without you, interspersed with Reels and TikTok’s about how Blake Lively is Satan and you believe it because women are not to be trusted. No woman - not even you. Especially you. You’re in bed with someone you don’t trust and who doesn’t really trust you, and if you admit to each other it’s a lost cause then that means you need to rebuild again. You’re too old to rebuild again. It’s safer just to act like you’ve changed. Keep your mouth shut, until it’s time to say the wrong thing. Then go to bed and let the whole cycle start again.

This is a lot of women, but it’s especially Kristen Doute. People have a very strong belief that Kristen Doute has changed. They think this even though Kristen Doute has not changed at all.

I will confess now that I knew this day would come, and I am relishing every part of it. I feel like the little girl about to throw the dodgeball in the Gift of Prophecy meme. There was no part of me that believed what Danny and Nia were selling for the past two years, but I knew I needed to wait for the two of them to pass the Misogyny Event Horizon before I could make this take plain. Everything nice I said about them in my post about Janet last year is Revoked - and in fact, I didn’t even mean it! I was just trying to be nice. But honestly, being nice is overrated anyway. Fuck anyone that makes women uncomfortable, and fuck the people who lick their boots (that means you, Kristen).

In the Spring of 2022, I remember earnestly believing a lot of the people who were actively making fun of Amber Heard for her account of being assaulted by Johnny Depp were bots. Perhaps it was naive of me, but I very much hoped that these could not be real people that walked the earth with me that thought a woman recounting a brutal sexual assault was in any way funny - even if you did believe she was making it up, rape just…isn’t funny? But every day was more and more disheartening, not to mention intensely triggering to bear witness to people who I thought were trustworthy and stalwart supporters of women and victims to brazenly and gleefully shit on this woman for doing nothing but be attacked. Johnny Depp incurred no consequences for what passed between him and Amber Heard in his marriage save for some bad press and accidently cutting off the tip of his finger (an incident Amber somehow gets blamed for by the Depp stans - if there can be such a thing), and yet he was treated like the victim by thousands of No Follower accounts with fake profile pictures. The reportage that came out in the wake of the trail verified there was a significant bot campaign waged against Heard by Depp’s team, and yet our cultural memory of it is still warped by misinformation that people are all too happy to accept. Change, it would seem, is challenging to everyone, and admitting that you might have been wrong is the same game.

So when I became aware that, in all likelihood, Janet Caperna was going to have to share an event of sexual violence that traumatized her in order to explain why she was triggered by Danny Booko I had a sinking feeling, but also a sliver of hope. Years have passed, we cannot still be so illiterate about the effects of trauma and how they can manifest - we cannot still be downplaying what Danny did to Jasmine and Melissa in order to uphold some bizarre vision of the Booko’s marriage being “goals”. Amber Heard is still living a life of seclusion, but she has escaped abuse for the moment. Maybe we’re in a place where we can heal from all these cultural misunderstandings about sexual harassment, sexual assault, inappropriate behavior, and abuse. Maybe we can all put it on our hearts to change these parts of ourselves that hurt others.

Well, apparently I was the fool the whole time! Put my ass into the Wicker Man.

I think I’m particularly triggered by Kristen because she reminds me of most elder Millennial women I know (derogatory). They are smugly self-satisfied in clapping back instead of actually engaging with a topic, they often fall for misinformation they found through Instagram Reels, and they act like enjoying gangster rap makes them not racist. Not to mention most of them now have children they’re refusing to parent, and then getting angry at the school for holding the brats accountable (can you tell I used to work in a High School?).

I started writing this last summer, when the second season of The Valley was still airing. At the time I stopped writing it because clearly any criticism of Kristen was not going to be met with a degree of understanding by the audience, but to my eternal delight it seems times have changed. But then, things were always going to change. Life is long and Kristen is crazy - whatever “growth” people were convincing themselves they saw from her in the first two seasons of this godforsaken show was always going to be short-lived because Kristen will always be Kristen. And she should be! Clearly she resonates with a great many viewers of reality television. But it’s 2026 and Kristen is still on our TV’s proudly calling men displaying sociopathic tendencies and abusive patterns of behavior towards their current and former partners her friends, and people don’t seem to care because at least she’s doing it in a more mellow way. The subreddits are filled with people excusing her because she’s not throwing drinks in peoples faces or flying in women from Miami to inflame situations anymore.

But does this mean Kristen has changed? No.

Like many women of her station, she’s only changed in the sense that now she has a child and a fiancé, and dear God in heaven do neither of these things seem healthy for her. I am unafraid of being labeled a hater because I am indeed the Biggest Hater, so I will say now I always thought adding a baby into the equation of Kristen’s life was a horrible idea. We have a cultural tendency to act as though a women with severe emotional dysregulation will be made right by motherhood, when in fact it’s almost always the opposite in practice. Children, and especially babies, need constant surveillance, food, care, engagement, and you get thanked for virtually none of it save for the internal connection you build with it as a parent. For a lot of people who go on to have babies this connection is enough, but if you’re already going into the experience of motherhood or parenting with the tank half full for yourself it isn’t going to magically fill itself by taking on a task which is guaranteed to test you in every way you can be tested.

When Kristen announced her pregnancy people took it as the ultimate sign that she had changed, but even last season on The Valley we can see evidence that the sentiment isn’t true. Disregarding the fights I didn’t side with her on, all season - when she was actively trying for a baby and undergoing fertility treatments - she was drunk. I’m not a doctor, but I know just through observation that booze is not good for you even when you’re not trying to conceive. Kristen was always one of the heavier drinkers on Vanderpump Rules, and I think most of us assumed that she had aged out of this behavior now that she’s literally in her 40’s, but it seems that’s not the case. On a cast trip in season 2 she’s weeping to her fiancé, Luke, about her fertility struggles and on the bedside table is both all of her fertility accoutrement and a full drink. It’s hilarious, but it’s also maddening. A woman who has not changed her coping mechanisms since the age of 29 does not need a baby to take care of to prove to the world that she’s a grown-up now - she needs to grow up. Kristin can barely tolerate a vacation without full-time help.

A woman’s relationship to motherhood informs how she is viewed in society, but it has to walk a narrow line so that they aren’t accused of “weaponizing” their pregnancy (see: Janet). Kristen has struggled with fertility, and is now battling Post-Partum Depression, and for this she is excused and given a pass by viewers. Not to be that bitch, but Janet - who was the subject of intense scrutiny and death threats last season - was in the exact same phase of Post Partum that Kristen currently is this season, and she received none of the support that Kristen is enjoying. I don’t think it’s wrong for Kristen to receive support, and in fact I think she probably needs it very badly when we see how Luke is as a partner to her, but the hypocrisy is overwhelming. Really, Kristen is a cautionary tale for all “Mom Friends” out there - the difference between being the Mom friend and being an actual Mom is stark, and you should carefully evaluate every single part of your life to ensure you are ready to have a child. Failure to properly understand yourself, or your circumstances, is going to bring suffering people into the world. This is why Reproductive Rights matter, because some people are responsible enough to admit that they shouldn’t be parents because they would not be good parents, or the situation wouldn’t be right, or maybe they need to reevaluate their partner or their job or where they live. It’s a lot of work, but you need to do it. Not doing it is an act of violence.

Not everybody deserves a baby. Not even every person who wants a baby deserves a baby.

Kristen brought a baby into a bad relationship, and into a time in her life where she is completely dysregulated with zero healthy coping mechanisms, but people are applauding her change because the only change that matters is the one you can observe. A baby is the ultimate status symbol, as it advertises to the whole world that you are a responsible, moral human being capable of taking on forming another human’s entire world view in a safe and positive way. Further, it tells other people that your partner loves and trusts you so much, and your relationship is so solid, that you had to cement your connection to one another Forever. Obviously, not everyone who has a baby is subject to being seen this way (racism plays into why some people are actually looked down on for having babies), but with Kristen we saw this to a great extent last year. She got her man, she got her baby, she now has everything she’s ever wanted!!!!

First of all, barf. Second of all, in what world is being a mother the only dream Kristen ever had? James Mae erasure (become a paid subscribe today to support my dreams of heteronormativity in Trump’s America!).

Subscribe now

Let’s talk about this man who has made Kristen Doute’s dreams come true for a moment. Luke is a nightmare of a human being, second only to one Daniel Booko, who tricked himself into thinking that because he liked fucking Kristen he was in love with her (many such cases). Luke is not in love with Kristen, in my opinion, because he does not seem all that interested in her feelings or ensuring she feels supported in these precious first few months of motherhood, and in fact he seems singularly interested in hanging her out to dry. He leaves her alone with the baby to get wasted and pass out on the couch, he removes himself from discussions with her to go hang out in the garage like he’s a dad in the 1950’s about to try and fix the cable antenna on the roof in a lightening storm, and he disparages their relationship to their friends. This is all just the overt reasons, not to mention the fact that I believe he’s growing to resent her for “trapping” him in California when he’s been talking for three seasons about how he hates it there and he just wants to move back to Colorado. Well, Luke, why did you join the show then? It’s not called The Valley: Colorado Style, you knew you were signing a contract to plant roots in California. Their lifestyle and goals for the future are not in any way aligned, at least to the naked eye, and so it’s not that surprising to me that he’s proving to be shit at supporting his fiancé through PPD. He seems disgustingly selfish, and he probably always was.

This does not release Kristen from her responsibility, though. We’ve known Kristen for long enough to know that when she gets herself into a stable situation (doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad) she will immediately begin to self-sabotage until the situation implodes, and then this will be used to excuse away her treatment of people and how she chooses to cope with it (drinking). The last few episodes of The Valley have shown the casts trip to Mexico, and from the beginning of the trip she was picking fights with Luke, cutting him down to size, and then trying to backtrack. She’s in no place to be away from the baby, in her opinion, and so she looks down on him for trying to get her to relax and let the nanny take care of everything. Reader: they’re on vacation. There’s a nanny there. She can step away, she’s just choosing not to. I attribute this to her PPD certainly, but it’s also a longstanding pattern of wanting to paint her partner as this demonic beast who holds her hostage to his needs, when in fact she places herself in the cage. In the words of Connor Roy from Succession: “you liked the cage, you asked to be put in it.”

That really sums up having a baby with a subpar partner, doesn’t it? You liked the cage, you asked to be put in it.

When season 8 of Vanderpump Rules aired I know there were a lot of fans who thought Katie and Stassi icing Kristen out was too harsh, and I remember at the time I mostly agreed. They had been friends for so long that cutting her off, especially at a time when it seemed she needed their support (she was navigating a tough break-up), seemed like overkill. However, looking at Kristen now everything makes a lot more sense. They talked on podcasts and on the show about how being Kristen’s friend had become exhausting - she would demand all this support and attention, and then would refuse to do anything to change her situation and would then act confused and hurt when people would stop offering her help. The people who then took space from her would be characterized as bad friends who were trying to hurt her, and the viewers often sympathized with Kristen when in reality she caused all of these problems herself. She has always been her own biggest op. People have wasted years telling her the exact route to get out of the cage, but Kristen would rather stay in the cage with her not-shit man.

I blame a lot of this type of thinking on the patriarchy, but I also blame it on her very weird and creepy friendship with Nia Sanchez and her unflattering prairie dresses. Nia is an agent of the patriarchy the likes of which has been seldom seen on shows actively marketed towards the 20-40-year old audience, and although it took everyone a while to cotton to her true nature they have since seen her for exactly what she is. She gentle parents her husband to prevent him from engaging with people who are demanding accountability for him behaving like a True penis, she shouts down women who try and apologize to her, and her whole life appears dedicated to upholding and revering toxic Christian gender norms. What’s most troubling about Nia, in this sense, is how much Kristen seems to idolize her and her relationship with Danny, which is something she should be put in Arkham Asylum for. She cites the way Nia will helicopter him and forcibly pull him out of conversations as something she aspires to have with Luke, which I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at. It goes without saying, but if you signed up to be On A Reality Show there is no longer such a thing as “dealing with it in private”. This is your literal job.

The ne’er-do-well’s that continue to support the Booko’s have vacillated between excusing this behavior with either “what do you expect, they’re trying to defend their family” or “well, clearly you’ve never been m a r r i e d”. I would like to say: if Danny and Nia gave a fuck about their marriage or their cursed family they would not have come back to this show. Instead they took a fat ride on the vain train and convinced themselves everyone hated Janet so much that they could just behave like monsters and nobody would give a fuck.

To refresh the reader: Danny grabbed the ass and thigh of his two lesbian co-workers, and is acting like anybody being creeped out by this behavior has something wrong with them. He’s also insisting that his drinking is completely normal, even when he has had several very direct consequences from it and has resorted to drinking in secret as opposed to just not drinking at all when in group situations. It’s unreal, and it’s equally unreal that Kristen - who has been outspoken about having faced abuse from previous partners - would defend this in any way. But she does. In many ways, Kristen idolizes Nia but she empathizes with Danny (a man who pressures his wife into having sex with him), just as she does many of the flawed men of Vanderpump Rules and The Valley, because she sees herself more in them. They drink too much, they’re argumentative, they can at times be violent or volatile. These are all all qualities Kristen has, and I think is tortured by. She doesn’t want to be like Jax Taylor, she wants to be like Nia - and so anyone coming at Nia is them also coming at the Kristen she wants to be in her heart of hearts. And if the person you’re desperate to be is not immune from criticism and has faults of her own then what’s going to incentivize you to change, or want to be better? Kristen needs Nia to be beyond reproach because she needs to believe there’s a possibility she too could be beyond reproach.

But nobody should be immune from owning up to their mistakes. Danny and Nia want to continue to blame Janet, who has ceased talking about either of them save for explaining why she was triggered by Danny in the first place. In the most recent episode Danny has what seemed to be a pretty calm and collected discussion with Michelle about why she thinks he makes people feel “un-comfort-a-bull”, and when told that Janet is not talking badly about him he runs around the entire party yelling about how Michelle is projecting on him and all these women are just out to humiliate him. In response, Nia yells at Lala for daring to try and get Danny to understand what the actual problem is (i.e.: he did a bad thing and is refusing to materially change the behaviors that caused it) and storms out of the party with Kristen on her heels while Danny belittles Lala for not having a husband. Together they identify that actually this is all Janet’s fault, and she must have a spell on everyone. It’s so MAGA-coded. Yes, you’re sooo right, the person you’ve isolated and mocked and de-humanized is the problem and they’re the one hurting you. I love it here!

For the record, I think I am a shooter for Janet because I react to conflict in the same way she does. When I feel as though I’ve hit the wall with someone, or a conversation has outlived its effectiveness, all I can do is walk away. If someone is committed to misunderstanding you, or mischaracterizing what you’re saying, or not willing to accept your apology, why should you stay? Let the relationship be what it is, at a certain point. And if Kristen came at me doing a Lindy West “na-na-na-boo-boo” baby voice trying to make me feel stupid I too would say “check, please!”. The second somebody you’re in an argument with starts repeating what you’re saying to them in a silly voice just walk away and know that you’ve won. It’s the most embarrassing behavior I’ve ever seen.

Another reason I wanted to revisit The Valley was a scene that also took place last episode. In it, Janet revealed to Lala that when she was a pre-teen (she was 12) she experienced sexual assault, and that although she thought she had dealt with the trauma of it she now sees that her reactions to Danny last year were definitely linked to the unresolved issues she carries from the incident. It was a moving scene, and it made me feel all the sorrier for her as I’m sure the ways in which people talked about her last season compounded her lingering trauma response. Later on, we see the tail end of a conversation she had with Tom Schwartz and Jesse, in which she is explaining that she knows her reaction to some of the things Danny did was overblown, but that to her it was proportional because of her own experiences of sexual assault. Jesse, for once, seemed to earnestly hear her and take her in, and acknowledged that hearing her experience made him see the situation differently than before. Schwartz, being Schwartz, starts to say he sympathized but didn’t understand because to his mind everything with Danny was resolved, only for Janet to respond: “it’s different when you’re a woman.”

The fact that Janet needed to recount this incident on camera in order to humanize herself is extremely disheartening to me, as I think it should be to all women. I should not have to convince you that I am a human being worthy of respect by recounting one of the worst things that ever happened to me. It should not be a question of tearing open my chest to convince people that I bleed. Men are always saying “I imagined how I’d feel if my insert female family member was assaulted and now I understand!” when in reality they’re just admitting that unless a woman is close to them in a material way they are not full humans. Personhood should be a guarantee, and the respect that comes with that should be a given. I’m not arguing that Janet should be beyond rebuke because she was raped, but the ways in which women continuously need to prove that they are full people who have been hurt in order to be granted an ounce of humanity is honestly devastating. And even then, it doesn’t always happen. Once again, Amber Heard told the story of her rape and people made TikTok’s making fun of it. We live in a sick world.

What Danny, Nia, Kristen, Luke, and Jesse feel like they can get away with because all last year they let us paint Janet as the one who actually caused all of this turmoil is crazy. I know I’ve said it once before, but it’s devastating. You can no longer share a story to give context for where you were coming from because that’s manipulative. You can’t walk away from a room of people yelling at you because that’s not taking accountability. You can’t apologize because you didn’t really mean it, probably. At a certain point you can do no right, and that’s exactly how they want it. If you’re wrong then they are right, and if they’re right they don’t need to face the cage they’ve put themselves in.

Kristen should know this. But she’s lost in a labyrinth of her own making, where doors lead to other doors and one fight begets another. She has no permanence for the decisions that she’s made to take her to this situation, and instead seeks to blame others for putting her here. It’s easy, when we feel out of control, to look to other people for guidance, and she has done so with Danny and Nia. But the truth is, Danny and Nia are just as messy as everybody else, and if she doesn’t know that now she might never know it. That’s a trademark of Kristen too, that if she loves you enough she’ll act like she doesn’t see the harm that you cause, like how she rode for Jax, defended some of Brittany’s poor actions, and how she’s still finding ways to defend what Danny did even at the expense of longstanding friendships with Jasmine, Zack, and Brittany. Kristen is a hypocrite of the most acute kind, and it’s becoming increasingly unwatchable. Continuing to lionize people who don’t deserve it is going to land her exactly where she started on The Valley - let us remember she was fired from Vanderpump Rules for filing a false police report on a black co-worker to accuse of her of things she never did, all because this woman slept with Jax while he was with Brittany. That’s the kind of behavior that should have sparked a complete overhaul of your value system, how you respond to conflict, and how you form attachments to your friends, and yet Kristen seems to have done none of this work. She is the same bitch she always has been, and she’s not even ashamed of it. Word on the street is that at the reunion she’s planning to attack Janet for the “timing” of her bringing up her assault story on camera. She has learned Nothing.

Stop being a fucking loser, Kristen. Stop defending and aligning yourself with misogynists. You will never be Nia, because Nia does not exist in the same way many Trad-wives do not exist. She’s a construction that will one day have to be destroyed and rearranged to resemble a whole person - she's a woman who used being homeless as a child to tuck-and-roll out of holding her husband accountable for his drinking and then turned around and called unhoused people sleeping in a park an “infestation” that was going to harm her children. On season one of The Valley you accused Jesse of being abusive because he hit a table, and now you’re conspiring with him to question a woman’s trauma. You talked about being pushed into bushes and physically assaulted by a boyfriend, and now you defend Danny’s right to be rude to his wife and physical with your friends. You spread rumors about Janet’s marriage last season, and rumors about Michelle and Jesse’s the year before. You abandoned a good friend to take up for someone who doesn’t deserve it. You are in a labyrinth, but you’re also at the bottom of a deep, black pit and nobody put you here but you.

There is one memory I return to with Kristen that makes me think there could, in one universe, be hope for her. Ironically, it’s something that didn’t even happen on camera. It happened on the cast trip to Mexico in season 6, on the night where the cast convinced themselves that she and James hooked up (for the record, I never really believed that). They all got wasted, went clubbing, probably scored some primo drugs, and slowly they all faded off into the night. James described everyone going off to bed in the early hours of the morning, leaving just him, Schwartz, and Kristen. He described Kristen hanging out in the shallow end of a pool, not speaking, listening to Fleetwood Mac on her phone.

I have been Kristen in that moment so many fucking times. She had to have been listening to “Landslide.”

We’re all afraid of changing, Kristen. But we do. We have to.

Truly I struggled about whether I wanted to write about Taylor Frankie Paul’s recent domestic violence scandal and subsequent ousting from The Bachelorette, or if I wanted to jump on the hater train for Lindy West’s new memoir (or, as Oswald Cox would say: mem-wah). Both of these things are triggering in specific ways, and certainly because I’m slow as fuck to write about things both of these topics will have ceased being interesting to anyone who isn’t my flavor of autistic by the time this comes out. Alas.

Ultimately I’ve chosen the latter, as the particularly grotesque miasma that fills my proverbial nostrils at remembering what Feminism used to mean in the mid-2010’s makes me want to roll myself up into a carpet and die. Not even necessarily because I look back on those halcyon days of Jezebel, pink pussy hats, or Beyoncé in front of the big “feminist” with embarrassment. I am, before all things, a hater. The idealism and hope that characterized the bulk of Millennials is not absent from me (I too watched Yo-Yo Ma play the cello at Obama’s inauguration) but it certainly seems paler than others, and I think it always has been. I can’t explain why other than so say I’m mentally ill, I never met a sunny day I didn’t want to throw clouds into. And yet, I do find myself a little melancholy at the realization that whatever systems of recognizing and trying to understand difference we might one day have been trying to build are dead. Make no mistake, it died by its own hand, but still it strikes me as sad and hollow.

It’s impossible for a movement of real change to be so rigid in its expectations of people and systems, two very famously unpredictable things. When people decry the liberal tendency to tone police, or interject wokescolding in benign situations, or throw soup in museums I completely get it. Millennials have always wanted it both ways - we want to be the heroic rebels, but we also want to be the only normal ones on the room. Of course, making ourselves the normal ones in the room places the onus on us to popularize our politics, beliefs, and way of living, and the unfortunate fact of life is that there are a lot of other people on earth that have discovered a way of living that works for them, and they don’t particularly want to switch it up. It was a losing battle for a generation of snowflakes (lol). We were never going to convince the wider world that we knew something they didn’t know, but I maintain our intentions were good. We did our best to locate the issues that mattered, and I still feel a lot of those issues keenly in a way I feel we’re all being tempted to forget about, from doom scrolling on Reddit to wandering into the wrong conversation at a bar. Something’s gone.

I’ve suspected things were gone a lot longer than just the past week, but certain things have frozen this into sharp relief. There have been things I’ve read in the last few days about Lindy West that could not have been said openly a decade ago, and I’m not so sure that that’s a good thing, or that it’s evidence of a freedom of speech from the tight restrictions of political correctness. To me, it reads as people allowing themselves to drop dirt onto the grave of Millennial feminism one nasty comment at a time.

So, Lindy West.

If you’re reading this Substack you probably don’t know who Lindy West is (because I think really only my family reads this and though I do love you I don’t think you could pick Gloria Steinem out of a line-up). In short, she is a writer of the mid-2010’s who has gained significant notoriety for writing about being fat, intersectional feminism, and more recently about her personal life. At the peak of her popularity I wasn’t that familiar with her, but she was one of many chronically online “feminist icons” we were served up as young women trying to navigate burgeoning adulthood, sexuality, and justice (Lena Dunham has been invoked in the more recent conversations a lot). I certainly was aware of her book Shrill, and I watched at least the first season of the show that was adapted from it in 2019 starring Aidy Bryant, but as my life transitioned to be less online I slowly but surely lost track of Lindy.

These past few weeks have been a sort of catch-up for me.

To start: Lindy has just published her newest memoir (she’s written a few different collections of personal essays that to my mind might as well be formal memoirs), Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane, and it has caused quite a stir. In it she details how her husband, the musician Ahamefule Oluo (who uses both they/them and he/him pronouns, but I'll use he/him for consistency), met and fell in love with another woman, Roya Amirsoleymani, and how Lindy dealt with this by embarking on a cross-country road trip that culminated in her agreeing to a polyamorous relationship. Personally, this sounds like a great memoir! I’m one of the many people that found a lot of spiritual catharsis in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (even though I hike zero), which is all about a woman taking to the trees to figure her shit out, so a story of a woman outside of the every day searching for truth is one I will always resonate with.

However, from what I’ve been able to glean from the audiobook this isn’t exactly what’s happening here.

Lindy seems to spend the bulk of the trip trying to convince herself that her life back at home, where Aham and Roya are effectively shacked up together, is actually totally fine and that she should get over being upset that he wants to open their marriage up. This story is much less of a woman discovering her own truth than a woman convincing herself of somebody else’s truth. I hold space for the idea that this situation is very complex, and perhaps even Lindy is simply struggling with the language for it, but to listen to the way she speaks about the situation makes this seem disingenuous. It begs the question why she wanted to go on a road trip at all, as the whole time it really does seem as though she never had any intention of figuring her life out, or of potentially leaving her partner. It seems as though she’d rather just…not be at home while her partner and his new lover are there. I guess in that case, yes, take to the van, girl. But also she doesn’t really seem like she enjoyed a portion of this soul searching road trip, anyway, so she mind as well have fucking stayed and just allowed herself to be bummed out in the comfort of her own home. Better than spending pages upon pages looking down on the other residents of this country who are just minding their own business, because believe you me she spend an inordinate portion of the re-telling of this trip lingering on wondering whether the people she encounters voted for Trump. A very good podcast, Feminine Chaos, characterized her attitude on this road trip as “belligerently incurious” which is more of a roast than I could ever hope to fire up.

Truthfully, I don’t believe that she’s as recovered from the original sin of Aham’s first revelation of betrayal as she wants us to believe she is, or perhaps wants him to believe she is. The descriptions of his actions in the book are…horrible? He seems like a complete prick? And yet Lindy is constantly throwing her body in front of him at the slightest criticism from the public crying: “no, leave him alone!” like a noble martyr. There must be, to my mind, some satisfaction for her as a woman whose husband left her in spirit if not in body to place him on the pillory for the battery of the public just so she can look better. In a post-Scandoval world a woman who appears to have been wronged is instantly lionized as emblematic of a particular type of female suffering, which is something that unites her with anybody who has at one point felt jilted or hurt by a partner. Unfortunately, the consensus seems to be that Aham is a villain and Lindy is his stooge, and I find it hard to believe she wrote it that way completely unwittingly. What a bitter revenge, that the only way you can make your actions sympathetic is to portray yourself as a hapless dumbass (look no further than the cover of the book - this is a humiliation kink at work).

My primary issue with Lindy West and her partners is not their polyamory - I’ve known people in such dynamics, and I know that they work and that people feel deeply fulfilled and happy inside of them, to the extent that I find the core base of people decrying Lindy’s situation with her family a little mealy mouthed. They’re trying to criticize something else when they criticize her polyamory, be that her weight, her politics, her attitude, etc. Treating poly arrangements like the stuff of deviants and freaks is only lifting up the patriarchy more - which is the last thing we need in this day and age, my Millennial ass maintains. What do people really care about someone else’s relationship? My relationship is probably a mystery to my parents, my parents relationship is a mystery to me, it goes on, and on, and on. I feel the opinions of those who take issue with the manner in which this arrangement was floated to her are in far better faith than the people who want to act as though there are not poly relationships that are stable and filled with love, because that’s just factually untrue. What the critiques of that side of the spectrum land on is two-pronged, and I think both are worth considering: one, that being poly is something that should be discussed and felt out openly and with the full support and consent of all partners, and two, that if someone needs to be convinced to be poly that the dynamic is fundamentally flawed.

It’s clear from the book that Lindy was blindsided by Aham’s suggestion that if they were going to be together they would need to be in an open relationship because he wasn’t comfortable in monogamous relationships. If you remember acclaimed HBO property Succession, this conversation sounds a lot like how Shiv floated having an open relationship with Tom on their wedding night. I need at least two books about Aham’s life, because the lore that’s at play here is - I think - crucial to getting at why this all happened the way it did. Aham had at that point been married and divorced twice by the age of 27, and one of the excuses he provided as to why he wanted to be poly implied that monogamy is coded racism (once again, I will lean heavily on the idea that maybe Lindy just isn’t articulating this properly). In any case, Lindy did not actually agree to be poly, but she reticently backed herself into the corner of “if you’re going to be with other people just don’t tell me”, which is not consent to as complex and varied an arrangement like being poly can be. From here, she learns Aham is seeing two different women via DM’s from a fan of hers (yikes), and she makes reference to a period of time in which Aham might have been struggling, but we get zero details about what that could mean.

We do, however, get lots of coverage for Lindy’s betrayal and insecurity and fear of abandonment in response to this. She really, really seemed tortured by the suggestion that she would not be enough for him, which - as a fellow fatty - is something that would (and has) triggered me as well. Lindy has talked a lot previously about how growing up fat has instilled in her this idea that the only way anybody will ever love you is if you lose weight, and I’m sure the fact that Roya is a very conventionally attractive (read: thin) woman was an agent of extreme chaos in her self-confidence. Let it not escape the readers notice that every time Lindy speaks about Roya she emphasizes how small she is, which is obviously commentary on how big Lindy thinks that her own body is - which is itself a bitter disappointment, that this totemic feminist thinker of her age spends so much energy invoking her partners looks instead of her actual accomplishments. You walk away from the book knowing next to nothing about Roya save for the fact that apparently she’s small as shit and hot, which are normal qualities but are not the ones I would expect a woman who identifies as a feminist to linger on.

In the words of Odette, the Swan Princess: is beauty all that matters to you??

It should have been the most interesting part of the book, how this woman who for years was touted as the face of body positivity and feminism found her way back to loving herself, but the conclusion rings so hollow. Effectively the book ends with her agreeing to be poly, getting on antidepressants, and happily allowing herself to be moved into the second bedroom with a cavalcade of stuffed animals (?!?!?!) while Aham and Roya sleep together in the master. She’s since wept in taped interviews about how bad she felt “forcing” Aham to try and be the kind of partner she needed instead of changing herself to be the partner he wanted.

Woof.

In short: I have reservations about why Lindy agreed to this arrangement, but ultimately that’s something only she can understand. People using this specific instance to demonize all poly relationships are pedestrian - do we say that monogamy is clearly a farce every time a famous couple splits? No. People punching down on polyamory read to me like people that just need to confront their own internalized shame and prejudice - it’s 2026, read The Ethical Slut and shut the fuck up.

Besides, the people who were criticizing Lindy, Aham, and Roya a few weeks back clearly jumped the gun lol

What really revved my engine up, and had me thinking about the futility of Lindy West as a feminist icon of a bygone era, was the reaction to the Slate review of Adult Braces. The journalist Scaachi Koul interviewed Lindy, Aham, and Roya, and published what many people believe to be a pretty evenhanded take on the book and on West as a person (other publications have definitely not been as kind) two weeks ago. Yesterday a note was added via the publication to address a series of emails that West, Aham, and Roya all sent to the author taking issue with their individual portrayals in the piece. Aham’s especially is notable for how nasty and unnecessary it was towards the author personally, including calling her a “bitter, untalented mean girl”. Side note, but can we stop referring to people generally as mean girls in 2026? It’s so fucking lame and juvenile, and really just reads like you want someone to smack a lunch tray out of your hands. He went on to decry the language used to describe why he was away from the house at the time of the interview, which is…what was Koul supposed to say? She described him as being away with Roya as they worked on a shared project, which he took to be demeaning of his work as a musician. Because, as we all know, the profile piece about his wife really should have been about his struggles as an artist. He also posted several Instagram stories in which he seemed to be trying to take credit for helping Lindy write the book, and waxing on about what a good person he is, and I just have to say I do not trust this persons variation of feminism if this is how he reacts to criticism.

Roya’s email followed the same train of thought, including implying that the author (who is of Indian descent and has written of her own experiences with shadism) was “anti-black”, and that nobody even reads Slate anyway. I’ll say, her reaction caught me the most off guard because she’s been fairly quiet in regards to this whole situation, clearly preferring to remain private, but to pop out the gate with an accusation of racism because someone accurately described the actions of your partner is, honestly, nuts. West’s response, typically, is the most pathetic as she hold the line and implies it’s somehow inappropriate to criticize Roya because it’s about to be the Persian New Year and the U.S. is at war with Iran. I will say, that little nugget convinced me maybe Lindy does think it’s an act of anti-racism to be poly. She followed it up with a frankly really embarrassing Instagram story in which she’s trying to troll the haters by doing a baby voiced impression of their dissatisfaction with her work but instead just seems like she’s spiraling out. Yeah, hearing the definitive feminist voice of a certain era of our existence doing a “na-na-na-boo-boo” baby voice while deflecting criticism of her book all about her husband who broke her trust is…fairly damning.

By now it’s clear to me that West’s feminism is perhaps as shaky as her understanding of her own relationship, and by extension her relationship with herself. It’s something that in the right hands makes incredible art, because nobody can argue that being a feminist is hard and there are a lot of spaces to ethically navigate. However, where West has landed with all of this is alienating to the very people that gave her a platform in the first place. You can preach self-respect and self-acceptance, but if you do no work to employ those messages in your own life why would anybody give you the time of day? It’s like taking a creativity workshop from Caroline Calloway, or indeed following any member of the Manosphere’s advice on improving your relationships with women. And then, when faced with the opportunity to illustrate why your choices are somehow exemplary of intersectional feminist thought, you fumble the bag and choose to blame your audience? No, ma’am. Nobody I’ve seen is taking her words, or her version of this story, in bad faith. They are simply reacting to the story as she herself is telling it, which is overwhelmingly bleak.

This is what Lindy West is doing in the reaction that her book is garnering: she’s trying to convince us that we’re misconstruing her words, that she’s fine, and that the only reason we’re critiquing her is because we hate poly people and are probably racist. If I told a story about my wife telling me I looked better with curly hair rather than straight hair and people lost their minds and tried to cancel her I would be obligated to defend her because I said something that mischaracterized what she said to a wide audience. However, if I told the same stary with the added context that she said my head looked square when my hair was straightened and she got cancelled for it my only excuse would be “my head does look square, though!”, which is not a great argument against why my wife deserves to be cancelled. She’s never said that, by the way, it’s just something I’m insecure about (become a paid subscriber today).

Subscribe now

Lindy, it’s nice to meet you. I’m a big, fat dyke who majored in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. I know and love people who are in poly relationships. I oppose racism. Now that I’ve set this groundwork, come close to me…you’re delusional.

There’s a piece of pseudo-advice that writers are often handed, which is to “kill your darlings”. Its attributions are debated, but the primary understanding of its meaning is that the little scenes the writer inserts into the story purely for their own edification or pleasure often should be the first things to go. Your favorite part of the story may be the least necessary part in terms of pacing or plot, and so you have to get rid of it even if you love it. I struggle with this about as much as any writer, but I think Lindy West does, too. Although killing your darlings is often something employed in fiction I think it’s advice she should have taken to heart in regards to writing this book, and its subsequent backlash. She included every depressing detail of her reaction to Aham’s initial relationships, and she included a lot, a lot, a lot of real estate for why Aham does not seem kind or trustworthy. If she really didn’t want us to walk away hating her partner she did not have to characterize him this way. She should have been more discerning. She should have killed her darlings. But she didn’t, and is instead choosing to blame everyone else for reacting exactly the way she told us to.

Millennial feminism is emblematic of the exact kind of toxicity that’s inherent to the way all members of this poly-fuck have reacted to the criticism of West’s book. If anyone says something unfavorable about Aham they are actually unable to recognize their own prejudice towards POC, or they’re mindlessly dunking on the poly way of life, or both at once. I’ve read many pieces on this here website that basically claim this situation is “woke gone too far”, and I hate that viewpoint but I understand the shape of its bones. Millennials are annoying. The ways in which we perform our identities is annoying. That’s not to say we’re wrong, or need to tone it down, or that we should all assimilate into wider normie culture because I too would fail at that. But it’s a fact that Millennials take the heat for being outspoken, eating all the avocados, and killing chain restaurants (not me, though, I love chains), and our pink and blue hair and our overabundance of dumbass stuffies makes us look fucking annoying. I can’t wait until we all have so many rights as human beings that it will be okay to openly recognize this (see, I am a Millennial - I still think we'll all have rights in six months!).

So, yes. Lindy West is annoying and she probably always was. However, there is a particular shade of the reaction to her that’s hitting quite close to home, and which I think is truly the reason why feminism as we know it is bleeding out. See, there have been trolls since mankind figured out how gratifying it was to clown on each other. Lindy West is no stranger to trolls (she actually had a conversation with her biggest troll on an episode of This American Life), and I’m sure this is nothing new to her. But almost from the jump, the reporting on this story has been inordinately fixated on the perfect intersection of the worst thoughts mouth-breathers and Republicans have about their biggest enemies: not only is Lindy West a loud, feminist woman, not only is she in a three-way poly relationship, not only are her partners people of color, but no. Something worse. She’s fat while she does it.

Comment sections about Lindy West have always been cesspools of fatshaming and fatphobia, and never more so than in the wake of her memoir. People openly speculate about how Aham can stand to have sex with her, how she doesn’t crush Roya when they sleep together, how anyone could possibly find her attractive. It’s the cruel joke of it all, because Lindy West is beautiful to me. She has beautiful hair, nice looking skin, a pretty face, and awesome style. And yet, she will forever be an unfuckable, obese ghoul not only because she’s fat but also because she’s annoying, and loud, and the easiest way to cut someone down when they threaten your sense of normality is to insult their appearance. For a while this kind of behavior was frowned upon by the larger culture because it’s pretty brazenly nasty and unkind, and yet more recently it’s become de rigeur in order to be seen as edgy, clued in, or pushing the envelope. We have a network of podcasters and social media clout goblins that see fatshaming as simply the first circle of hell for anyone who wants to participate in public life, and as a result we focus on weight now more than ever before. Lindy West, again, should be no stranger to bullshit like this, but the ease with which people are allowed to attack her weight and her appearance has not heretofore been so simple.

It should be noted that not too long ago Elizabeth Gilbert was on a book tour not dissimilar to West’s for her recent memoir All the Way to the River, a book in which she openly admits to sourcing drugs for her dying, drug-addicted girlfriend. There’s even a prolonged anecdote about how Gilbert planned to murder her girlfriend and the only reason she didn’t was because her girlfriend somehow realized what she was planning. This caused many news stories, yes, and yet I don't recall the public outrage being so breathless and so inescapable for Elizabeth Gilbert, a conventionally attractive (again, read: thin) woman. It’s very easy for everyone to collectively #own Lindy West because she’s fat, whereas Elizabeth Gilbert, who has sinned in just as many unimpeachable ways, has been allowed to skate past critiques for decades. I don’t think it all comes down to looks with Elizabeth Gilbert, but it’s an element that can’t go unmentioned. Between All the Way to the River, Amy Griffin’s The Tell (google the rumors, they’re a doozy), and Adult Braces this has actually been an awesome year for controversial memoirists.

An element that I think is particularly irritating to me is the many, many commenters who interrogate why West doesn’t just get on GLP’s like every other fucking person in the country. There’s a lot to break down here, but to begin with the simple one: if you’re trying to be prescribed a GLP by a licensed professional it’s not as easy as it looks. My own doctor attempted to put me on them for health reasons unrelated to my weight, and very quickly it was reported my insurance wouldn’t cover the cost, and the cost itself was not insignificant. Second, even if you try to go through a secondary route in obtaining a GLP (as many do) either through a third party website or by buying the compound directly from China it still costs you every month, or every few months, to do so. West, among other things, has been speculated to not be very responsible with her money (she’s a NYT Bestselling author, has a television show based off her life, and has sold thousands of books but her credit limit is $500), so I don’t know if she’s in a position to pay an unspecified amount each month for such a medication. And third…maybe she just doesn’t want to? I know that sounds crazy, as she reads as incredibly insecure, but I know better than others how you can oscillate between hating your weight and feeling completely happy with your weight.

It simply depends on the day.

The first time I knew definitively that I was fat was when I was either 8 or 9.

My nephew isn’t in this memory, and his birth is the touchstone on which I can delineate my capital-C Childhood and my post-Him childhood. He was born when I was 10 (he is ten years younger than I am, my sister is ten years older than I am, it’s very comforting math), so I must assume that this memory is from the ages in which I was beginning to retain memories between the odd liminality of my Make Believe world and the Real World. I was old enough to know that I loved Taco Bell, and because my brother and sister were older teenagers that basically made Taco Bell their patron saint for a period of time.

I don’t remember what I ate that day, but it must have been a lot.

It must have been, because I remember my father storming into our Dining Room (he was always storming in places - now that he’s retired he shuffles) to see me lazing back in a post-Bell euphoria. There were probably a lot of reasons why he was mad that had nothing to do with me, and indeed it did not take a lot to piss my dad off back then, but I remember clearly his disgust at me having eaten. He said clearly “look at her stomach!” in that way my dad spoke when he was outraged by other people, like he had seen a dent in his truck bumper.

Yeah, that was when I knew I was fat.

In a way I should thank my dad, because at least his candor in declaring to our family that I was a 9-year old porker readied me for my whole elementary school class to try and use that to hurt my feelings. It’s hard for a fellow child to land the same plane that a forty-something year old man can, so I can’t really blame my classmates for trying. The positive of this situation is that I developed a personality way earlier than my peers simply as a defense mechanism - I remember one of my classmates walking up to me after a botched mile run during Track and Field and her, with concern apparent in her eyes, telling me one of the other girls was calling me a fatass. In response I told her to tell that girl she was a fucking loser (I was an early cusser, blame having older siblings and an Irish father).

It was a sobering experience for a child to go through, but I was going to experience it no matter what. I think most average children (that being: able-bodied, white, middle class, non-fat, etc.) can skate through childhood and adolescence and only come to the realization that they are not special, or beautiful, after a traumatizing event in college. Some men never have this happen to them, which I think escapes their notice. But women in particular get to exist as pretty little girls a lot longer than they naturally should simply by virtue of the ways society treats a pretty little girl. Having been fat from a young age that bubble was popped for me perhaps before I was really ready for it - I was still young enough that I played with dolls, that I had fantasies of being a beautiful princess, or thoughts that maybe boys might like me.

The discovery that I was fat punctured that part of my childhood. I stopped being a character in my own Make Believe scenarios because I couldn’t stand to linger too long on imaginary observations of my form (this was when I started writing stories about other people). I told myself I needed to come to terms with the fact that because I wasn’t beautiful - because being fat meant being ugly - there was no way anybody could ever love me.

As a result, my puberty was a veritable minefield of hatred and ugliness. My reasoning was that because I was fat and had braces I didn’t need to take care of myself because it was all a wash anyway, and as a result I had voluminous acne, I wore my hair in the same ponytail for a year straight (I brushed around the hair tie lol how crazy is that), and I rarely ever changed my clothes. It was like being a hermit in Ancient Greece - I think I was trying to prove something, but the lack of recognition of what I was trying to say only made me angrier. I was an intensely angry teenager, and I think at the core it was because I knew there was something I could never be. When I would be forced to be around my cousins I would be so deeply resentful, because I have a girl cousin who is around my age and she mastered hair and makeup and had a social life decades before I did, and I could tell she had a rapport (especially with my sister) that I just didn’t have and perhaps never would. They were both beautiful, and that was a cheat code that I couldn’t incorporate. I was more comfortable around freaks, or misfits, and obviously this led me to being a Theatre Kid from a young age.

There are probably people who will read this who knew me as a High School student who will quizzically be like “but you weren’t fat!!” in that desperate, sharp way people often try to tell you that you weren’t fat, but by then it didn’t really matter what I was. Not to me, at least. When you’ve gone through an adolescence, puberty, and young adulthood as a fatty there is nothing outside of Satan himself shaking you by the shoulders that will convince you that you aren’t fat. My hormones levelled out for a brief, shining moment and as a result I was slightly less fat than I was before. Big whoop. I still wasn’t thin, and if you aren’t thin then you’re fat. It isn’t even a question of ‘you might as well be fat’ - no, if you are not thin then you are categorically fat. Don’t be mad at me, I didn’t create society. In complete honesty, I felt fatter in High School than I am right now, which is ample, because from a young age I stopped being able to see my body as it actually was. This is an issue I think most women, even thin women, have. We’ve become so warped that our bodies are just impressions on impressions, hunks of fat and gristle to cut off and throw to the dogs, even if we’re nothing but powdery flesh atop sharpened bones. Someone made the point that just a few months ago we were all gaga over how amazing Catherine O’Hara looked in one of her last red carpet appearances before her death, completely missing the context that she was thin because she was horrifically ill and dying. This is where we are.

In college I ate pizza, and virtually nothing else. Was that an eating disorder? I refused to snack and would almost absentmindedly turn down food that was offered to me because of my anxiety at having people observe me eating. Was that an eating disorder? My Junior year I finally had my own room, I would return from rehearsal or classes late at night and I would fill a coffee mug up with red wine and drink it very fast just to stomach eating chickpeas out of a can. Was that an eating disorder? Sometimes, today, I go days with dinner being my only meal. Is this an eating disorder?

It couldn’t be one. I’m fat.

What I saw people saying about Lindy West really disturbed me. Not because I thought we had somehow moved beyond fatshaming, or because I expected more from the internet, or anything like that. Mostly I was disturbed by how few people were coming out to defend her against such insults. Maybe with this memoir she really has burned the last bridge for her audience, and I certainly wouldn’t blame them because that’s something Lindy did herself. However, there will never be a part of me that sees a woman being completely trashed because of the way she looks and want to join on the fun, and you’ll never convince me it’s acceptable to do so. Maybe it’s Millennial cringe of me, but I’d rather hold someone to account for their actions rather than their appearance. To my mind, criticism of Lindy West is proving that the era in which she defined her brand of feminism is gone. You can now fatshame with impunity, and you can openly discuss why a woman would choose antidepressants over her supposed “wifely” duties of sleeping with her husband. I think the real thing that’s making Millennial feminism look bad is not Lindy West, but how quickly people have reverted back to being openly cynical about alternative lifestyles and openly hateful of fat people.

I would rather get dinner with the most embarrassing polycule that ever walked the earth than spend five minutes with someone who thinks their “weight loss journey” is the most interesting thing about themselves. But that’s just big, fat me.

I’ve talked slightly about religion before, to the extent that you might be tempted to think it actually factors into my everyday life. It doesn’t.

Like many lesbians, I was raised with semi-religion depending on the day of the week and eventually grew out of taking God into consideration for anything by the time I was a teenager. Unlike my siblings I didn’t even attend Catholic school, and so transitioned neatly into looking at the T.V. as my one true God. My parents, however, stuck with the grift at least until I was in High School and would cart the family off to church on Sunday mornings after a long week of being Themselves. I was a distractible and attention seeking pain as a kid, and my (often hungover) parents wriggled out of making sure I was absorbing the priests teachings by tossing me religious books to thumb through. The books were often far more interesting than whatever the creep in the robe was droning about, and usually they had slightly illicit words like “damn” or “hell” for me to go ooooooh at.

One of my favorites was the story of the Prodigal Son, even though the illustration of the son in question annoyed me because he had a bright yellow turban and I was unclear on yellow until I hit my hippie phase. For the fellow blasphemers, the story of the Prodigal Son basically goes: a rich man has two sons and one day he gives them each an inheritance. One son, wearing the Main Character turban, immediately hits the town with his money and blows it on what we can only assume is booze and women. Quickly penniless, he has to work in a pig pen or something and it sucks and he’s very, very afraid to go back to his father and admit that he wasted the money and made mistakes. Finally he does go home and his father is so happy to have his son back that he throws a rager. The other son, in a truly relatable fashion, goes “dad what the fuck he’s a loser”, but the father doesn’t care because he loves his son and is just happy he’s home. The whole thing is an analogy for the complete love of God, forgiveness, blah, blah, blah.

If I’m permitted to write Bible fanfiction for a moment: what if the Prodigal Son had left his father’s house and been better? What if staying in the house was actively making him worse, and the only way for him to grow was to move into the world, as imperfect and perilous as it is? What if the house is something that’s rotting the people who live in it, warping the way that they’re able to exist outside of it?

My metaphors are imperfect, yes the house is obviously the internet. My actual Bible fanfiction is better than that, I promise (it’s not, it’s about Ben-Hur lol). Point being, the internet is where we all live now, and when one has to come back to it they often have apologies to make. It’s now been a month since one of the residents of the Old Internet has returned, and there are no apologies in sight.

A lot has been said about Gabbie Hanna, but in a lot of ways Gabbie Hanna no longer exists.

In her place there’s a woman named Gabrielle Kroner - she’s a new wife, a devout Christian, a singer who supplements as a fitness instructor. She looks mature, and yet her face is still bright and glowingly youthful. Gone are the days of her bleached blonde bob and her loud, bloody lipstick. In the photos of her wedding to her husband, Robbie, she looks ecstatic and gorgeous in her long, ethereal gown, the two of them embracing against a dim sunset. In spite of everything that’s happened around her, this was often the outcome I really wanted for her: to move on, fall in love, and start living the life that it seemed she really wanted to live when she was trapped in the labyrinth of the internet. I was actually very happy for her.

But the loud, twitching, indignant Gabbie Hanna still lives in her. She appears every time Gabrielle Kroner opens her mouth.

The story of Gabbie Hanna is, in manner, similar to the Prodigal Son, or really any story from the Bible. In her excellent video essay on Gabbie, Madison Harnish of Cruel World Happy Mind described the story of her career as akin to the story of Icarus in Greek myth. It’s rare and indeed something kind of special to encounter a story as concise and predictable in its twists, turns, and morals as the story of Gabbie Hanna, and as such it’s a perfect story in which to analyze where we were and where we are now. Gabbie is young, and yet so much of her is trapped in time and place the same way people Of A Certain Age find themselves time-locked, unable to move forward for fear that the world around them has changed. Recently there’s been a trend on social media wherein people post photos reminiscing about what their lives looked like in 2016, and even though that was only a decade ago it feels as though so many things will never go back to the way they were - for people who hold themselves fast to a time and place this must be a traumatic fact. If the past few months of Gabbie Hanna’s resurgence has proved anything it is that in her head she is still very much alive in the hard and fast days of her initial cancellation: she speaks fast, she deflects, she becomes inflamed and blames the world for inflaming her, she looks for help in the wrong places.

Certainly this is the most bizarre part of Gabbie coming home to the internet, as I typically assume someone who has disappeared in whole or in part for a series of years has done some self work to manage their past and their present. But it seems that hasn’t been the case. The world closed the door on Gabbie a long time ago, like a toddler pitching a fit on the floor of a pantry, and here we are creaking the door open to see if she’s gotten it out of her system and instead we find all of our canned preserves shattered along the floor. And there Gabbie is, jam all over her face, deeply proud of herself for all she’s accomplished.

She’s been there the whole time, screaming and making a mess, we just moved on without her. Time flies, and like a sedentary vampire she’s stayed rooted to the moment everything went wrong. How did it go so, so wrong?

Nothing captures a sense of time and place for a generation of people than beginning a story with Vine. Vine was like TikTok but also not, for the people unfamiliar with life on this earth for the past twenty or so years. Gabbie hit it big on Vine in 2013 initially with character skits, and ultimately amassed a real following by both starting a story time YouTube channel and by joining forces with David Dobrik and his roving band of morons lighting themselves on fire for content. David Dobrik and his Vlog Squad were pretty horrible to Gabbie and would regularly rag on her and call her fat and insult her nose, but these were the days of casual internet misogyny where getting mad about a guy calling you fat was still cringe because we liked guys for some reason. Thankfully, Gabbie began to amass her own following apart from the Vlog Squad, and so her time affiliated with them is checkered only by her involvement with other confederates like Jason Nash and Trisha Paytas (more on her later). She had her own fans, her own deals, and her own personal style - but not so much so that she didn’t have early controversy for joke stealing, most infamously for a bit swiped from Louis C.K. For what it was worth, Gabbie did apologize pretty sincerely for the gaffe at the time and for the most part everyone was happy to let her move on. She was far from the first YouTuber to get in hot water over something like borrowing a joke for a bit.

Outside of a few mismanaged story times (one in which she told the story of someone in her High School who had died of an overdose), Gabbie was a fairly safe YouTuber with a distinct niche. She built her audience, and with that came an expansion of her professional circle. It was an odd era for YouTube - stars were being made of any halfway decent creator, and if something was proved to be passably funny it became a trend, such as Rap Battles (can you tell I don’t like them? lol I don’t like music comedy). One YouTuber who maximized his potential for an audience via the Rap Battle was a ne’er -do-well named RiceGum who made it his schtick to insult other YouTubers through raps like DJ James Kennedy from Vanderpump Rules. He did a rap insulting Gabbie and her appearance, and so when they ran into each other at a party it was sure to be a bad situation. Gabbie posted Snapchats of her and RiceGum at the party, jokingly challenging him to battle her and you can see he clearly would rather be left alone. She posted another, this time implying he was probably afraid to battle without a ghost writer. Next thing we know Gabbie is snapping from the balcony of the party, visibly shaken with tears in her eyes, claiming that RiceGum had hit her and broken her phone.

In my opinion, this is a good point in the history of Gabbie’s time on YouTube to bring up that Gabbie has alluded many times to some form of abuse in her past. A few scatological stories have been shared about her family growing up, but it’s a fact that Gabbie has been in at least one and potentially more severely abusive relationships (she’s written previously of being physically abused by a partner). According to her, she’s been diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and has additional anxiety, depression, and has struggled with eating disorders. Gabbie is a dysregulated person, which isn’t a bad thing at all, it’s just the base state at which she experiences the world. Anyone with these bedrock mental illnesses will understand that the world can be a traumatic place to move through depending on the regulation you’re able to accomplish over your moods, with chemical interference, therapeutic interference, both, or neither. Add onto this base layer a healthy serving of physical and mental abuse and secondary trauma and you can quickly see how a person’s view of events could be reflective of something that’s more about their trauma than not.

I say this because the situation with RiceGum became complicated in a way it didn’t need to be, and as a result Gabbie’s trust in the YouTube community was likely never the same. See, RiceGum admitted to taking and breaking her phone (which is unforgivable on its own) but he denied hitting Gabbie, and witnesses at the party corroborated his story. I don’t think we need a lot of added time to understand that it doesn’t really matter whether he hit her or just broke her phone because both are pretty unacceptable, but at the time a lot of people took RiceGum’s side and called Gabbie a liar. I don’t think Gabbie lied, to be clear, I think she’s a woman with past physical abuse who was triggered by a man being aggressive and physical towards her, but this was a minority opinion. RiceGum went on to write another rap about Gabbie tastefully entitled “I Didn’t Hit Her”, and none of Gabbie’s colleagues came to her defense about any of it. It’s the cruel realization most people come to in their own time, that their work friends are not real friends, but clearly this shook her to the core, and I can’t even say she was wrong for being shook. YouTube is purposefully intimate, and typically the creators that engender the most invested audiences are those who can manufacture authenticity, and that often includes fabricating a life and relationships for yourself that only exist for online consumption. It’s easy to understand that conceptually, but to have something scary and upsetting happen to you only to turn around and realize you’re on your own was probably incredibly isolating and sad.

Regardless of how we may now see the RiceGum situation, it did not do anything to mitigate the perception of Gabbie as someone who lied to manipulate her audience, something that was only going to get worse in her next public scandal. The scandal itself is fairly ridiculous, as most YouTube drama seems in a post-Dramageddon 1, 2, and 3 world, but essentially Gabbie (and a few other YouTubers) did a promo deal with a brand called Kenza Cosmetics promising her followers a deal of high-quality makeup brushes. Basically you were promised a cache of brushes valued at $80 for the price of $10, and if that seems too good to be true it’s because it was. The brushes themselves were pathetically poor quality, and Gabbie took a lot of heat for promoting such a product to her audience of (mostly young) fans, and her reaction to the criticism was less than understanding. In a video addressing the controversy she showed herself trying out all of the other products she had been sent to promote and hadn’t (which actually just made it look worse that it seemed like she picked the worst one to actually promote), and she famously instructed anyone who thought they were going to get such a good deal to “manage their expectations”, which is hilarious and pissed many, many people off.

I think the reaction to the brushes was as overblown as anything from that era of YouTube, especially anything even semi categorized as “makeup drama”, but a peculiar reputation was building around Gabbie. She was brash, outspoken, had a gift for speaking and endearing herself when she wanted to, but the moment she encountered any kind of criticism she would snap out like a turtle. Often she was deeply convinced of the purity of her own intentions, and believed that no matter what she did and how it came across she shouldn’t have to apologize because she didn't intend any harm. As a fire sign I resonate with this, but this is something you ideally grow out of as an adult. A skill imperative to living and engaging with humans is the capability to apologize, mean it, and to internalize what you did wrong and how you can avoid doing it again. If you stick a penny in a light socket the zap is all that should teach you not to do it again.

So, Gabbie has made harmless mistakes and overreactions. Nothing that’s had actual consequences on her life or the lives of other people. Perhaps it’s because these dramas were fairly inconsequential that when the worm turned again Gabbie had decidedly not learned her lesson, but this time her opponent was not makeup brushes or rap battles, but something far worse.

Trisha Paytas has been the rottweiler ripping at the pant leg of the internet since she first dropped to her kitchen floor crying in 2016, and there are very few more formidable enemies to have had on YouTube. I’ve historically had incredibly complex feelings about Trisha, which I think is common, but nobody can argue she was magnetic to watch with her bizarre quirks, her temper, her mouth that never seemed to stop moving. Circa 2017 Trisha had hooked up with and began a relationship with Jason Nash, a member of the Vlog Squad. Being a member of the Vlog Squad, Nash was also friends with Gabbie, who - upon hearing that Nash and Trisha had had sex - informed Nash that Trisha had herpes. She heard this from, of all people, Shane Dawson, who has never and will never miss an opportunity to talk shit on anyone and everything. Nash, obviously, relayed this to his new girlfriend who did not react well to hearing that a rumor about her having herpes was being spread in their friend group.

Once again, this is something that could be easily solved with a well-timed apology. But no, Gabbie is stubborn. She doubles-down on her behavior and refuses to admit to imperfection, even in situations where the stakes aren’t that high. She endorsed a bad product, all she had to do was apologize and move on. She endorsed a rumor that turned out to be untrue, all she had to do was apologize to Trisha and not perpetuate the rumor anymore.

As you can imagine, this isn’t what Gabbie did. Instead she hopped on Instagram and created a poll to ask her followers how they would feel if they found out their friend slept with someone who had “an incurable STD”. Her followers validated that she had been in the right, but it solidified the idea that Gabbie maintains to this day, which is she did nothing wrong and Trisha was just using an isolated incident to try and destroy her. Just last month Gabbie re-released a podcast she had done with Trisha where it’s clear they were on two very, very different pages about whatever friendship they may have had. Personally I think they’re both lying about different things in their history and ultimately they were both too sensitive to be friends with one another, but Gabbie maintained for a long time that she truly believed Trisha was going to cause her physical harm. In that podcast episode she highlighted Trisha specifically as one of “her abusers.” For her part, Trisha has for the most part stopped speaking about Gabbie (a hallmark of Trish, she hates you until she doesn’t), and when she has spoken of her she’s afforded her a lot of grace, something Gabbie still struggles to reciprocate. If only it could be that simple - for Gabbie it seemed even the most inconsequential of dramas was life and death.

Unfortunately, the next drama she became involved in was literally a matter of life and death.

Around 2019 Gabbie was filming a video with a friend about trying to turn herself into an E-girl (don’t ask me to explain, I probably can’t). She scrolled through images of girls in the style she wanted to replicate, lingered on one girl’s face for a moment, and commented that she liked her style before scrolling away.

This one moment ignited a firestorm that actually was darkly serious.

The girl that Gabbie had inadvertently shown in her video was a young girl named Bianca who had very recent to that videos filming been tragically and horribly murdered. When her followers made Gabbie aware, she blurred the girls face but left the video up, which for many signaled that she was callously choosing content over empathy. I don’t think that the situation is that simple, but she was called out in droves by drama channels, Angelika Oles in particular. Oles kept on with her criticism of Gabbie long after Gabbie herself apologized for the incident, and she is chief among the people that Gabbie blames for her reputation beginning to decline. The situation is altogether deeply sad and very complicated, and I unfortunately look at the first half of it as positive for Gabbie because she did earnestly apologize and tried to do the right thing. Unfortunately, she just refused to quite while she was ahead - she reached out to the girls family and asked them to put out a statement telling people to leave her alone, which is wildly inappropriate, she Streisand Effected herself into prolonged exposure by firing back at anything Angelika Oles said that even slightly seemed like it was about her. Basically, she took the death of this poor girl and made herself the victim.

That’s an unfortunate theme with all of Gabbie’s controversies - even in situations where she threw the first punch she will always paint herself as the victim. She behaved very, very badly on the set of the YouTube Premium show Escape the Night, and walked away from it telling people that she was the one badly treated even when there were numerous pieces of evidence to the contrary. Around this time she was getting serious about a potential music career and did an interview with Genius in which she sang and had a mishap with the microphones that transformed her into a meme, and though she tried to laugh it off it was clear she did not think this was funny and had decided in fact it was a deeply hurtful thing that people were doing specifically to harm her. It’s a paranoia I could only feel deep in my PMS. It’s a great comfort to me in my more vulnerable moments to remember that, in all likelihood, people are probably not thinking about me at all. This apparently is not the way Gabbie operates in the world - if she gets attention it’s because everyone on earth is out to get her, if people are not giving her attention then she’s somehow desperate to regain it. It’s actually infuriating (but not as infuriating as her multiple PUBLISHED attempts at poetry - become a paid subscriber today…).

Subscribe now

I really, really struggled in thinking how to appropriately transition from these relatively miniature dramas and into The Big One. In a lot of ways, this is probably how the people who were authentic fans of Gabbie felt when the information about Jessi initially came to light, because up until this point Gabbie was a figure that operated moreso in the gray than in binary black or white. She was difficult, she was complicated, she made very real mistakes and would hit back when pushed, but that’s also the traditional vocation of YouTubers. They get in fights and create drama and refuse to apologize - just like joke steaking, this is something a lot of other creators have dealt with and successfully come back from. But what happened with Jessi in many ways broke the way people were able to engage with Gabbie and her content, and it’s something that fundamentally altered Gabbie’s ability to discern between actual harm and petty grievance.

So, a brief (lol) history…

Jessi Smiles, like Gabbie, was a Vine creator who transitioned successfully into story time YouTube videos. At the time of her initial success in 2013 she was dating a fellow Viner named Curtis Lepore, but they broke up shortly after. After they broke up Jessi alleged that Curtis assaulted her while she was suffering from a head injury, and he was subsequently arrested. Though he pled down from rape to felony assault he was still sentenced to probation and community service for the crime, which is an absolutely nuts light sentence. Similarly to how people reacted to the RiceGum situation with Gabbie in the same era, many Viners and fellow YouTubers were not on Jessi’s side and instead took the side of the alleged rapist.

One of those people was Gabbie.

She tweeted a vague statement (“beware, beware, beware of a woman with a broken heart”) and replied to pushback with defenses of Lepore, despite not knowing him or Jessi. She tweeted multiple times the day the allegations were made public, defending her position with the fact that she knew “thousands” of girls in her hometown who had “cried rape”, including an instance in which a male friend of hers was accused, and it was never true. She later went back and deleted all of these tweets, but the replies to them remained up, eerie reminders of exactly how rancid her takes on the situation were. In a 2020 phone call with Jessi that was published in the midst of their fallout, Gabbie confirmed she primarily sided with Lepore because Jessi had blocked her on social media after she had made a joke about “taking her crown” on Vine. For the record, Gabbie denied that these tweets existed for literal years, but then when confronted about them in 2020 said that she had never denied anything. S i g h.

Despite this, she and Jessi finally met in 2014 and Gabbie apologized for the tweets, which Jessi accepted. The two had a deep but complex friendship for about a year, including a period in which they lived together, but the positive dynamic of their relationship was short-lived. In truth, they were both young, troubled, and addicted to social media, so their friendship was never in a million years going to be healthy, and certainly Jessi did things she probably regrets the same as Gabbie did. They both accused one another at different points of “using” the other for views or engagement, an accusation they’ve also both tried to dispute. Circa 2015 Gabbie was at a party with a gathering of fellow creators, many of whom were friends with Lepore, and Jessi took issue with Gabbie hanging out with the friends of her rapist, which to me seems fairly reasonable if someone is supposed to be your friend. Gabbie, of course, sees this as Jessi attempting to meddle with her livelihood because Gabbie relied on networking for her music and her other ventures, and infamously told Jessi “his friends didn’t rape you.”

So, this is a pretty unforgivable thing to say and do, and technically it should have been coffins for Gabbie then and there, but she always, always, always finds a way to make things worse for herself. I confess I’m unclear on if that Friends Party was the night Gabbie met Lepore in person, because every time she or Jessi speak about this situation it’s confusing and emotional, but there was a party in this period of time in which Gabbie and Lepore were both there. Lepore attempted to appeal to Gabbie’s now defunct friendship with Jessi by talking up Gabbie and talking down Jessi, and ultimately phone numbers were exchanged. In early 2015 Gabbie and Lepore had a FaceTime call with one another in which Lepore asked if he could share what happened from his perspective, and Gabbie allowed him to do so with the justification that if he said anything that didn’t match Jessi’s version of events she was going to “call him out”. According to Gabbie, his telling matched Jessi’s, she told him unequivocally that he had raped Jessi, but they continued to text each other a few times after that call. They allegedly took a photo together at a Vine event, but Gabbie asked for it to be deleted.

It’s especially jarring in the winter of 2026 to hear the way Gabbie speaks about this situation. To her mind, she allowed this interaction to happen because he’s a human being and everybody has a voice and deserves to be heard. It’s actually horrific and disgusting to hear her affording this man, this rapist, the kind of understanding that she refuses to extend to anyone else. We now live in a post-Epstein world, in which society as a whole is now going to have to come to terms with the fact that a lot of men, including the President of the United States, in all likelihood raped women and children and are going to be allowed to continue to participate in society and benefit from it. I am personally finding this fact very hard and deeply traumatic, and when I’m confronted with anyone who insists to me that either it didn’t happen or that we need to afford men any kind of grace I become angry enough that I want to kill them. That Gabbie, who has her own past with abuse and trauma, would come in front of the world and act like this in any way exonerates her from accusations of rape apologia, is beyond words. It’s stunning. And it’s equally stunning that she continues to act surprised that people were angry about this, or that the facts of what she did could be affected in any way by Jessi speaking about them.

Because Jessi did speak about this. She initially posted her video “Gabbie Hanna needs to be stopped.” in 2019 when Trisha Paytas had revealed that Gabbie had spread the rumor that she had herpes, a now deleted video (reupload attached because it’s an iconic experience) that gained a lot of traction at the time. A woman named Deanna had tweeted in reference to the fact that Gabbie had chosen her best friends rapist over her friend, and she and Gabbie subsequently had a long, long DM exchange in which Gabbie said multiple things that violated Jessi’s privacy, including sharing private messages between them, in an attempt to clear her own name. Jessi admitted off the bat that the drama was years old, but that it was being spoken of now that she knew Gabbie was sharing private information about her to essentially complete strangers, which I take to be an extremely valid reason for creating a callout video on someone. Gabbie, however, took this to be another attack on her livelihood, as she claims Jessi only released the video because she knew Gabbie had music and upcoming collabs to promote and so would face more backlash than she already had. I think Jessi’s initial video is straightforward and easy to understand, but Gabbie maintains she did nothing wrong.

In fact, she maintained she did nothing wrong for three hours over the phone with Jessi (they both recorded each other, which is nuts but these are two messy people) in 2020. In the call Gabbie recounts all the interactions she had with Lepore, that he threatened to blackmail her with a screen recording of the call which makes no sense because Gabbie literally didn’t do anything he allegedly demanded she do and he hasn’t ever released anything. Lepore has admitted he did in fact record the call with Gabbie, but that he did so for legal reasons (the guy seems skittish as fuck) and disclosed it to Gabbie at the start of the call, and that he never threatened to release it. Gabbie maintained over and over that she had never kept these interactions a secret from Jessi. Jessi, for her part, said multiple times she had not in fact known that they had FaceTimed each other, or that Lepore had shared details of the assault with Gabbie. The entire call is upsetting to listen to, as well as infuriating to try and parse through. Deep, dark truths about their friendship are being revealed between bullshit arguments about whether or not Gabbie tried to sleep with Jessi’s ex-boyfriend, and numerous times Gabbie attempts to get Jessi to agree to sign an NDA while refusing to sign one herself. Jessi at one point suggests them both removing all the videos they made about one another and both signing NDA’s, but Gabbie alleged it wouldn't be fair for her to sign one because she would get asked about Jessi in interviews and she would need to answer, so why doesn’t Jessi remove all her videos, sign a contract, and issue a public statement saying she lied about everything? It’s so Gabbie that it makes me sick.

Listening to it, it’s so abundantly clear that Gabbie does not understand an ounce of why what she did was wrong. She blames Jessi for her channel not doing as well, when in all actuality it was the fact that Gabbie had transitioned from being a fulltime story time YouTube channel to being more of a music channel, and the truth is not a lot of people were interested in it. She may have musical talent, in a sense, but that wasn’t what built her audience, and so it stands to reason they wouldn’t stick around for her if she wasn’t posting a lot of her old content anymore. Gabbie didn’t see it that way - to her mind Jessi and her friends had slandered and abused her (she called Jessi a “high-school fucking bully” in a widely memed podcast), and as a result they all needed to pay for what they did. In her view of events she had stopped being friends with Jessi and so it was no business of Jessi’s who she spoke with or collabed with, and she had already apologized for the tweets when she met Jessi so her conscience was clear. This is so deeply wrong on myriad levels, but it’s the only way to understand even a portion of the apparent rage that Gabbie seems to feel for Jessi. Everything that subsequently went wrong in Gabbie’s life and career was Jessi’s fault, and so she no longer cared if she was violating Jessi’s privacy, hurting her feelings, or potentially retraumatizing her in her quest to clear her name from the brand of “rape apologist”.

The call was released after Gabbie had already begun her career rehabilitation tour, which inexplicably included an appearance on the Drama Alert channel on YouTube, which is somewhat akin to a celebrity who gets cancelled for being racist doubling down and appealing to a far-right audience. It’s also a small aside, but it should be noted Keemstar (“keeeeeemstaaaar” as Repzion’s ex calls him) was one of the YouTubers who very publicly sided with Lepore and alleged Jessi was lying about her assault, so I’m sure that had something to do with why Gabbie showed up. Gabbie had been profiled in a BuzzFeed article about the decline of her popularity (which is lowkey insulting), in which she claimed that it was “chaotic” that Jessi still had not apologized to her for her 2019 video. In response, Jessi released portions of the call. In response to Jessi’s response, Gabbie released the entire three-hour call as a sort of prelude to her upcoming series "Confessions of a Washed-Up YouTube Has-Been"(the series has since been deleted).

The series detailed all of the controversies she had ever been involved in, and purported to be sharing her side of the story for the first time even though Gabbie is literally a YouTuber who videos everything she ever did and recorded everything she ever said. In her opinion, YouTube had become a toxic environment in which the growing ecosystem of commentary and drama channels were being encouraged by the algorithm to “take down” successful creators like her, which is a helluva way to say she doesn’t appreciate being held responsible for her own actions. She claimed that because of the actions of drama channels, her former friends, and her haters she had been “shadow banned” from YouTube (which means your content is being suppressed by the platform), which is a serious accusation when most YouTubers rely on views and the money made from ads in order to continue creating, However, as we’ve said prior, Gabbie’s main evidence for why she was shadow banned was that she was not getting as many views as she was at the height of her fame, which - when we bear in mind her content had changed from 2013 to 2020 - is not that substantial. It’s possible her fans, who trended younger, grew out of her, didn’t like her music, no longer wanted to support her after one of her dramas, or any other reason for why people tend to unsubscribe. Gabbie was convinced of this, though, so much so that she was consistently livestreaming her own investigations and claiming she had evidence of her ban. She was so disgusted by YouTube culture, she said, that upon the conclusion of the series she would be leaving the platform.

Jessi released a second video, “Gabbie Hanna will never stop.”, in 2021 in the midst of Gabbie releasing her series. The video itself is very sad, and detailed why she released the initial portions of the call, clarified why she and Gabbie were not able to reconcile these issues, and ultimately announced Jessi would not be speaking further about Gabbie in any videos. It’s a depressing watch, and it made Jessi look very sympathetic and Gabbie look like Satan. It very much clouded the remainder of Gabbie’s series, which she never finished, and I think this is why Gabbie did not actually quit the internet the way she said she was going to. Gabbie may claim she had been planning to quit YouTube since 2018 but that she was waiting for a high note to go out on (and she never had a high note post the Monster meme), but it rings hollow. She may have stopped regularly posting, but she was active on TikTok and was still pretty accessible on social media. I don’t think she’s ever really been able to get over the fact that her series was not the smash hit she expected it to be, and that it didn’t rehabilitate her image in the way she wanted it to. If anything it actually made her look worse, as she doubled down on all her wrongdoings and placed the blame on people who criticized her instead of taking ownership of even the smallest of things. This is probably the reason that she’s come back to rehash everything in 2026, if we’re honest. Regardless, Gabbie faded away just slightly.

Until.

I think to this day a lot of people aren’t sure what exactly happened to Gabbie in August 2022. When it was happening there was some consensus that whatever she experienced must have been a psychotic break from reality, but in the interim years many people have looked back on it feeling confused about what it was we bore witness to. As a person not on TikTok in 2022, I remember there being an extreme amount of concern about her behavior and her wellbeing, including from people that Gabbie would describe as her enemies, including Ethan Klein of H3H3. Essentially what happened was Gabbie began to behave extremely erratically, including concerning tweets, and posting over 100 TikTok’s in 24 hours in which she seemed to be in some form of religious delusion. She claimed she was the second coming of Jesus, she made transphobic and racially insensitive comments, and ultimately had wellness checks from the police and creepy fans coming to her door. She painted on mirrors and then wept uncontrollably into them, she laughed hysterically and blared music out of a sound system, she spoke rapidly and incoherently. Gabbie has spoken previously about having Bipolar Disorder, as well as ADHD, and some of the behavior exhibited in her religious pattern recognition made people believe she may have some latent OCD as well. As quickly as it started, it stopped. It’s hard to articulate exactly how worried people were about her. This was before Kendra Who Fell in Love with Her Psychiatrist, and it was in the era where we still understood Gabbie as someone who trolled for attention, and even still people were very, very concerned.

That was the last people saw of Gabbie seriously - she would still occasionally post on TikTok and her socials - for a long time. It seemed the universe was through with waiting for her to pick and choose the right moment to leave the internet and instead reached in and plucked her right out of it. Scattered information was publicly available, that she had left California and returned to Pennsylvania, that she had become a fitness instructor and looked like she was doing very well. A lot of her life moved into the real world and offline, and I speak for a lot of people when I say that despite all of this bullshit I was very happy for her. The internet warps people into the very worst and most depraved versions of themselves at times, and if someone can escape that cycle of anger, retribution, shame, and depression that’s worthy of a certain amount of respect. For a while it seemed as though Gabbie Hanna had done what she set out to do: she came, she saw, she Vined, and when the internet hated her most she vanished to become a better person and live a better life.

But relapse is an almost always inevitable form of recovery, because slowly but surely Gabbie began to post some…troubling things to her TikTok again. All of a sudden she was posting about random creators and telling them she could see that they were fighting against demons inside, or talking about how her fear of flying was actually her fear of not getting into heaven. It was as though the smile slowly slid from my face. Oh no, I thought. She’s found God.

Finding God is not a negative thing in the slightest if that’s what you want and it’s healthy for you, but I don’t think that a relationship with a higher power is the thing Gabbie really needs. What she really needs is a qualified professional. Instead, she speaks endlessly about how her life has been altered by her newfound religious zeal, and in the patterns of her speech there are definite echoes of her manic episode. She’s now revising history to fit the narrative that her Christianity has outlined for her, that she was lost and depressed not because she alienated people and did bad things but because God was trying to lead her to Him. The people she had controversy with were abusers in need of forgiveness instead of actual humans that she hurt all on her own. She’s now claiming that she didn’t finish her YouTube series because she was being attacked by demonic (angelic? her video was an hour long and deeply unclear) forces that kept making her see “666” everywhere, which is metal as fuck. She, Gabbie, was better than she had ever been (a common refrain for both her and Taylor Swift when things literally couldn’t be worse for them) and it was all because she had accepted God and repented for all her wicked ways. But what of the people who hadn’t repented for what they had done to her?

Well, they would still have to pay.

She released an hour long podcast with her new husband in early February, and in this podcast she effectively blames everything that went wrong in her career first on Trisha Paytas and then on Jessi Smiles. It’s a stunning video with everything we now know about what really happened, and as you can imagine it was not received well by the internet at large. It’s been covered extensively, notably so by Adam McIntyre who has since been named by Gabbie as one of her abusers simply for covering the video on his channel. Similarly to how she pivoted in the wake of Jessi’s final video, I think the reaction to her first podcast made Gabbie re-think the approach to coming back to the internet. People rightfully called her out for being a hypocrite, accused her of living in religious delusion, and expressed concern for the ways that she sees reality (which is a burn), and I don’t think this was how she thought people would react. I think she assumed that enough time had passed and she had grown enough that she could come back unquestioned, and she maybe, maybe, maybe could have had a chance at doing that had she not burst back into the room screaming about Trisha and Jessi. People might have been willing to give her an 11th chance, but it’s clear she has internalized none of the things she’s been told over the years. It’s honestly kind of impressive.

As a result of the negative backlash she released the “actual” first episode of her podcast (clearly hastily recorded after she saw people weren’t tolerating her revisionist history), in which she begins sharing her… ““testimony””. What is Gabbie’s testimony? I don’t even think Gabbie know, babes. Ultimately this seems to be the hundredth time she’s going to re-hash all of these events from her perspective and make it seem like she was the victim all along just with added God thrown into the mix. She released the third podcast (or the second, depending on how you look at it) just this past Friday, and in it was some of the most profound religious delusion I’ve ever seen. She told multiple prolonged stories about encountering Angel Numbers, including an incident in which she traveled to a parallel universe while trying to walk to a taco shop, and another incident in which a literal pastor told her she needed to seek psychiatric help. You cannot make this shit up.

All throughout these podcasts Gabbie is convinced that the people who criticize her have hate and anger and wrath in their hearts, and as such she can only feel closure by resolving to “not be like them”. What Gabbie seems to miss is that she is the one who lives with this, feels and speaks about this, and goes to bed and wakes up with this manner of hate in her heart for other people, and the most people do is react to her. She can’t see this, I believe, because unfortunately she is very sick and she has no boundaries to the internet. She believes her TikTok algorithm comes from God, which is a Zizian-esque delusion of the highest order. The phone is not a conduit for anything other than our base impulses and needs, and Gabbie is not the only person who uses it to self harm.

A fascinating and infuriating thing you notice when you engage with Gabbie’s ““testimony”” is how often she claims that she’s “scared” to be telling it. This is doubly hilarious because it hearkens back to the period of time where both Gabbie and Trisha Paytas were claiming they were scared the other was literally going to try to kill them, but beyond that it’s very disorienting hearing her proclaim that she’s scared to give her side of the story for two reasons. One, because we’ve already heard her side of the story, and in fact we’ve heard it multiple times in YouTube videos, podcasts, and TikToks. Two, because there are very few YouTubers I’ve engaged with who have been so comfortable showing themselves screaming vitriol into a camera like Gabbie. When her poetry books were criticized by Rachel Oates (an amazing creator who needs to be protected at all costs) Gabbie filmed multiple videos of herself screaming and hurling abuse at Rachel and calling her a bitch like 10 times.

There are people who walk the internet who have legitimate reasons to be wary of Gabbie - that she is now returning to attempt to portray herself the victim of anything other than the consequences of her own actions is stunning and laughable. But then, it’s also the perfect marker of her new Christian persona, as nothing is as frightening as the well of boiling hot rage that lurks in the hearts of most loud and proud Christians. They are easily the most intolerant and intolerable people to be trapped in a society with, as they are convinced of their own righteousness and victimhood. Certainly a lot of this is due to the fact that most Christians are imbued with a sort of martyr complex, in which it serves a divine purpose for them to be abrasive towards everyone around them and to be subsequently rebuffed so that they can claim they’ve been tested by God not to lose their shit. And then if they do lose their shit it’s actually fine because they’ll just repent and go to heaven anyway because God forgives all - just like the man and his Prodigal Son. This mindset creates zero incentive for a lot of Christians to be active or useful members of any community that isn’t made of people exactly like them - they don’t need to engage with anyone they think they won’t meet in heaven, and fuck the climate, and fuck the country, and act like you have no political values beyond “being a good Christian” because none of it will matter in heaven. It’s a religion of gaslighting - they push you, you push back, then they act like you were the one who wronged them.

In a way, it’s perfect for Gabbie. Much of what her grievances have boiled down to is this stated desire to “move on”, as though that’s not what she was doing before she rejoined the internet. She claims this has been made difficult for her because the moment she begins to connect with someone in her real life they’ll distance themselves from her because they discover her past, and I won’t lie when I say that sounds very, very hard. However, Gabbie places the full scope of her past at the feet of other people, like Trisha Paytas, Jessi Smiles, Angelika Oles, and so on and so forth. To her, it’s because these bad actors have perpetuated a narrative that the people in her life no longer make space for her, when the fault lies squarely on Gabbie’s shoulders. Most of the people she called out in her initial return video have not spoken about Gabbie in literal years, and many of them have said they plan not to speak of her ever again. Trisha Paytas has, as recently as this past winter, spoken favorably about Gabbie…the woman who said she had herpes.

It’s like Gabbie is a ghost wandering the halls of the internet, still wailing about the wrongs done to her, but she’s so trapped she can’t see that the people who used to live there have gone. Left. Moved on. She’s the only one who hasn’t. I wish that this could just be as sad as that is, but unfortunately Gabbie is someone that only seems capable of finding closure when she’s sufficiently perpetuated the harm back onto someone else. She resented that Trisha called her out for claiming she had herpes and so has to keep bringing it up, even when all she has to do to let it be in the past is stop bringing it up. She’s supremely angry that Jessi addressed her defense of her rapist, and so she wants to punish Jessi over and over again. Her particular vitriol for Jessi is actually astounding considering just how in the wrong Gabbie was and remains to this day over a woman that has seemingly just wanted Gabbie to leave her alone and stop bringing up her assault. In the comments of her recent TikTok’s people have been continuously telling Gabbie to leave Jessi out of this new series, and they are met each time with incredulous replies and outright refusals to leave Jessi alone. Clearly the accusation of being a rape apologist has burned Gabbie to the core, but the person she should be angry at is herself - nobody forced her to hear out the rapists perspective, and nobody told her to bring it up over and over again and subsequently make herself look worse and worse.

Ultimately the thing I think Gabbie is the most angry about is that Jessi, Trisha, and Angelika, have all moved on. When I try and place myself in Gabbie’s head, try to understand her spirit, it’s nothing but a black, swirling rage over the fact that she’s been trapped in the prison of her own actions and all of the women who helped put her there get to go on and have babies, and success, and lives outside of the internet.

Gabbie truly believes that if we all just gather around and listen to her side of the story that we’ll change, and that sooner or later we will all understand her to be a maligned woman, a victim of shadow banning, and a scapegoat for the wrongs of drama channels on YouTube. But the internet is forever. We watched her live her side of the story in real time, before a cultural narrative could or would be formed around it, and still we didn’t agree with her. Gabbie would hear that and would interpret it as us “listening to her abusers”, when really, Gabbie, we listened to you.

To be prodigal is to be reckless with money, resources, or generally what you’ve been afforded. Gabbie was afforded the same goodwill all creators are given when they first set foot onto a platform, and she squandered it on petty drama, narcissism, and cruelty. She’s come back to the People’s House, which is the internet now (for better or worse), with her hands empty, asking to be accepted back. There’s a quote that goes: “When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.”

I don’t know why that quote reminds me of Gabbie. Maybe I’m afraid the internet will swallow her up again. Maybe I’m afraid of what she’ll do next.

All this is to say, when I decided I’d rather learn French it was probably not pushed back upon because my parents believed that either option was probably going to be a wash, as most things were for what they believed to be their developmentally delayed child. In my defense, I thought geographically it made more sense to learn French, because in the event of Nuclear War we’d be able to flee to Canada more effectively (I spent a lot of my adolescence very afraid of nukes - this has been a complicated few years for me).

I liked French, but I was never extraordinary at it. All my teachers from Middle School to college have told me my accent is excellent, and when I travelled to France in 2014 I managed just fine, but there are very few instances in my life in which I’ve really needed to use it. It would have been much more beneficial to me to simply have learned Spanish - I know far more people who speak it, and it actually would assist in my daily interactions. Truthfully it’s a testament to how actually stupid I am to have been more concerned with the potential threat of fleeing a nuclear holocaust than to the entirely probably scenario that one day I’d work with people whose first language is Spanish. Ah, youth.

Suffice it to say, I’m a little embarrassed about the fact that I don’t speak Spanish. One day in the future I’d very much like to learn to speak it, because I think that would be a worthwhile skill.

This, apparently, is an opinion that a lot of people find to be decidedly political.

Last night was the Super Bowl. We didn’t really watch it in our household (too busy watching Molly’s Game (2017) for the 53rd time), but we diligently waited until it was estimated to be halftime so we could tune in for the show. Last years spectacle, brought about by the incomparable Kendrick Lamar, was a transformative experience, and so the expectations were high for what we anticipated from Bad Bunny. There had been rumblings of news about what the performance would entail, as there usually is, and the eyes of the nation fell upon Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio just as the sun began to set in Santa Clara.

I thought it was great! It was cinematic, joyful, and poignant. The vibes were impeccable. His presence was incendiary and his fellow performers (including a beautifully dressed Lady Gaga and a deeply sexy Ricky Martin) turned it up gleefully. We were speculating how it would be to see the show in natural lighting, as so often the game takes place in a darkly lit stadium, and the inclusion of rosy, gold-tinted light made me feel as though it was not still February, but that today I too could have thrown on a white shirt and bopped around my neighborhood. In the scheme of things I don’t know how we’ll remember this halftime show and where it ranks, but as of today I think we’ll remember it positively.

Most importantly: my not speaking Spanish did not in any way impede my ability to enjoy it. I had the usual white person thought of: damn, whatever he’s saying must be So Real, but it mostly ended there. That’s what’s fun about music - it transcends language, it imparts a feeling that can be latched onto by anyone regardless of race, nationality, or identity. It’s the great equalizer (one of my favorite songs - which was actually featured in the Olympic opening ceremonies - is a song of complete gibberish called “Prisencolinensinainciusol” and it goes hard). See Rosalía’s latest album, LUX, where she sings in 13 different languages, for more examples on how cool music is.

Unfortunately it would seem a few people did not walk away from Bad Bunny’s halftime show aglow with the positive vibes of his performance, and they certainly did not pause to consider how cool it is that it was entirely in Spanish and was still coherent to primarily English speakers. No, there were some people deeply offended by this choice (as there so often are).

One of these people was Jill Zarin.

She took to the Gram in a front facing camera nightmare to declare: “I just don’t think it was appropriate to have it in Spanish […] I don’t speak Spanish, I would’ve liked to have known the words he was saying. To me, it looked like a political statement because there were literally no white people in the entire thing. I’m not taking a side, one way or the other…I think it was an ICE thing. I think that the NFL sold out and it’s very sad.”

S i g h.

If you don’t remember her (lol, she’d hate that), Jill Zarin was an inaugural member of The Real Housewives of New York City, and she remained a mainstay of the show up until season four. Immediately she was the gold standard - she was zany, loud, lived a very unique and opulent life, and could occasionally be endearing enough that you forgave her frequent gaffes. And there were gaffes. Jill was also a notable housewife in the sense that she had frequent drama with people, but at least up until season three the people she chose to have issues with were people like Ramona Singer, who had her defenders but who was largely understood to be a lunatic. All that changed in her third season when she made an enemy of her former best friend, Bethenny Frankel, and the rest - as they say - is history.

I hesitate speaking too much about the early seasons of The Real Housewives of New York, because I might write about them at a different time, but all of this bears mentioning when we speak about Jill. She began as everyone’s loud, lovable aunt, and slowly but surely she Animorph-ed into the worst version of herself possible. It became difficult to tell which version had been the real Jill - did fame transform her into this, or was the seemingly nice version of Jill the real mask? Honestly, I’m more convinced of the latter than ever before. I don’t know if the cameras can change someone so fundamentally that they would cease being a nice, reasonable person after prolonged exposure. It’s certainly a factor, but I’m more of the opinion that the camera just serves to exacerbate something that’s already there, like inviting a baby into an already tenuous marriage. Jill was always selfish, always conniving, and always decidedly classist, the cameras just convinced her that these were fun character traits in place of flaws in need of addressing.

None of this would bear mentioning were it not for the other news that was announced last week.

On February 3rd, E! announced that it would be picking up the slack that Bravo had been leaving as it related to RHONY, and they would be reuniting select members of the original cast for a show to be called The Golden Life. It would star Luann DeLesseps, Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan, Kelly Bensimon, and Jill Zarin, and would center on their new lives in Miami. This show was something the Bravo audience had been clamoring for in the last few years - the remaining members of the original cast were officially sidelined after a legitimately disastrous season in 2021, and Bravo instead established a new cast with mixed results. The two seasons the new cast have turned in have rated poorly, and were generally not successful with audiences outside of the ne’er-do-well’s that literally watch everything Bravo airs, and fairly often fans have loudly asked for Bravo to reconsider their decision. It wasn’t common knowledge why it was that the RHONY ladies were being given chance after chance on every other show but RHONY, so the news about The Golden Life was music to a lot of fans ears.

Regrettably, I have a fair amount of reserve about this news.

The original RHONY cast was lightening in a bottle - it’s something that can never be captured again, and perhaps shouldn’t be. In the piece I wrote about Janet Caperna I made reference to the idea that it was no longer possible for people to earnestly engage with reality stardom as a vocation while also claiming ignorance of its form, and I further that thought here by saying I don’t think a show like the original RHONY could exist in 2026. The first two seasons of RHONY were rich in their blacks and their whites, there were distinct villains and heroes and archetypes that swanned about in tacky statement necklaces and dresses made from burlap sacks. In our current reality landscape people are far too savvy about the form, far too discerning of even the faintest trace of dishonesty and guarded over their true selves, to allow themselves to be made into a symbol. Bethenny Frankel became the Greek Chorus for a generation of people because she perfectly skated down the slopes of the average character beats: overachieving underdog to burgeoning girlboss, girlboss to successful wife and mother, and then a miraculous fall into wronged woman. She allowed the world to witness a vulnerability most people don’t let anybody see. I have problems with Bethenny, but there was nobody who did it like she could do it. I don’t know if people are able to do that anymore. Reality television is like a vaccine we’ve all gotten, there are symptoms that we can experience but we never get the whole picture. There’s a barrier somewhere.

It’s possible that the inability for these archetypes to be recaptured is part of the reason why these select women have been cast at all, as all of them have at one time or another been termed deluded in the fairest sense of the word. By casting a person who truly cannot see the world for the way that it actually is and instead sees themselves as the Main Character of a morality play wherein their role is to convince the audience they’re loveable they may indeed be able to present a facsimile of the old formula, but it will have ceased to be authentic. This tracks for a network like E!, which has famously presented some of the most overproduced and scripted “reality” shows ever made, but it forgets that the audience generally doesn’t appreciate this level of condescension. It’s a joke to look back on the hijinks that populated Keeping Up with the Kardashians early seasons, wherein the episodes were way more reminiscent of a perverted kind of Brady Bunch - every episode has a distinct arc and a lesson learned with added jokes and silliness - but did anyone really buy that? I think we mainly indulged it because at that time it was a curiosity in the same way that The Girls Next Door was a curiosity. Authentic drama did end up occurring on KUWTK, but those cases were few and far between.

What drew a lot of people to RHONY was not that these women were choreographed into behaving bizarrely, it was that they were earnestly bizarre - their friendships, their houses, their clothes - and I fear attempting to provide a workable structure around this is only going to present them problems. Either they’ll cease to be themselves (the thing they’re loved for), or they will cease to indulge in the network set-ups that E! so often uses to create interest. Both are bad, and the second might actually be worse due to the fact that these women are all…old. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. That’s not an argument for them ceasing to have careers, but it’s an argument for why I don’t know if they can succeed in a format like this any longer. Which is worse: a show about women who have moved on forcing themselves back into these roles for money, or a show about women who have so stubbornly not moved on that they become unrecognizable in our current time and place? It’s bad. It’s all bad.

Further, the transition from New York City to Miami simply exacerbates what was an existing flaw withing the makeup of the original show. Even from season one it was a generous point of view to believe that the women of RHONY were giving us an actual window into the life of the average New Yorker - Bethenny, easily the “poorest” of the whole cast, still lived in a two bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. These always were fabulously wealthy women living a fabulously wealthy lifestyle, it was simply that the greater country somehow looks at New York City as some sort of class equalizer that we deluded ourselves into thinking they were in any way more relatable than the women of a franchise like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Yes, the subway ran under their heels the same way it ran under the feet of day-to-day struggling people, but proximity doesn’t also serve as a mediator. By moving these women from New York City, where many of them have long since ceased permanent residence, it is boldly declaring that whatever association with the average person these women might otherwise have had is over.

This, unfortunately, has implications of its own. To effectively unpack this we need to briefly (lol) turn to what wrecked the original format of the show in 2021, namely the Infamous season 13.

I defended this season to the bitter, bitter end because I always adored RHONY over every other franchise on the network. I could not personally accept that the show had gotten this unwatchable. It was absurd! How could this have happened? The final episode of RHONY to ever feature the original cast was literally called “So…That Happened”. Even the editors gave up on the shit. There wasn’t even a reunion. In the words of Nancy Kerrigan: why?!

Simplistically: racism.

Like, actually. This is why Jill’s Instagram triggered me into writing this.

In October 2020 it was announced that Bravo had cast Eboni K. Williams as one of the housewives of RHONY, making her the first black woman to have been made a main cast member of a 12 year old franchise, which was nuts in its own right. Eboni is a bit of a complicated figure, as she had some rightwing ties and had at one time been a commentator on Fox news, but this should have been something that united her with her castmates. It was common knowledge post-2016 that at least half the cast was privately conservative, and that estimation only grew over time as Ramona in particular made no secret of partying at Mar-a-Lago. However, whatever Eboni’s political leanings were became irrelevant in light of the indisputable fact that she was a black woman and they, all four of them, were white (or white passing, as Luann is some percentage indigenous from Canada, but we don’t know how much). She had an uphill battle the whole season in attempting to goad the other women into having meaningful conversations with her regarding race only for them to beat hasty retreats, and this is partially understandable on the shallowest possible level. These women had just cleared the finish line of a season where they were drunker than they’d ever been, had become mired in more nonsensical arguments than ever before, and come out the other side intact - they probably thought that to discuss something as serious as race in America in 2020 was above their pay grade. They were going to say something offensive, get canceled, and forever have to have it be a part of their resume that they committed a microaggression on television. Sure. Suuure.

However, it’s pretty rich to act like talking meaningfully about race is a bridge too far for a group of women who had entertained their friend arriving to a party in blackface. That’s only one of the racist things that Luann did, mind you, and she isn’t even the most vocal racist of the group.

As a result of the other housewives being perhaps too gun shy to engage with Eboni’s attempts to help them declare themselves anti-racist, they continuously fled conversations with her and tried to laugh off her events that asked them to engage with black culture. And the thing a lot of white people continue to act as though they don’t understand is that if you keep trying to stage manage or exit a conversation without actually engaging with it then the conversation will keep being brought up, because this is not something that should just exist within implications. You should be able to sit down with any person of color and interact with their experience, hear their perspective, and allow that it differs from yours without become defensive or abusive. If you aren’t able to do that it’s possible you have a prejudice that’s more deeply ingrained than you might like to admit.

Eboni took a lot of the blame for the seasons failures, but upon a rewatch it’s clear she’s simply trying to get the other women to see her. Had they all sat with the discomfort of the implications inherent to the fact that in 12 years of their show Eboni was the first black women they actually had to treat like a peer they might have been able to have a real season, but they all time and again proved that race was too much of a barrier for them to cross. It made them uncomfortable to acknowledge their privilege, even as the show was marketed as a look inside a kind of privileged elite when it was first being shopped around in 2008. They were happy to throw Eboni under the bus as “the real racist” who did nothing but bring up race when it wasn’t relevant instead of prioritizing getting to know them and their feelings, instead of taking responsibility for their own failures to recognize their biases.

I will say, as a rare win for her, the only person I will keep exempt from this is Sonja Morgan. Sonja is an exhausting person for me and I really don’t think I’d like her very much if we met, but she consistently proved that season that she was hearing Eboni and did want to lift her up as a member of the cast. Sometimes she was a little too quick to laugh things off in front of the other housewives, but I find the way she very clumsily attempted to advocate for Eboni’s point of view way more authentic than Leah McSweeney’s far more virulent and aggressive defenses of Eboni. Leah knew all the lingo, yes, but when it comes down to it Leah is very much a gravelly-voiced, Dimes Square wannabe who lives what seems to be a youthful and multi-cultural existence, but who also seems to really just be out for herself. One of the biggest blow up’s of the season came when Holla Heather Thompson brought up voting and Leah absolutely lost her shit and declared she would not be voting in the upcoming election because Both Sides Bad. She did end up voting, I think, but it froze into sharp relief exactly who she was and exactly what she stood for to me. For the record, if you don’t vote you’re nothing but a cuck.

Sonja did have an altercation that season with a minor Friend Of character named Bershan that actually turned physical (she broke a fire extinguisher while drunk because she is a full tilt alcoholic), and although the cause of the fight was not race related it quickly got turned that way in the fandom. Bershan, who is a black woman, was used as a further extension of why race should not and could not be a part of RHONY - viewers decried the fight as just another thing people were using to try and “cancel” the show (before they conceptualized the show could be, you know, canceled). What Bershan and Sonja fought about was petty, escalated quickly, and was forgiven by both parties almost immediately, but it Amen-ed the already palpable feeling that the show was on a collision course with where reality television had a responsibility to the current moment. RHONY typically filmed from early autumn and into Christmas, meaning season 13 was filmed half a year into quarantine and just a few months after the murder of George Floyd, two things that were inescapable parts of all of our lives for a significant period of time. Race was on peoples minds more than it might have otherwise been, and there’s a certain subsection of Bravo audience that deeply, deeply resented that. The average Bravo consumer is probably a lot more like Ramona than she is to me (become a paid subscriber today!).

Subscribe now

Speaking of Ramona, if Eboni was in any way teeing these women up for failure then she certainly struck out in spectacular fashion.

The nadir of all the ways the show tried and failed to respectfully engage with race occurred within an event dubbed Black Shabbat (or Black Sabbath, as Sonja mistakenly called it). Up until this moment Ramona had been the primary offender of dipping out (in the parlance of Tom Sandoval) of uncomfortable conversations with Eboni, and so was uniquely poised to be a terrorist at an event that was both centering the black experience and the Jewish experience. Ramona is not black, and she is not Jewish, so it was a given that she would take offense at having to sit quietly and allow other people to speak for an evening. What commenced is easily some of the worst television I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was so bad, and so unending, that Bravo had to split it into two episodes. Never mind the casual cringe moments of Sonja referring to herself as a Shiksa, the money comments, or all of the non-Jewish women weeping over Leah being able to recite a blessing most Jewish people learn and perfect at 13 years old, but you know…take note of that lol. Literally every time any of the people of color at the table opened their mouths Ramona leaped in to talk over them, dismiss their experiences, or argue for why her perspective as a rich white woman is just as valuable as their perspectives. Probably the worst moment was a woman (who actually should have all of Ramona’s money Venmo’d to her) sharing the truly harrowing story of her and her baby almost dying due to racist medical malpractice, only for Ramona to leap in with “well, when I gave birth my nurse - WHO WAS BLACK - was mean to me.”

It’s…pretty unconscionable stuff. They should have called Andy Cohen that very night and said “that’s a wrap”. This is even all before the season ended and the stories of exactly how disgusting and racist Ramona was to everyone, not just Eboni, came to light. According to a formal complaint lodged with Shed Media, Warner Bros. Discovery, Bravo, and NBCUniversal, Ramona used a racial slur in conversation with a black crew member, and subsequently used the abbreviation of the word in a defense of herself via text to Page Six. Eboni had made her own allegations of racism by Ramona by then, and it was the final nail in the coffin for the original iteration of RHONY. For a lot of people the conversation very much begins and ends with Ramona’s performance that final season as to why the show ceased to be tenable, and it certainly bears acknowledging that Bravo appeared to prefer canceling the show rather than holding Ramona to account for what she’d done. It’s unbelievably offensive.

However, as we see even five years post season 13 the things that created this downfall are very much still present in the women they have chosen to breathe new life into the franchise. Jill Zarin has been a problem since the moment she alighted upon America’s television 18 years ago, and I’m tired of acting like she wasn’t. Some otherwise very sane and rad content creators I follow are very much of the opinion that Jill had something special when she first appeared onscreen, but I confess I’ve never been able to see what that something special is. She’s done herself no favors in the interim years of her time on the show, as she seems to have made it a priority to cozy up to the Trump family and other rightwing idealogues for an invite to a party where she can inform people of who she is, and she perennially embarrasses herself by attempting to shoehorn herself back on television. Certainly the worst case of this was when her late husband, the much beloved Bobby Zarin, passed away in 2018, and Jill invited cameras to film outside of his funeral even though she had not been on RHONY in years. She later tried to dispute that she had the cameras called in her very unfortunate appearance on The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip (that’s a fucking mouthful, woof), wherein she just came off looking like a desperate loser. Moreso, in all the years of fans loudly complaining about why they don’t just have a RHONY with all the new girls and another called RHONY: Legacy for the original cast it is never brought up why that didn’t come to pass. The truth is that it’s Jill’s fault RHONY: Legacy was only ever an aborted RHUGT style show, as she pulled out of doing the show hastily after they balked at meeting her financial demands.

This is the frustrating thing with Jill, all she ever does is cry, and complain, and say nobody ever gives her second chances, but then people try to give her second chances and she biffs it every fucking time. I am immensely displeased that now she’s convinced a separate network to give her a third chance after she spent most of her goodwill from Bravo, and just to sweeten the deal they’re throwing in foul, racist Ramona, deluded Luann, a woman who I take to be Kelly Bensimon but who really just looks like Caitlyn Jenner, and Sonja, who by all accounts should be in a rehab right now. And what are they going to do on this show, set in Miami? Run around with all their white friends decrying how the real racists are the people who are asking them to apologize for being racist? Film reels about how people speaking Spanish is a political statement they take offense to, because this America and we all need to speak English? I don’t want to watch that. These are people who thought being asked to get vaccinated against COVID was fascism, but that ICE ripping people from their homes is just the way it should be in a lawful society.

I have a certain degree of sympathy for women like Jill, Ramona, or Sonja, because after all these are older women who have in a sense been poisoned by their exposure to television. Their lives would be completely different had they never appeared on Bravo, and I have to believe this would be positive for all of them. Perhaps Jill would have had other successful ventures, Ramona might have stayed with Mario, and Sonja wouldn’t have gotten herself into such massive debt. This doesn’t take away that Bobby Zarin was certainly always going to tragically pass away, Ramona would always have struggled with her oppositional defiance disorder, and Sonja always would have been bad with money. Even still, once you hit on to the kind of fame that Bravo affords people it would be nigh impossible to return to a normal way of living - you will forever be chasing the high of having your petty squabbles with your second tier friends be featured in actual publications, of having this kind of vapid silliness make you real money, of beginning to believe the version of yourself that is mean, and rude, and privileged is the version people want to see. Returning to “normal” life was likely somewhat traumatic for them, which is a joke in itself. I’m sorry that these women need to be on a television for their lives to make any kind of sense, and I’m sorry they seem unable to recognize themselves in the real world anymore. It’s probably a deeply alienating thing. Perhaps that’s why they’re so closed off to other people’s experiences. But the truth is you don’t feel division unless you embrace divisiveness. Filth teaches filth.

Four minutes into his Super Bowl halftime show Bad Bunny looked directly into the camera and spoke: My name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and if I'm here today at Super Bowl 60, it's because I never, ever stopped believing in myself. You should also believe in yourself. You're worth more than you think. Trust me.

Imagine being so broken that you’d be offended by this just because you couldn’t understand the language it was spoken in. Imagine turning your own fear, and self-loathing, and discomfort onto other people and using it as an excuse for why people should be terrorized, or taken advantage of, or made to feel small. Is that a golden life?

On Valentine’s Day it will be one year since I started writing on Substack. If you’ve read all of my work, or if this is the first thing you’ve happened across, thank you for reading. Nothing makes me feel more myself, or more alive, than being able to write about something passionately, no matter what the subject is. There are people who I truly respect and admire who have subscribed, or who have indicated they’ve read something I wrote, and it’s humbling and wonderful to be able to have those moments. My few paid subscribers are appreciated more than words can describe (also believe me I wanted it to be even cheaper but there’s a literal cap at how low you can ask people for, which is nuts), and I value your support. Without writing I literally hate this bitch of an Earth, but with writing it’s made just a bit brighter.

It’s been a very strange year. It’s as scary as it is invigorating, and I’m ready for more.

Thank you - happy early Valentine’s Day. 💘

UPDATE 2/10: The second I scheduled this piece E! released a statement to announce Jill Zarin has been fired from “The Golden Life”. Thx be to Göd. Insert gif of Jill falling on her face while skating here.

Even though I live much farther north than some people, I had never actually seen them before. Before they lit up the sky my mom and I had been visiting, catching up with the comforting drone of the television buttressing the conversation, the sound it emitted one that I haven’t been privy to in seasons: The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Controversially, I was never a fan of RHOSLC. Even in its first season there was something swollen about all of them, something red and inflamed and infected - I didn’t like the look of their faces, I didn’t like their homes or their clothes, and the storylines didn’t catch my interest. So bored by their introductions, I didn’t engage in the sophomore season and missed the Jenn Shah saga in all but headlines, I missed the subsequent Instagram (it was Instagram, right?) drama, and the most I know about anything happening on the show is what plays in commercials before I watch the shows I really want to be watching. I understand this to be an unconscionable gaffe from most Bravo-pilled people I’ve shared it with, but I can’t find it in myself to care.

That gets to the heart of the deeper issue. I write and think a lot about Bravo (as you might know from reading other things on my blog), but at this moment in time I’m actually finding myself unable to stomach watching anything on it. There’s a new season of Vanderpump Rules, there are housewives strewn every which way, there are episodes of all different kinds of Below Deck, and yet I simply have no interest. I think something in my soul truly was broken from everything that happened with The Valley this past Spring, and I haven’t really recovered yet. Engaging with a new show right now means re-engaging with the same people that justify sending women death threats, and it’s honestly been hard enough without all that nonsense. This obviously presents certain issues for me, because I receive lot of fulfillment from engaging with these shows and trying to approach them with a critical lens, but I find myself at a bit of a waterloo. I’m less and less willing to engage with nonsense as the world seems to become more and more saturated with misery, dripping off our cakey exterior like buttermilk.

It doesn’t stop me, however, from rewatching seasons of Housewives past. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, often a millstone around the neck of the worst people you know who want to go back to “the way things were”, and only coyly dodging what exactly they mean by that when pressed. Unfortunately, nostalgia is something that it’s easy to brush up against, just the same way as melancholy is when the light is just right and the music is just wrong enough.

Usually when I want to feel nostalgic I put on a movie that once made me feel like the puck on an ice hockey table and pour a glass of wine, but we’re in the doldrums of Dry January in our household. We might be the only Minnesotans left who are participating in Dry January after the shitshow the first two weeks of the year have ended up being, but the hard press of the Here and Now is a steady brace against getting too sentimental about the past. These days I’m lucky if I grasp onto a spare moment to think about the future, let alone ruminate on the past. Watching the ghosts of Housewives past march past my screen isn’t as therapeutic as I wish it was, as right now it’s just a reminder of how myopic and selfish a large swath of society is, and it’s truly, madly, deeply a fucking drag. Vanderpump Rules, Summer House, and Shahs of Sunset are still safe, though, in case you were wondering.

I’ve put off writing this part, because not only is it the darkest part of this miniseries, but it’s also the end. There’s been a lot I wanted to talk about in revisiting the Denise years of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and I’ll probably walk away wishing I had said more, probably catching stray ideas I should have included in the shower or before bed. But that’s the risk you take with publishing anything, and I’ve put this off for long enough trying to think of all the ways I wish this story would end, because it isn’t a happy ending.

In the words of Taylor Swift, a.k.a. The Riddler: will you tell me to go fuck myself, or lead me to the garden?

Denise Richards is a Midwestern girl at heart. I think this is why I’ve always liked her. She shows up to events with a ponytail, stonewash jeans, an upside-down jacket, and downs tequila shots while telling jokes about blowjobs. A lot of people share these attributes, but certainly what distinguishes Denise from the average trainwreck trying to “wow” the squares with their daring is that Denise is beautiful. Denise Richards is so beautiful that she’s been allowed to get away with telling us that she was a tomboy growing up, which may well be true, but can never be the absolute truth when you internalize just how beautiful she’s always been. Maybe you were the only girl on the baseball team, Denise, but it isn’t as though you were a butch chick with huge biceps like the other lesbians that wanted to play with the boys.

Like other bombshells, Denise is so beautiful that she’s had a unique experience of the world. There’s a moment in one of Ricky Gervais’ episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (a show I actually really enjoyed, much to my own chagrin) wherein Gervais placidly tells Jerry Seinfeld that the way he moves through the world is “like a young king - things are kept from you”. I really feel as though young women like Denise have a similar method through which they move through a lot of their lives: doors are held open for them, free scones are often added to their coffee orders, people will willingly offer up their time and energy simply in the hopes of pleasing a beautiful girl. This is probably lovely (if a bit claustrophobic) to experience, but its downsides are legion. Beautiful girls can also be leered at, not taken seriously, endangered, and are often discarded once they get older and find their beauty is fading. It’s either allow yourself to slowly fade away, or try to augment age with plastic surgery, which will successfully garner attention back on you but rarely for the right reasons. Denise was like an endangered animal - something precious, distinct, in need of protection, but often pitiably taken advantage of.

Reading over Denise’s resume makes me feel like a child again, paging through the magazines I would buy across the street at Walgreens, the summer sun pouring over the page and bleaching out celebrity highlights, big purses, low-rise jeans. All I knew about Denise for a long time was that she was beautiful. Her movies were things I needed to discover as an adult, and I didn’t watch her shows when they aired live, but I knew every detail of her face before I ever heard the sound of her voice. She captured so many moments in just the way she carried herself, from her brunette Brooke Shields days - eyebrows and lips dark and moody - to her Charlie years with her long, princess blonde tresses, her golden skin. She and Pam Anderson both had that power - all you had to do to know when an event took place was find out what Pam Anderson or Denise Richards looked like when it happened. Time moves keenly around beautiful girls.

Now, what do beautiful girls love? Bad boys. They like bad men who live on the edge, oftentimes for reasons only known to them. Surely there’s something sexy and mysterious about someone who seems to not care about the rules as it allows us to fantasize about living in our worst, most spoiled, versions of ourselves. There’s an interest in the sexual danger and deviancy that a bad boy brings, as it’s more likely that he’ll not only be anxious for sex with you but if he doesn’t care about traditional values or rules he may be more interested in sexually satisfying you than in simply procreating. It also stands to reason that a man who cares less about tradition or seeming “good” will have fewer hang-ups around presenting as traditionally masculine, so he might seem more artistic, more empathetic, more emotional. None of this means that he actually is better than the average Chad, but I can easily see why a beautiful girl is so easily lured towards a man that’s going to bring her nothing but trouble.

And, certainly, nobody said “trouble” more than Charlie Sheen. By 2000, when he and Denise met, he already had a reputation for chaos, including firing a gun in his house and injuring Kelly Preston, dating numerous porn actresses, and a history of serious cocaine addiction. The same year that he married his first wife, Brooke Mueller, he was named as one of Heidi Fleiss’ clients. So, yes. Charlie Sheen was bad. He still is pretty bad, but he used to be a lot worse.

What Denise saw in Charlie Sheen nobody can ever truly know, but what we can say definitively is that Denise seems to be a really nice person who loves to have fun, so it’s entirely possible there was something in him that she wanted to nurture and be nurtured by. Denise had a thriving career in TV and film, starring and being featured in classics such as Starship Troopers, Wild Things, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and guest spots on Beverly Hills, 90210, Seinfeld, and Friends. She had worked hard for what she got, maybe she earnestly thought that Charlie could settle down with her and they would have a real life together. She thought that enough to have two daughters with him - but it wasn’t true enough for her to not file for divorce while pregnant with their second. A temporary restraining order was filed during the course of their divorce, and Denise has alleged Charlie threatened her and was potentially addicted to pornography (to say the least).

Such acrimony in divorce proceedings would usually mean that Charlie and Denise had no reason to see each other ever again, save for co-parenting their daughters, but oddly this hasn’t been the case in the decades since their split. As of 2012 Charlie and Denise were on good terms, almost shockingly good terms. When Charlie’s twins from his first marriage were removed from Brooke Mueller’s home the court didn’t place them with their father, it placed them with Denise (who hadn’t been married to Charlie for seven years). Charlie reportedly fully endorsed this move. When I read that I was both shocked and oddly touched - Denise is the kind of woman that will house and parent two children who aren’t biologically hers without complaint, because she just genuinely seems like a person who cares about others. She adopted a daughter on her own in 2011 after a two year process, and the baby was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. Denise raised her as a single parent, and watching her on the show only reinforced the feeling that she’s an engaged and loving parent to all of her children (she probably has many, many children that she considers her own, in whole or in part).

It also bears saying that keeping somebody who has treated you the way Charlie has reportedly treated her in your life might be indicative of some sort of attachment issues. It’s certainly kind to give people second chances, and it behooves ones to be on speaking terms with their ex if they have children, but Denise seems to be a person who could have healthier boundaries. Even as recently as last year Denise was in Charlie’s documentary for Netflix speaking candidly but generously about their relationship, which again is insane to do for someone who reportedly threatened you. Denise seems to have real trouble establishing boundaries and making herself clear when people cross those boundaries (at least to an outside observer), and these are important things when you’re also someone with a big heart. Not everybody deserves a second chance, and not everybody needs to benefit from your generosity. It’s a lesson I think Denise might still be struggling with.

She has a hundred dogs, loves hosting parties for her kids, shows up to fancy parties with messy hair, and generally seems like a good time girl with a heart of gold. Is she perfect? No, but nobody is. I’m sure Denise has hundreds of character flaws I don’t know about, and I would guess that she’s as aware of them as others are. Even still, I admit I like her very much.

In all honesty, Denise seems like a beautiful person as well as being a beautiful woman. Certainly what made this past years news around Denise so shocking was that she’s beautiful. And to get in to what happened to Denise we need to discuss a character we haven’t spoken of very much, her estranged husband Aaron Phypers.

Aaron always seemed like a monster, and their relationship always made me sad to watch. Denise and Aaron together is like the most beautiful girl in a small town marrying the town drunk - everyone is gently trying to tell her this is probably a really bad idea, but again her beauty works against even people’s best intentions. Nobody wants to make a beautiful girl sad, and because beautiful girls rarely hear “no” they feel emboldened to make damaging choices.

There are seeds of truly odd shit scattered all over Aaron’s backstory, including the fact that he was briefly - and I do mean briefly - married to Queen, Icon, and Legend Nicollette Sheridan (Edie Britt, to the real ones). For the record, she should be on RHOBH immediately, her and Heather Locklear could actually save the show with sheer chaos magic. After his marriage to Nicollette it seems he transitioned singularly to building his business, Quantum360 (Q360), a wellness center that focused on healing through sound, light, and frequency therapy. I’d love to tell you exactly how stupid this was, but in all honesty this shit is so woo-woo that its stated organizational ethos turns to blackout curtains in my mind. Suffice it to say, it was a holistic medicine practice in Malibu that looked very nice but mostly seemed to be a grift that a lot of well-meaning people fell into the trap of. One of those people was, unfortunately, Denise, who visited the center in 2016 to do “DNA repair, anti-aging, and that sort of thing”. According to her it was lust at first sight, with the two of them reportedly having sex in one of the rooms at the center shortly after meeting.

Though they began dating shortly thereafter, it’s important to note that Aaron was actually still legally married to Nicollette. At first I didn’t take very much notice of this fact, as both Aaron and Nicollette seem like kooks who probably would clog up the process of getting a divorce until it took literal years, but this ends up being an important detail. Denise dated Aaron from 2016 to 2018 when he was still legally married to Nicollette, and Aaron and Nicollette were officially and finally divorced in August 2018. Denise and Aaron were married in September 2018. That is crazy. Reportedly they had been engaged since January of that year, but the timeline of these events is so fast that it seriously calls into question Denise’s judgement - people with zero attachment issues don’t get engaged to people still married to another woman, and they don’t run headfirst into marriage with a person just coming off what seemed to be a contentious divorce mere days after that persons divorce is finalized.

Their wedding was taped for RHOBH, and served as one of the inaugural moments where the audience fell in love with Denise. It was a slapdash, quirky, kind of charming wedding on a sunny Malibu afternoon, and at least that early in Denise’s time on the show we had no reason to think of Aaron as anything other than a dummy with a big dick. It just so happened that Aaron’s true colors began to emerge at the same time as the cast was starting to turn against Denise properly, rumors and scheming swirling around her and manifesting in comments about her hair, her clothes, her ice sculpture (lol).

The first real inkling that perhaps something was seriously off with this guy took place on an episode I rewatch all the time (because Teddi looks deranged in it), in which the housewives and their husbands congregate at Kyle’s house for dinner and drinks. It’s easy to lose this interaction, even though it’s unhinged, because the dinner also features Sutton calling Teddi boring, Teddi crying hysterically about it, and Kyle getting absolutely wasted, but here is where the audience really meets Aaron. Upon prompting, he begins explaining how his sound and energy healing works, and - for once - Rinna correctly clocks this as complete horseshit. She challenged him on his practices quite politely for someone who must know this is a snake oil business, but Aaron reacted with obstinance and inflexibility, replying snappily to the other women giving him the side-eye. Denise, potentially seeing that her castmates were getting the ick from him, cut him off under the guise of them “already being in enough danger” and insinuating they were being followed by the government because Aaron was close to finding a cure to cancer through frequency healing (!!!). It’s giving StalkedByTheFeds.

Needless to say, this dinner did not endear anybody to Aaron, and what followed only made things worse. As discussed, the Fox Force Five were banding against Denise over her asking them to refrain from discussing threesomes around her teenage children. Normal stuff! As a result they advised her to not bring her kids around if she didn’t want them talking about sex around them, so Denise took the note and showed up to a barbecue sans her kids with Aaron in tow. Cue the other housewives demanding to know where the kids were - did she think they were bad mothers? Did she think she was being funny? Why didn’t she want her kids around them? Upon being pressed on this, Aaron swooped in to answer for her that all they had asked was for the other women to respect that their children were present and to be more appropriate when they were around. The other women immediately took offense at his attitude and his daring to argue with them, and from that moment on Aaron was a despised side character for the cast (he had to do the walk of shame and apologize to them an episode or two later, it was stupid).

However, this was also a flash in the pan moment that went on to live in the imagination of the audience for a long time. Upon storming out of the barbecue as the other women yell at them, Denise tells Aaron to just keep walking out of the party because they were “on camera”, and presumably she didn’t want to completely let fly on how pissed she was until they were off-mic. Aaron growls back at her not to tell him what to do or he would crush her fucking hand.

This moment was commented on briefly at the reunion, with Andy Cohen expressing concern for Denise and her wellbeing in the relationship only to be easily brushed off. Denise didn’t make a big deal of it at the time, probably already thinking of the best ways to defend herself when the conversation turned towards Brandi. None of the other women seemed to make a big deal of it either, but why would they? Domestic violence was already something they had swung on and missed with Taylor Armstrong, and it would stand to reason they were either gun shy or simply didn’t care. By that time they hated Denise, hated Aaron, and were only too happy for them to be taking their leave from the show. What happened after wouldn’t be their problem.

Subscribe now

I, personally, find that really fucking gross, and I applaud the efforts of one Garcelle Beauvais, who caught a lot of strays because she continued to confront Rinna in particular about the ways in which she treated Denise. Denise became a specter on the show, frequently referenced but not seen, until after Rinna was blessedly forced from the show in 2023. However, the Denise that reappeared in season 13 was not the same Denise that we had seen just three seasons prior. She was disheveled, drunk, wearing an upside down jacket, and seemed jumpy when approached by even the most well-meaning of housewives. I struggled with understanding why Denise would have wanted to come back to the show at all, and later agreed to be filmed for a short lived season of her own solo reality show called Denise Richards and her Wild Things, after the way she was treated, but I have to assume the answer is they needed the money. She no longer had a steady gig with The Bold and the Beautiful, and Aaron’s center was becoming embroiled in more and more controversy.

As you could probably guess, when you tell people that you can cure their cancer with a fancy light and a sound bath they will be understandably upset (to say the least) when it comes to pass that this isn’t accurate. Circa 2022 Aaron made one such promise to a woman who had recently been diagnosed with Sarcoma, guaranteeing her that he could cure her with stem cell treatments or she would be refunded 50% of the $126,000 he was given. Well, by December 2023 this woman’s tumors had expanded by 25%, her prognosis was poor, and her partner requested the refund Aaron had promised them. Aaron ignored this request, and ignored it three more times until the woman ultimately and unfortunately passed away. Her partner has filed a suit against Aaron in an attempt to reclaim the money.

Clearly things were percolating, and maybe had been since Denise had left the show, but things didn’t come to a head until this past summer. On July 7, 2025, Aaron officially filed for divorce from Denise citing “irreconcilable differences”, which is a dog whistle in celebrity divorce for someone behaving very, very badly. He also requested spousal support, which put a fine point on just how desperate he probably was for cash. Just over a week later Denise requested a restraining order against him, reporting the following to the court:

“Throughout our relationship, Aaron would frequently violently choke me, violently squeeze my head with both hands, tightly squeeze my arms, violently slap me in my face and head, aggressively slam my head into the bathroom towel rack, threaten to kill me, hold me down with his knee on my back to the point where I would have to plead with him to get off me so that he would not kill me and hack into my laptop and phone and download all of my text messages. […] Aaron regularly threatened to ‘break my jaw’ and would cry, beg me to stay, and promise to get help — none of which ever happened.”

According to Denise, Aaron had caused her at least three concussions over the course of their relationship, and would often verbally abuse her in addition to the physical abuse. The incident that led to them ultimately splitting for good included Aaron grabbing Denise hard around both arms and screaming that she was a “cunt whore” into her face before throwing her to the ground. That night he also stole her laptop and distributed private messages that he had stolen from her devices (Denise has also alleged that he would often use recording devices to monitor her). Along with these statements Denise submitted photos of herself with a pitch black eye, looking at turns terrified and sadly resigned. The way a lot of women probably look when someone they trusted with everything turned around and hit them with it.

A permanent restraining order was granted.

Rumors have abounded in the months since their divorce has been filed, from dead dogs to what their shared financial status really is, but if Aaron’s marriage to Nicollette is any example it’s possible this is just the beginning. It’s come to light that Denise was bankrolling Aaron’s entire family, and in fact they all lived in townhomes that Denise leased for them. They’ve since been evicted, but recently GoFundMe’s have cropped up from Aaron’s family purportedly to raise funds for Aaron to fight for custody of Denise’s youngest adopted daughter. This is scummy on myriad levels, and completely unsurprising from someone who is also attempting to wring spousal support out of the woman that he abused. He’s out there crying about how if she doesn’t give him money he’s going to be homeless, has no phone, and Denise is a drunk who just tossed him and his family out of their house like trash. I actually hate him.

This saga will only continue, and I walk away from it feeling deep, deep sadness for Denise. She appears, at least to me, to be a very nice and kind person with horrible taste in men. And, to be clear, having bad taste in men, or having a high sex drive, or being loud, is not a reason anybody should be laying hands on you. I feel additionally sad that Denise was probably very alone in her experience of this abuse, as it’s a common thing that an abuser will slowly cut you off and alienate you from the people who will be able to help you if they notice things that are wrong. Some of her oldest supposed “friends” proved themselves fame whores that were eager to turn against her for a buck, and to this day those relationships haven’t been mended. She was completely teed up to walk into an abusive dynamic and she did it, not because she knew this was coming but probably because there was nobody in her life willing to tell her to stop. You don’t need to look that closely at Aaron to see what he is. There were probably a lot of people who saw this coming and did nothing. Some of them were Housewives.

As sad as I am for Denise I also place anger on the Fox Force Five, two of whom are still active members of RHOBH and one of whom is about to have a resurgence in popularity based on the show The Traitors. Was is solely their responsibility to see and stop abuse before it happened? No, of course not. But they failed parlously in being good friends to a woman who did nothing to them simply because they decided they were angry at her. The slow, heat-death of their show is their punishment.

Season 15 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has been airing for four weeks, and it may be too soon to tell but things are not good. Kyle “dyke” Richards is still coyly trying to play at honesty while claiming her personal life should be private, Erika Girardi is dating a far-right ex-army officer named Shrek, Sutton is slowly chasing all her real friends off the show, and Dorit is being Dorit. Rating have been mid to low. Fan reaction is bored and disappointed. There are rumors that this could be the shows last season. I will not be watching it. I’m too tired of their bullshit.

In the end, the show will ultimately die as it lived: a show about Rich Women Doing Things. It’s a sad pill to swallow that the moments of true greatness that have come from this show (and indeed, most Bravo shows) come from moments of true pain and suffering for a lot of the people who create them for our consumption. It’s a Videodrome of misery buttressed by a wind tunnel of self-absorption, cruelty, and bad clothes. Each season became a landscape to present excess, and it has become nothing more than a triptych of Biblical gluttony, a three-paneled horror show of messy divorce, bankruptcy, widows and orphans defrauded, sisters turning against each other, and abused women being put out to dry by people who were supposed be their friends. The moments where it was great were truly great. But that isn’t enough to make up for all of this - like a garden of beautiful flowers punctuated by heavy, poisonous thorns. A garden will slowly rot unless you go deep and pull directly at the root.

I live in Minnesota.

People have had a lot of ideas about this place for the last six years since becoming aware that the people who lived here were capable of expressing their pain in “illiberal” ways (i.e. ways that threaten the racism inherent in our society). I had hoped that Tim Walz offering himself up as the representative of the state during the last presidential election might help to assuage people into believing that Minneapolis was and is a thriving, exciting, hopeful community of people doing their best to live a decent and good life, but I’m not sure that message has landed. There are people (some of whom actually live in Minnesota) who are convinced that during the protests that occurred around the murder of George Floyd in 2020 that the city was burned to the ground like it’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame or something, because their knowledge of the Twin Cities extends no farther than what the nightly news wants to tell them. When Renee Good was murdered by ICE last week people were angry, but it was flash fire. People have seemingly already moved on outside of Minnesota.

This makes me angry. Perhaps it’s because since 2020 people have been happy to write off the people of Minneapolis as a lost cause who were happy to destroy their own communities (as if any of it is true), or maybe because they’re people who wouldn’t have cared anyway. Clearly you can tell people anything about a place and they’ll believe it if you’re standing in front of a podium with a literal Nazi quote on it. A lot of people who I otherwise would have termed very left, clocked in people have moved on from this, or never spoke out at all. There are cars being left abandoned on the side of the road, in the middle of the street, seatbelts cut and bumpers crushed like tissue paper. There are people who are gone. They may never come back. The government is invading our state, our local politicians are neutered, our community leaders are landlocked in terms of what they can accomplish. Republicans are lying about Renee Good, about Minneapolis, and are celebrating citizens being ripped out of their homes and potentially sent to die. Nobody is saying anything.

Minnesota has not moved on. The people who live here, who have hearts and minds, are not going to allow this without resistance. People are scared, and angry, and sick of pushing back, and we still smile and tell each other “good morning” if we pass each other on the sidewalk. I feel lucky to live here.

I would rather live here than in Beverly Hills. From what I can tell, the people there are a lost cause.

It was a gift to see the Northern Lights. I’m glad I stood outside and looked at them instead of watching Bravo. I wish that every night, when I want to sink into other people’s pain, I could go outside and look at the Northern Lights instead.

For people who know me personally you know that I have a chronic problem with how much I talk, which isn’t something I’m really apologetic about because truly it is something I don’t think it’s in my power to control. I have a lot to say almost at all times, because my brain is constantly hopping between Ideas and wanting to get to the bottom of things, and my mouth often helps me dig deeper and deeper into what I’m trying to experience within a conversation. Sometimes this means I’m interrupting, which I’m aware is something we as a culture really don’t like, but there are many aspects of my life and personality I don’t think the general public would like if they had to spend more than an afternoon with me. People are free to talk over me, too, as long as we’re Getting To The Bottom of something together because to me every conversation is an engine that we have to shovel coal into together. That can be difficult to articulate to people, who I assume think I don’t care about what they are saying when in reality I just want us both to experience the conversation not just Have the conversation. Sometimes I think I relate too strongly to that Italian couple from Call Me By Your Name.

That being said, when I have something that earnestly weighs on my mind I don’t have a lot to say. It makes it really difficult to write, and it makes it very difficult to talk about anything of substance, which is why on here I tend to focus more on media and less on what’s going on with me personally. Without sounding like too much of a Bethenny Frankel, I keep many, many, many walls up with many, many, many people because if I truly had to speak at length about how I’m experiencing my life at any given moment I would burst into tears. I would so much rather discuss why I hate the shit out of Lisa Rinna than answer a pointed question about, like, how I’m doing because one of those things I can talk at length about without becoming too emotionally invested and the other will make me revisit five years worth of trauma I don’t want to unpack. Maybe one day I’m going to be ready - having done none of the work required of me to become ready lol - but I don’t know when that day is.

Ultimately this is a prelude to explain why it’s been difficult for me to write without actually discussing why it’s been very difficult for me to write. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done that makes me feel completely safe, and the illusion of safety makes me want to be vulnerable even when I know it’s really a facade. There’s been a lot that’s disturbed me in recent weeks, both personally and publicly, and to talk about one asks me to talk about the other. One fire feeds the other. It’s why things get tangled up with me. It’s why I treat reality TV with the same importance as literature, why in my mind things in separate spheres of influence seem to correspond to the same rules of engagement. Every conversation is an engine, and every bit of coal that fuels it matters. Which is why when I truly want to think about something I like to be very quiet. When you really think about it, I’m doing everybody in my orbit a big favor by choosing to be mature and quiet, because if I really engaged with how I’m feeling I would be in an asylum with Taylor Swift making it everybody else’s issue instead of just my issue that makes me cry and smoke sometimes.

Suffice it to say: I have not been very well. I’m better-ish now.

A few weeks ago I requested time off to go to Chicago with my sister and her family. Normally the request would have been approved right away, but this is a very busy time of year for the place that I work and my boss wanted to have a conversation about it before he approved it. We went into his office, he asked me why I wanted time off, and I cried. That’s where I’ve been.

Where were we?

Last time I spoke about the women who created The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and I’d like to start today speaking about the women who destroyed it.

To me there are two people who permanently altered the course of RHOBH, taking it from a show about Rich Women Doing Things while suffering some of the craziest horrors a person could go through and transforming it to the glittering turd it is today. One of them is Lisa Rinna, and the other is Erika Girardi.

This isn’t to say that any of the housewives that followed the initial lineup didn’t contribute to the legacy of the show, or alter the ways in which certain things are addressed on camera. Yolanda Hadid, Eileen Davidson, and Dorit Kemsley are all of a similar era of the show as Lisa and Erika, and they’ve all made notable contributions, but I think of the show in terms of who joined after Erika Girardi and who didn’t because they mind as well be different shows. Housewives that entered the fray in a post-Erika landscape operated with a different playbook, they wore different clothes, they mostly appeared to lean on persona, with the exception of a precious, raw few. If Lisa Rinna was the micro aggravator that altered the course of the show then Erika was the macro aggravator.

Rinna is similar to Brandi Glanville (who we discussed in part one) in that they are two extremely polarizing forces that both at times served as hapless pawns, fan favorites, and ultimately became villains. They could both be brash, vulgar, and surprisingly astute, as well as hilarious in the right circumstances. They could also both be loud, aggressive, and could turn on people with very little warning. All of these in combination make them incredible personalities, and it can’t be argued that Brandi and Rinna made excellent TV (especially together), but also divided the audience. Just as much as people were amused by Rinna they could also be annoyed by her obvious persona, the way she could sometimes speak in cringe-worthy internet slang, and the way that she chose the strangest battles to fight to the death over.

I’ve always had a major issue with Rinna, so I’d like to get it out of the way that she made great TV. However, I always found her completely phony, and even the elements of her life they injected to attempt to humanize her rang false to me. The way she paraded her mother in front of the cameras was meant to be endearing, but I disliked the performance of affection, especially when it was obviously being used to make her look better when she was having conflict with other housewives. Additionally, it left a very bad taste in my mouth how she addressed her daughter’s eating disorder on camera. It isn’t impossible to have these discussions on camera, as Crystal Kung Minkoff and Jackie Goldschneider have shown, but Rinna often wanted to introduce the subject of her daughters illness one-on-one to the viewer and then receive no additional thoughts from her castmates or even let her daughter have the chance to speak on her own story. She seemed to want to get the “that’s sad” from the audience while doing none of the work of…owning it, alright, I said it. Garcelle Beauvais posed a very relevant question to her once upon a time asking her to reflect on the ways in which perhaps she’s contributed to her daughter’s body image, and Rinna’s reaction was and has since been anger and vitriol that anyone would dare to infer such a thing. It’s not a nice thing to think about, to be sure, but what does Rinna - or her daughter - gain from acting as though she has no accountability as a mother for the ways in which her child might have been inadvertently hurt by her trying to be a good parent?

Additionally, and this should speak for itself, but everything she does online is fucking irritating. It’s why when I confidently say Rinna plays a “part” on the show I do say it with a grain of salt, because nobody is that nasty over the internet and they don’t have a smidgen of that in their everyday life. The first example was a tweet, in which she tagged Lisa Vanderpump in a picture of an array of cupcakes covered in pills - weirdly being a pill-popper was Rinna’s thing for a minute, it was weird and not that deep.

This is oblique enough to come off as harmless if you don’t really have context for what was happening behind the scenes, but the truth is that four months prior Lisa Vanderpump’s brother had completed suicide via pill overdose. I’ll mention in the spirit of fairness that Rinna often did post pictures, art, memes, etc. about pills, but I still don’t believe this was just a harmless mistake. Rinna claims she didn’t know about Vanderpump’s brother, and instead asserted at the time that she just felt bad because “nobody had wished Lisa a happy birthday on Twitter” so she made a joke at her own expense, because Rinna is a zany, harmless pill-popper and not somebody who says really heinous shit to people when they’re weak. I don’t really buy that rationalization, due in no small part to the fact that the two Lisa’s had had tension right up until that point and it seems obvious to me that Vanderpump’s ousting from the show was already being plotted. Rinna didn’t like Vanderpump, Vanderpump didn’t like Rinna. There would have been no reason for them to sincerely Tweet a Happy Birthday message to each other.

The second example of Rinna being a true ass boil on the internet happened with Garcelle Beauvais, who she had already been having tense moments with. Rinna leapt to the defense of D**n* J*nk*ns (identity withheld to protect the Me), who Garcelle had described as “ignorant” in reference to comments The Individual had made in reference to “black content creators”. It’s not what you think, but it’s also exactly what you think, because The Individual clapped back at Garcelle, the only black housewife on RHOBH, with Rinna as back-up.

Obviously this did not go over well.

My interpretation of Rinna’s oft touted tagline “own it!” is one that I don’t think Rinna actually intends. My version of “owning it” is being able to recognize the role that I play in any given situation and acknowledge what energy I’m contributing to something, whether that’s good or bad, so that I can try to create a positive experience for myself by being active in my own accountability. Rinna’s version of “owning it” seems to be acting like a complete douchebag and refusing to apologize for it because actually it’s the other person’s fault because they’re not owning it. All that Rinna has to do to own something for herself is yell at somebody that they are not. It’s a deeply, deeply irritating trait for me personally, because readers of this half-assed newsletter will know that I do not appreciate being gaslit by these bitches or their network. #IKnowWhatISaw.

That dynamic is ultimately why I am of the firm belief that Rinna was the first plane that hit the towers here. She was a superb gaslighter of the other housewives and of the audience, starting from her very first drama of the show. She wanted us to really and truly believe that she was naught but a pawn being used to say Kim Richards was close to death, and that Yolanda Hadid had Munchausen, but again I just don’t buy this. Rinna always tried to deflect the blame onto someone else, portraying herself as a wide-eyed silly billy who just wants to have fun and gets caught up in the insanity, but you can’t play stupid and dumb at the same time. She played the game too well when she really went after people to pretend at being that shocked by her own actions when they get revealed in situations where she operated from the sidelines. She was a mean bitch, and she knew she was, but she was also one of the most successful housewives I know at getting people to think the opposite.

For scale, I really love Lisa Vanderpump even though I know she’s shady and weird. I can’t explain why other than the fact that I find her quirks endearing. Viewers who loved Rinna follow the same line - they might not be able to articulate why they like her, they just like her. But I never gelled with her, probably because she - like Shannon Storms Beador - does a “I’m being funny” voice when she wants us to think she’s being funny, and I have to be honest that’s a red flag to me. Anyone caught doing a Voice on my watch is not to be trusted, because clearly there’s something else going on up top that wants to protect them from their own actions (lol).

Speaking of voices, we should talk about Erika.

Rinna altered the way the show was consumed, and Erika altered the way the show presented itself. It’s been spoken about at length by scholars of Bravo’s medium, but there is a distinct era before Erika and there’s a distinct era after her. Aesthetically, she elevated the show from the semi run-of-the-mill glam of the traditionally wealthy and into the pseudo sexy clown show that it is today. Before Erika the housewives dressed well, to be sure, but she and Dorit were some of the first that championed the flashing of brands, of popularizing a drag inspired personal look, of creating a “character” each time they wore a new outfit. At least half of this was due to the fact that Erika herself has an alter ego that she could lean on to inform the ostentatious way she presented herself - the pop star, Erika Jayne. “Star” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because really Erika’s career was funded by the stolen riches of her wealthy husband, and she only really had a following in gay clubs where everyone is on molly and just wants to rub their bodies on each other. Nevertheless, she dressed loudly and proudly, and the other wives took note quickly.

It became the norm for the cast to travel with their own personal glam squads (even housewives like Kyle Richards, who always bemoaned the emphasis on glam, had one), and having a memorable outfit was an important part of attending a filmed event. The show began to rely much more on aesthetics than it previously had, to the detriment of other aspects of the storytelling. There was a gulch of a few years after Erika joined where everyone looked better than ever but they had nothing to do, nothing to bring to the table. The biggest dramas were about bitchy comments being said off camera, rumors that couldn’t be verified, other things that might be slightly entertaining to the invested watcher but don’t pack as much of a punch as faking cancer on Orange County or witnessing the destruction of a family on New Jersey. For a while Beverly Hills was easily the most boring franchise of the bunch, even as the cast stepped up their looks and their outward presentation of wealth. That’s part of what was always fun about Beverly Hills, even as it transitioned from being the darkest show on TV to being a milquetoast slog through rich women’s closets - they had the coolest houses, the coolest clothes, the most amazing pools, and their events were attended by actual celebrities. Sure, there was nothing actually happening on the show, but at least it looked nice.

Unfortunately, Erika had the same problem that Rinna had. She was very good at presenting herself as someone who had it all figured out, and if you argued with her she could read you into silence. It became apparent immediately to those who have an eye for her particular schtick - as I said, I hate a Funny Voice - that all was not as it seemed. On the show Erika appeared quick, dry, and witty, but by the time she arrived at reunions each season she was stone-faced, mealy mouthed, and answered every question Andy Cohen volleyed to her with abrupt, clipped answers, as though she was being deposed. It was easy to write it off as merely her being married to a lawyer rearing its head, but it wasn’t as though Erika had any less to lose than the other housewives, so the fact that she appeared so tightly wound at reunions, where she had to answer directly for things she said or did, was curious to me. What was Erika trying to hide behind her big outfits, her odd lilting series of Voices that could swing from a shrill joviality to a low, deepthroat-esque warning?

Well, it turned out she was hiding a lot. Widows and orphans. The rest you can Google for yourself.

The point of this diatribe against Rinna and Erika is not to release steam on why I dislike them or to argue they were necessarily bad for the show, but it is to explore why I feel the show turned against what was supposed to make it great. Instead of having actual drama the cast seemed more concerned with presenting themselves to be the most elevated versions of themselves, whether that spoke to the truth of their lives or not. It was dishonest, and it was boring, and every major drama the show has attempted to explore has operated on the periphery of those two things ever since Erika’s first season. Kyle doesn’t want to talk about her divorce or her possible lesbian relationship, Erika didn’t want to talk about her divorce or her lawsuits, Rinna didn’t want to talk about what was really happening in her family life, Dorit didn’t want to discuss whether she knew about her dog being sent to a kill shelter.

Everybody has a right to privacy. But if you want privacy you shouldn’t agree to be on a reality television program.

What bothers me the most about the turn this show has taken is not even that it’s boring, it’s that it’s dishonest. Not only is it lying about itself, but it’s boldly proclaiming that it’s being truthful when you don’t even need to be that well-versed in the show to know that this isn’t accurate. It’s hypocritical to a comedic extent, and it irks me to no end that they’re so high on their own supply that they think I’m going to fall for it. As a bitch from the Midwest I must admit now that I hate hypocrites, and I hate snobs.

With that in mind, let’s talk about season 10.

I have, quite literally, been haunted by season 10 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills since it aired. Up until now I’ve described a lot of psychological warfare happening on these shows, of the sadness and depravity that the network has gleefully aired, but the way that season 10 bothered me is almost intangible. To properly articulate why this is I need to provide a little background, which truly is just eating up the word count for those who already get where I’m coming from, but bear with me.

There was, and arguably still is, a core alliance of current and former housewives that are often referred to as The Fox Force Five that consists of Kyle Richards, Erika Girardi, Lisa Rinna, Teddi Mellencamp, and Dorit Kemsley. This coalition has, over the seasons, been accused of ganging up on their other castmates in order to protect one another from unflattering storylines and potential secrets being outed. A few victims of this have been Sutton Stracke, Kathy Hilton, Garcelle Beauvais, Lisa Vanderpump, Crystal Kung Minkoff, and Denise Richards. The attacks the Fox Force Five have levelled at these women have sometimes been successful, and sometimes unsuccessful, but at this point it is practically inarguable that during the time they were all actively on the show (or jockeying to be on it, such as the first season after Teddi’s firing) they regularly backed one another in campaigns to bully, harass, and intimidate the other housewives. What set these attacks off could vary in weight, and indeed often it was something petty (a poor choice of words, a miscalculated conversation), and so the furor with which they would attack their subject appeared confusing and disproportionate. Not all the time, but certainly some of the time.

Most viewers recall the first true incident in which the FFF successfully took control of a narrative happening in season 9. I spoke a little about this situation in my piece about Teddi, but to summarize this stupid, stupid story: Dorit Kemsley adopted a dog from Lisa Vanderpump’s dog sanctuary, the dog bit her husband, she gave it to a friend of their family to raise, and that friend gave the dog to a kill shelter. Vanderpump, often disgustingly outspoken about her love of dogs, heard that the dog had been sent to this shelter, rescued it, and waged a silent war against Dorit for endangering the dogs life, enlisting the help of Teddi and the employees of her shelter to push the narrative that Dorit had knowingly endangered the dog. Teddi initially played along, but broke rank to support Dorit when the other women (especially her close ally, Kyle) sensed an opportunity to finally nail Vanderpump for orchestrating takedowns of fellow housewives. Duplicity aside, the other women successfully organized against Vanderpump to the extent that she stopped filming the show mid-season and refused to even attend the reunion. In a matter of just a few episodes a fan-favorite, and one of the original housewives of Beverly Hills, had permanently removed herself from the narrative of the show. The bond of the FFF was forged in the fires of this initial ousting - they had been able to label themselves the champions of truth and honesty, and all those who they came to believe were not being “open and honest” were subject to condemnation.

And, of course, the truth can be a liquid thing. Often on television the truth lies somewhere in the middle, so even if someone believes they are being completely truthful it will rarely be enough to satisfy the engaged viewer. The lighting needs to be right, the words need to be better than perfect otherwise the fight could go on for weeks instead of minutes, the audience in the room and the audience in the television need to be in agreement that the time is right for any given Truth to be spoken, otherwise it mind as well be a lie to save face, a deception and attempt to avoid accountability, a pointless deflection. On reality TV the truth is everything, but it also means nothing. This is why sustained exposure to reality television warps your brain. I know from personal experience (become a paid subscriber today!).

Subscribe now

So, you can guess that having a horde of dishonest bitches proclaiming themselves the judges of whether people were being open and honest irked me. It irked a lot of people at the time, but I honestly think most of the audience was just happy that something was finally happening on the show again besides outfits and disagreements over whether champagne can be served in a wine glass. In case you were wondering, it can but it does feel weird, I can’t lie. Another lie from Teddi Mellencamp…

It was pure luck that the very season that did away with Lisa Vanderpump was Denise Richard’s first season.

Even at the time Denise’s casting felt slightly sad, because she was and remains a little too big of a star to be on a Bravo show. The same can be said for Garcelle Beauvais, but most of the (white) audience didn’t recognize Garcelle by name alone, whereas Denise was still considered a major star by a lot of women of a certain age. She had already had her own reality show, Denise Richards: It’s Complicated, which aired for two seasons starting in 2008, and she had been a steady working actress since her peak in the late 90s. It was seen at the time as a huge “get” for Bravo, who had long been harangued by fans for not pursuing housewives with actual resumes, like Heather Locklear or Nicolette Sheridan. Denise was the perfect person at the exact perfect time, and the audience received her warmly. She was funny, charismatic, had a unique family and lifestyle, and told just the right amount of dirty jokes to be scandalous to the other wives, who had up until then leaned on Erika and Rinna to be the bold, sexy ones. At first blush all the remaining housewives seemed to get along with aplomb - they had gotten rid of Vanderpump, and finally they had a season where there had been a major drama that generated controversy and viewership. What could go wrong?

I can only speak from observation, but it became obvious to me at the beginning of season 10 that the banishment of Vanderpump had created a bit of an issue in the distribution of power in the cast. Of the main cast, Kyle Richards was the only original housewife who remained in the lineup, and it seemed obvious to Kyle that she would be taking Vanderpump’s place as the housewife with all the power and prestige of being an OG. However, that wasn’t to be. Kyle is not well-liked by fans, and wasn’t even back in 2019 when the season was filmed, so the assumption that she would now be the leader of the cast that all the action circulated around was a hard pill to swallow. It didn’t help that the newer additions, Garcelle and Denise, weren’t necessarily her biggest fans at the beginning of the season. In the early episodes Kyle comes off as whiny, rude, and standoffish towards anybody who wasn’t the FFF, and her closest ally was Teddi, who had long since lost the goodwill of the audience. It’s not a surprise the viewers gravitated more towards Denise, who was fresh off an amazing inaugural season, and who was still funny, kooky, and eager to have her opinion be heard. It didn’t seem like a surprise to Kyle either, who almost immediately started making moves against Denise.

The first example of the FFF clearly deciding they had had enough of Denise getting to swoop in and be the favorite occurred after a dinner at Denise’s house. The whole cast had been present, as well as Denise’s children and a selection of their friends, and the conversation had loudly and drunkenly turned towards sex. Denise giggled in the moment, but was clearly uncomfortable with her children and their friends seated so close to the conversation, and she mentioned as much to Erika over lunch after the fact. Watching the conversation now it appears obvious that Erika is sucking in the moment like a sponge so that she could go back and tell the FFF that they might have an “in”. Denise, who had made a splash her first season by talking about sex and happy ending massages, now didn’t want to talk about sex! Albeit, she didn’t want to talk about sex in front of her kids, but still! What a lair - what a hypocrite! That’s not very open and honest of her! They spun the moment into Denise calling them bad mothers, into Denise being a tightly wound bitch, and even to watch it back today is bizarre. All the woman did was say it was weird that her friends were loudly talking about threesomes right next to her kids, and in response to the other women saying “well, maybe your kids shouldn’t have been there!” she said she would stop having her kids around them. Everything they got angry with Denise about was in direct response to their actions against her, and thankfully they had some superb gaslighters on their team.

As bad and weird as it started, it was bout to get, much, much worse.

So, Kyle and Teddi were hanging out when Kim arrived to drop something off, and - what a coincidence! - Brandi Glanville was waiting for her in the car. Brandi was invited in, in a totally natural and not at all staged move, and proceeded to sit on the bed and tell Kyle and Teddi all about how they shouldn’t trust anything Denise said because she was a liar. Why was Denise a liar, Brandi? Because Brandi and Denise had slept together while Denise was married to her husband, Aaron (more on him later), and Denise had lied to Brandi and told her they were in an open relationship until after they had slept together when she revealed that actually they needed to keep it a secret.

Reader…let me put you on game.

Whether Brandi and Denise really slept together doesn’t really matter to me, but I’m dubious as to this being the absolute truth. As we discussed in part one, Brandi has a stated history of coming onto other women when she’s drunk, so the degree that things can cross over into being sexual. Denise also seemed to like her tequila, so it’s entirely possible something did happen between them, but the circumstances through which this came to light give me extreme pause. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that Kyle would be having these problems with Denise and would just by happenstance invite in a situation where a person who isn’t even on the show anymore comes to her to drop a major bomb that portrays Denise as a liar. I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it was an orchestrated event. Does that mean it didn’t happen? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. What I care about is the way in which the FFF threw themselves onto this rumor like the nuns in The Devils on top of that crucifix, snickering and squirming at the idea of *gasp* lesbian sex, which has long been something more like a joke than an actual thing women engage in on Bravo. Don’t get me started on lesbian hook-ups being seen as just silly experimentation on Bravo, not actual orientation. It’s weird and infuriating. Not to mention the way this interaction is characterized by the other women as Brandi being “tricked” and made to feel ashamed because Denise “made her a cheater”. We love a predatory characterization of lesbianism on this Substack, because that isn’t something actual lesbians struggle with at all - hetero chicks acting like we’re all just lying in wait to grope them. As if that isn’t something that Brandi has actually done.

Affairs had been revealed on Bravo shows before, but this particular instance struck me deep in my soul with how eager the FFF was to giggle and cover their faces in delight when they discussed the Denise/Brandi situation in private, and then once they had to address it head-on they acted like they were speaking at the United Nations. They could not have been happier for Denise to be forced into this corner, to be made to answer for something that was going to have a profound effect on her personal life, and to accept at face-value something that was coming to them through dubious means. None of them had a reason to believe Brandi over Denise, and in fact a lot of them had had way more tension with Brandi than they had even that season with Denise, and yet they took the first opportunity to tear down the new favorite. Their confessionals were all different flavors of Vaudevillian - Erika in particular was doing so many voices, so many theatrical flourishes of her arms - from fake shock, to fake indignance, to fake outrage. None could seem to agree on whether they were more angry Denise had supposedly talked shit about them to Brandi (texts which were never revealed), or whether they were angry Denise was being dishonest about her life. Ultimately why they were angry didn’t really matter.

Denise’s reaction when confronted about the rumors on the cast trip to Rome is honestly heartbreaking. At first she reacts with incredulity, trying to laugh it off, but once it began to sink in that the other women were treating this with the utmost solemnity she begins to flail. She calls for the cameras to go down, for the scene to be cut, and ultimately begins to cry. One of my least favorite characterizations of people is that the second they cry once confronted it means they’re guilty of some wrongdoing, and a lot of people applied this rationale to Denise in Rome. Everything she did was evidence that she was a fake, phony, sexually devious person, and this was the truth for her all the way up to the reunion. Her last reunion.

It made me really, really sad to watch that season for the first time. I hated the way Rinna turned on Denise, who had been a good friend of hers, in favor of dogpiling with her other asshole confederates. It made me sad to see Denise leave, because she was funny and quirky and had an interesting family. It made me sad that the show, which had floated idly for so long, had somehow drifted all the way back around to accusing a woman of lying about her life just to reinforce a power dynamic that the audience didn’t even like. And, most of all, it made me sad that queer women were being treated with the kind of mouth-agape, tittering nastiness that I had hoped most women left behind in high school, as though it’s both disgusting and hilarious for women to have sex with each other. All of it was embarrassing. All of it was fucking lame.

Nothing is more illustrative of this than a scene in Rome where Rinna is angrily berating Denise for denying the affair with Brandi. She insists repeatedly: “Own it! Own it!”

Denise, somewhat exhaustedly, replies: “I have owned it, and it’s not good enough.”

I hold space for the fact that there were things Denise didn’t want the other housewives to know, let alone the entire world. This was portrayed as duplicitous by her castmates, and at the time a significant portion of the audience reacted to Denise’s boundaries (the cease and desist, the “Bravo, Bravo, Bravo!”) with raised eyebrows. Oh, you want to change the rules? Fuck you.

The audience didn’t know then exactly how much Denise had to hide. As it happens, the cast had made the same mistake with her as they had with Taylor Armstrong.

But that comes later.

The year was 2010, and the genre as far as Bravo was concerned was still in its infancy. There had been disturbing things occurring on Survivor, Fear Factor, and other competition shows, but the implication of these boundary pushing shows was that consent had been pre-negotiated between production and participants. We took for granted that everything we were being presented with had been agreed upon by all involved, that any real element of danger was not in actuality as deadly as we might otherwise think. These shows were also workplaces, and the workplace has to ensure certain protections even if the purpose of the work is to push the envelope. It’s obvious now how wrong we all were, how easy it was to take advantage of everyday people who needed money more than they needed notoriety, but back then we weren’t accustomed to being presented with things that were genuinely unexpected. Shocking.

At least this was how I remember it. In 2010 I was 15, I was still sneaking into the basement to watch Keeping up with the Kardashians where my mom couldn’t judge me for it, and there was very little envelope pushing happening on E! at that time. Bravo was where we had started going for our evening programming, and it felt refreshingly grown-up to be able to watch these shows with my mom and have actual opinions about one woman or another. And, oh boy, was season 3 of RHONY ripe for opinions. Best friends had turned rivals, marriages had been ended, new alliances formed, and it all came to a head on the island of St. John.

Or, as it came to be known, Scary Island.

Whatever it was that happened to Kelly Killoren Bensimon on that trip is debated to this day. Some say she was on crystal meth, some on a mixture of booze and pills, and some say that she really was just being Kelly. Whatever it was, it created one of the most erratic performances ever seen by a housewives audience, who watched in stunned horror as she accosted a pregnant and grief-stricken Bethenny Frankel over whether she was a chef, told Alex McCord she was channeling the devil, and generally refused to allow any of the women to simply relax and enjoy their vacation. She was aggressive, incoherent, and inexhaustible. It was, honestly, something that nobody could make sense of. We knew Kelly by this point, and Kelly knew the show (it was her second season as a housewife); we knew she could be daffy, delusional, and occasionally out-of-pocket, but all of these things were harmless until she set foot on St. John. Overnight we became unwitting witnesses to what amounted to a nervous breakdown that culminated in screaming, running down halls, weeping, and Kelly having to be hastily spirited away in the dark of the night. The circumstances surrounding her departure, too, are subject to interpretation, but it seems generally accepted that Kelly did not choose to leave, and in fact she believed that she was the victim of “systematic bullying” instead of having experienced a mental health crisis.

Watching it, I remember feeling like I was falling, like I was watching something that I wasn’t supposed to see. I had always been too invested in the television and whatever it wanted to give to me, but there had already been moments where what I was seeing transcended the screen and managed to imprint itself deeper than my retinas (living in a post-9/11 America was the wild, wild West of what was being shown on the evening news). Part of my singular disturbance to what happened to Kelly was surely due to the fact that at least at this point in time these moments were not what we were going to the Housewives to watch. We had already had Teresa Giudice’s immortal “prostitution whore” table flip almost exactly a year prior, but overall the Housewives franchise was where we went to laugh, to deride the pettiness of the upper classes, to feel more assured in our own sense of the world by watching these women and their outrageous antics. There was always an undercurrent of misogyny, but it mostly remained subliminal and rose no farther than Girl-on-Girl Crime. It was early days, and the idea that we would bear witness to actual darkness on these shows that were only promising a few laughs at the expense of rich, drunk assholes was a completely unexpected consequence of pointing cameras at women already dealing with an excessive amount of pressure in their personal lives.

It’s a distinct memory: me, alone in the dark of the night, feeling like I no longer had control over what I was watching, that perhaps things could spiral even further out of control, that something bad was about to happen to Kelly. I turned the T.V. off, unable to stomach watching it alone, and ran upstairs to my parents room, finding my mom still wide awake and watching the same episode on their tiny, grainy bedroom screen. We watched the rest together, unable to make sense of what we were seeing, and I walked away from that episode of television changed forever. There was nothing else I wanted to talk about for weeks, and because there were not a lot of teenagers watching Bravo in my corner of the world I suffered mostly in silence.

It was the first time I tasted how delicious darkness could be, how potent and intoxicating it could be to witness someone else’s pain, to turn it over in my mouth like a bite of rare meat. It made me feel like a vampire. Even now, knowing the devastation that things like this cause, knowing the lives it has ruined, I still crave the taste.

It’s wrong. It’s so, so wrong. Don’t think that I don’t know.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills premiered on Bravo five months after the Scary Island trilogy aired on RHONY. It wasn’t immediately apparent that it would, for a time, become the darkest show on television, and indeed the first season initially appears to follow the same throughline of most early Housewives properties. It was, as Brian Moylan (who covers the show for Vulture) often refers to it, Rich Women Doing Things. Stars were made of virtually every woman on the inaugural lineup, all of whom delivered a healthy amount of Moments that cemented them as key players in the growing Housewives universe, from the disintegrating marriage between Camille and Kelsey Grammar (do you guys remember Frasier? Damn), to the worsening dynamic of sisters Kim and Kyle Richards, to Taylor Armstrong spending $50,000 on a tea party for her disinterested daughter, and finally to a dinner party featuring a zooted, vaping psychic.

I didn’t watch RHOBH when its first season aired. Scary Island had made me gun-shy of engaging with Bravo for a few years, especially since there was nobody my own age to dissect it with, and at first blush I took for granted that the glimmering patina of wealth covered up a deep, black pit of pain for all of these women. If the Dinner Party From Hell was at one end of the spectrum - illustrating that these women could have fun, unexpected ventures into drama - then one of the final scenes of the season proved there was much more that we couldn’t yet see. It’s become so iconic in the fourteen years since it aired, but the scene in which sisters Kyle and Kim finally - inevitably - confront one another over their lingering resentments is still as chilling as it is exhilarating. Shoved into the back of a limousine, an inebriated Kim slurs through accusations of betrayal, of theft, and Kyle meets her head-on by outing her sister’s alcoholism and lunging towards her as though about to exchange blows. As Kyle throws herself from the limo Kim slumps against the window, weeping.

What do I feel when I see Kim crying in the back of that limo? I feel sorry for her. I feel sad. But I also feel a hit of something.

Pain is one of the hardest things to replicate on a screen, no matter its size. It’s why instances of drama or hurt that appear phoned in get so quickly lambasted or memed - pain is a complicated thing, especially emotional pain. There is no one way to feel agony, or grief, or betrayal, and what reads as sincere and authentic to one person won’t read the same to someone for whom it looks completely different. Some cultures are anti-expression as a whole due to different interpretations of propriety and respect, and some cultures are dependent on the ways in which we communicate expression. Television isn’t an equalizer, at least as far as our translation of other people’s pain goes. It’s probably why these moments of actual, traumatic hurt often become the butt of a joke, or some illustration of how petty it is for people to get this upset when they know they’re being filmed. Teresa Guidice flipped a table and became an overnight sensation, and I’m sure if you ask her now she would say that her feeling when she did it was a genuine expression of rage and betrayal, but that doesn’t negate the comedy of the scene for the viewer.

I’ve written before about how our current cultural landscape seems to be acutely afraid of appearing earnest or sincere in their feelings, and it’s likely because of how quick we are to make fun of each other. At the present moment it isn’t even a given that you’re not being filmed when you’re out in public, being made a fool of without even being aware of it by a sneaky content creator with a cell phone who takes issue with something you’re doing, wearing, saying, etc. This panopticon of surveillance has been written about ad nauseum on Substack (I’ve scrolled past too, too many essays on why the Coldplay Cheating Scandal wasn’t that funny), and I believe we can all agree we live in some flavor of a Big Brother state. What’s interesting to me is the ways in which this fear of authenticity is then translated into reality television, which has up until now trafficked in moments of spontaneous truth, of loud, unavoidable, earnest conflict.

The second season of RHOBH provided multiple instances of this flavor of truth, and has since gone down in history as one of the darkest seasons of television ever put to screen. Kim Richard’s further descent into substance abuse isn’t even the bleakest thing to emerge from this season, but it does bear mentioning just how hard it is to watch her and her erstwhile lover Ken stumble their way through trying to act like they’re not absolutely spinning out on meth, pills, or both at once. No, the worst thing to come out this season - if not the entire series - is the revelation by Camille Grammar that Taylor Armstrong’s husband, Russell, abused her, and had at one point broken her jaw. The manner through which this information came to light, including who broke it and why, has been subject to a lot of scrutiny, and many viewers are of the opinion that the allegations of abuse were not treated with the horror and concern they should have. Instead, they appeared mostly incredulous to the idea that their friend and coworker was being abused to the degree that she was showing up to work with bruises, and others outright said that they believed she was exaggerating or making it up. Taylor’s behavior thus far that season had been erratic, to be sure, but the idea that she would be fabricating any of this seemed absurd to begin with and impossible in hindsight. The nadir of this storyline happened when Taylor and her husband were turned away from Kyle’s White Party for threatening Camille with legal action for outing the abuse (sending Taylor back into direct conflict with her abuser and yet acting like they were the ones being treated unfairly s i g h), but the true catharsis of it occurred off camera when Russell completed suicide a mere month after Taylor filed for divorce.

I recall there being shock at the time that Bravo chose to air this storyline at all, but what were their real options here? Even if the housewives appeared dubious about the claims at times the producers themselves were surely more discerning, and almost definitely bore witness to more evidence of the abuse. The fact that it was brought up on camera at all was not necessarily the fault of the producers, and they chose to make it a focal point of the season in a manner that, yes, is distasteful from a moral perspective, but makes complete sense to a viewer who would feel whiplash at the the allegations never being acknowledged after being introduced. The moral thing to do would be to never have a show that exploits people in their real lives at all, but that’s not a good enough reason to not have a television show in 2025 and it wasn’t in 2012 either. Whether they intended to or not, Bravo changed the rules of what they were willing to broadcast when they chose to re-edit the season around Taylor and Russell.

Death wasn’t enough to get them to reconsider broadcasting someone’s trauma, and in this instance I think maybe they were in the right to do it. The man was an abuser. Fuck his memory.

This series (?) is going to primarily be about Beverly Hills, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an instance in which Bravo did make the wrong choice as it related to dealing with the death of an ancillary character.

Anyone familiar with the Housewives franchise is probably already aware, but in the tenth season of The Real Housewives of Orange County Vicki Gunvalson’s mother died. Which is traumatic enough, but to add an extra layer of awfulness to the situation Vicki learned of her passing over the phone while at a Bunco party at Shannon Storms Beador’s house, all the other wives having a ball in the next room while she falls to floor and begins to hysterically sob. We know all this not only because the whole, horrible scene was caught on camera, but because Bravo made the choice to air it.

I have a really high tolerance for what I’ll watch on T.V., but I actually do think it’s pretty close to inexcusable that they decided to air this. It has nothing to do with an active storyline, and it doesn’t realistically lend anything to the season or the franchise. It’s just gross, and sad, and voyeuristic. I don’t even like Vicki and it makes me feel viscerally uncomfortable to watch her screaming, weeping, and hyperventilating while the camera just lingers on her without intervention, without feeling. The people who make Bravo shows are not journalists, they are not documentary filmmakers, they actually develop relationships with the subjects of their medium. That they knew Vicki, maybe even liked her as a friend or a person, and they let her pain become this accessible to the meanness of the audience, the uncaring, gluttonous mass of us, is demoralizing to the point of depressing. When filmmakers go into warzones we understand that they have a responsibility to the world to create a record of what war costs us, to perhaps make us think twice about ever engaging in it again. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a lofty goal. What is the goal in displaying this naked an expression of grief and sorrow? Because it certainly didn't gain Vicki any leniency when her beau, Brooks, lied about his cancer diagnosis.

It’s all masturbatory. You watch it and it makes you feel sad because death is sad, and we feel like we know Vicki so it’s even more sad. That could be our mom.

But it wasn’t. It was Vicki’s mom. If you want a moment of catharsis watch Bambi, or something.

What happened with Vicki was just the beginning, and a lot more could be written about the darkness of what subsequently happened with Brooks, but as I said this is mostly going to be about RHOBH. However, this instance can’t be overlooked as one of the first time it was made explicit to the audience that the people who were bringing this media to us were potentially illiberal in their methods of trying to entertain, and had along the way started to think that Shock was the same as Enjoyment. They’re strange bedfellows, but they have different faces. I was shocked when I watched Ramona Singer’s final performance on season 13 of RHONY, but I definitely didn’t enjoy it.

Kim Richards was one of the first times we identified a weak link and pulled on it hard on Bravo, and the ways in which this woman’s pain has been commodified is stunning. The pieces of Taylor Armstrong were still being put back together by the time it was made abundantly clear that Kim Richards had a very real problem with substances, and in all likelihood she should no longer be on the show. What always elevated the drama on RHOBH was that it was usually deeply personal; it wasn’t that Camille simply said something that offended Taylor, she said something that would have very real consequences for her in her abusive marriage and placed her in actual danger. The storylines that revolved around Kim were much the same, and by virtue of Kim’s struggles the stakes were raised every time. Being mean to Kim was not like being mean to Brandi, even if they were both damaged, sad people, because there were actual reasons to worry for Kim’s mental and physical health. She was, and always has been, very vulnerable.

The audience, even back in the mid-aughts, was aware Kim probably shouldn’t be on the show anymore, and yet we stumbled through season after season of her showing up to film with that same, sad, smoky voice. Technically Kim was fired in season 5, but according to producers she would still regularly show up to film scenes even after being told not to. Again, it’s a question of what we realistically expected. Kim demonstrably had money issues and clearly needed the regular paycheck and exposure, and these were likely the only reasons she joined the show to begin with, even if Kyle still insists they both wanted Kim on the show to keep her accountable for her sobriety. That Kyle was that aware of Kim’s struggles and still endorsed the choice for her to go on a reality show is bleak, but I have to keep reminding myself of the times we were in in. People thought The Anna Nicole Show, Being Bobby Brown, and Celebrity Rehab were all good ideas, too. Also Hey Paula, but that show was just bad because it was irritating, not because it was somehow life-ruining. Subscribe today for more Hot Takes.

Subscribe now

We know of at least two times Kim went to rehab pre-RHOBH, and she went on to enter treatment several more times during her time on the show, and Bravo was very, very aware of how deep her struggles went because they paid for her to go in one instance. It was not a secret that Kim was abusing alcohol and drugs when she was hired, and it’s not shameful to be someone who has addictions, but it’s something else altogether for the network to place someone who they know is struggling into potentially triggering situations. This is not meant to invoke Bethenny Frankel’s Reality Reckoning, but there is a point to be made regarding the culpability of the producers in allowing Kim to continue to film when it’s obvious she’s not in her right frame of mind and might be getting herself in real trouble. It’s even rumored to be an open secret that Bravo started the practice of hiring drivers and Ubers for the housewives because they were aware of and concerned about the potential that Kim was driving under the influence. The scenes of her on the cast trip to Hawaii in season 2 are close to unwatchable, as she and her boyfriend miss their flight multiple times before finally having to be escorted on and off of the plane by a producer, and not showing up to film multiple times due to either oversleeping or simply disappearing.

This business of not responding to producers seemed to be standard practice for a while, and her fellow housewives and producers have spoken about the juggling it took to film around Kim when she was at her lowest. It’s painful to read about, because when Kim would speak about wanting to be sober and wanting to be better for her family you could tell she was sincere. Her addiction often gets framed in what it cost other people (namely her sister Kyle), but the person who suffered the most from Kim’s addiction was Kim herself. It isn’t to negate the hurt she caused other people (especially to those attacked by her dog, but that’s another story), but it’s important to understand Kim’s pain in the proper context. She was born a suffering person to a suffering person who took advantage of her, and she took on a lot of adult characteristics and responsibilities when she was far too young to understand them, and her coping mechanisms were similarly adult. It seems apparent to me that Kim worked for a long time trying to make other people happy, and she numbed herself against the pain that it could bring her to have people not want to do the same for her. We caught up to Kim when her life was falling apart, when the persona was finally fading, and when other people were poised to use that fact to make themselves look better. Nothing about Kim’s addiction, or the hurt that it caused her or others, seems overblown to me. But it wasn’t fair for her to be taken advantage of just because she was a mess.

This is a conversation I’m very interested in now, especially, since The Valley is airing its three part reunion right now and thus far a lot of time has been devoted to Jax and his addiction, which is something Bravo continues to be mealy mouthed about. They seem to want to broadcast that Jax having an issue with cocaine was something they were none-the-wiser about, but that is simply and factually untrue. There’s no way they didn’t know. Brittany is now saying he would get up from the table multiple times during dinners to go to the bathroom, and if he’s behaving that way during normal dinners then this behavior was certainly exacerbated by partying. They’re just as eager to dismiss their accountability for putting Kim in potentially dangerous spots as they are about Jax. And, to be clear, Kim and Jax were in different situations, as Kim was aware she had a problem and attempted to get clean many times, something that it seems like Jax never did. Additionally, it bears mentioning that nobody forced Kim or Jax to take drugs or to drink, they did these things of their volition, and I’m sure Bravo’s representatives would want it known that they’d prefer the people they were asking to party continuously for months weren’t addicts, but still. They’re still asking for people to toe the line between just seeming really fun and seeming like they might have a problem, but the problem can’t be that bad because then it becomes sad to watch. Not a typical workplace!

There are other examples to paw over, surely, and once again I don’t know where I land on Bethenny Frankel’s Reality Reckoning outside of the fact that she’s the absolute wrong person to lead it, but Kim has always stuck with me. I’ve known a lot of women like her. They’re fun, and they’re funny, and they have very genuine love and passion for their lives, and sadly they’re just trapped in a vicious, vicious cycle. A cycle that, for a long time, was enabled by the network, who saw her spinning out and then trying to make things right multiple times, and yet still kept signing her to a contract. They were just as bad of enablers as Kyle was for encouraging her to join the show, and I’m sure they - like Kyle - realized too late that they made mistakes. But then they kept making them.

In that vein, another mistake that they allowed to go on too long was Brandi Glanville (lol).

Mask off, I hate Brandi. I know it’s very popular to be like “she’s cunt”, or whatever the fuck, but I just don’t like her and I never did. And I want it to be known that it isn’t as though I’m not on Brandi’s side because I’m on somebody else’s, because I agree with Brandi that the other women were initially really mean to her, but I don’t know. Her vibes were foul. Maybe she triggers me, I’m unclear, but I have always had a major issue with Brandi and the way she’s historically acted on the show. It’s just the luck of the draw that she’s very funny and made friends with Lisa Vanderpump, because it ensured that she would remain a huge part of the show for a distinct period of time, and that anyone that moved against her would be framed like they were tormenting this poor, downtrodden single mother. Brandi was initially introduced as a scorned wife (very Betty Broderick), and this initial victimization never really went far from her character on the show, even if she quickly proved she could fight back if needed and go even lower. Remember earlier when I mentioned there were members of the cast that thought Taylor might be exaggerating Russell’s abuse? That was Brandi. She even told Taylor at the reunion that she thought it was in poor taste to talk about the abuse after his death because it was disrespectful, and has since claimed that she thought Taylor “monetized” his death and that she (Brandi) was more hurt than Taylor was. What the fuck?

So, yeah, I didn’t like Brandi long before the racism. Because, of course, this devolved into racism, as it often does with white women with this much money. The victim of her sudden season 4 turn from drunk hooligan to actual Bad Person was Joyce Giraud, who - along with her fellow freshman housewife, Carlton Gebbia - I lament the loss of only because they seemed to suffer from the Jules Wainstein disease. That being, they probably needed one more season than they got to really be understood, but unfortunately we didn’t get that. Brandi shot racist remarks at Joyce (berating her for speaking Spanish, telling her and her husband to “go back where they came from”, saying she was “like a black person” because she didn’t swim), basically unchecked by the other housewives, and enabled once more by her producers. After the incident with Joyce at the swimming pool, and the subsequent accusation that she was racist, the producers set up a scene of her discussing the allegations in a limo with one of her friends who happened to be black - who I don’t believe we ever see again - who then was forced to reassure her that she, Brandi, was not a racist. They mind as well have gotten that poor women at central casting as “Beleaguered Friend of Color to a White Person Desperately Trying to Prove They’re not Racist”. Lunatic behavior.

Brandi comes to be an important player in the reason why I decided I finally wanted to write about RHOBH, and her history can’t be overlooked. She’s one of Andy Cohen’s rare birds, the kind that he liked to keep in big, beautiful cages where nobody was allowed to touch them. Like Kim, Brandi was allowed to get away with risky behavior for the sake of the show and the end-goal of Good T.V., but unlike Kim Brandi was a real antagonist. Kim could fight with people viciously, but she always seemed one hard gust away from falling back into being a mess, and Brandi always presented herself as a Tough Bitch capable of hitting you back where you least expect it, not to mention someone who drank so much that you couldn’t really trust what would come out of her mouth. She, in all likelihood, was struggling just as badly as Kim at times, but it wasn’t immediately apparent. Which is why the revisionist history of Brandi being a loon but ultimately a harmless braggart who wouldn’t actually lie or do anything to really hurt anybody doesn’t ring true to me, and never did. People hate Brandi when she’s acting out against them, and then the second she’s acting out against somebody they don’t like she’s a warrior for truth and justice (a la Trisha Paytas). This isn’t a new formula, but when applied to somebody like Brandi it has the power to make me want to swallow an entire solar system.

In case it doesn’t come up again - because I am very anti-Brandi - it bears mentioning now what’s been going on with her. In 2023 Brandi was filming for The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip in Morocco and was removed from the trip after her castmate, Caroline Manzo of The Real Housewives of New Jersey fame, accused Brandi of cornering her in a bathroom and touching her inappropriately. Brandi has declared her innocence, but it seems there were multiples witnesses of Brandi being drunk and at least being too physical with Caroline, and as a result this incident has led to lawsuits, declarative tweets, and ultimately no season of RHUGT. Shortly after returning from Morocco she began complaining of something happening to her face, and this quickly spun into a claim that she was suffering from a facial parasite that has caused her to be hospitalized and intermittently housebound. How true any of this is is anybody’s guess (there are rumors she has been seen by reputable plastic surgeons who assured her that whatever it is is not a parasite), but there is definitely something happening that is severely distressing to her face. I think Brandi is a really bad person, but I extend my sympathy to whatever she’s going through, because I’m sure it isn’t easy, and as someone who has undergone skin issues that elude diagnosis and effective treatment I know how scary and alienating it is. That’s the only break she gets from me.

There’s so much more to say, and time is a precious commodity. All I want to do, earnestly, is think about these women and what they’ve gone through. What they’ve allowed us to see them go through. It’s stunning. This is barely the tip of the iceberg to what’s gone wrong on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and what bothers me won’t bother everyone, but it’s been a cruel summer.

In the duplex I shared with my best friend during our senior year of college we had a large print of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. It hung above our sofa, watching us as we witnessed Trump’s first election, as we watched the final season of Girls and the first season of Big Little Lies, drinking gin in the daytime and falling into naps with our heads on the same pillow. When we first hung it up I remember loving it on sight, even if I didn’t entirely know what it meant. The first panel presented a familiar archetype: a robed figure blessing the man and woman that would inherit the earth, animals grazing and water flowing in the distance. It is pastoral, but eerie, like a Kansas cornfield. The second and largest panel displays a swarm of nakedness, human-sized birds, dreamlike structures and bright, joyful colors. Of course, the third panel is all darkness, all nightmarish grimaces, a landscape of smoke and destruction.

An unfortunate fact of life is that if you’re born and raised Catholic then you always will be. You can stop praying, disavow God, do the whole song and dance of embracing blasphemy, but you’ll still be a Catholic because there are things it instills in you that never, ever go away. Even now, decades into not being religious and instead learning and embracing other modes of observance, there’s a part of me that only understands pleasure in relation to punishment. Nothing comes without a cost, be that spiritual or emotional or what have you, and as a result any good thing that crosses my path is looked at sideways. What does this Good Thing want to take away from me? What do I have to give up to have this other thing? On my birthday, champagne in hand, I told my wife that I think I’m afraid to accept love because in my mind if I accept it then there will be less for her to have. It’s a scarcity complex, but only as it relates to good, nice things. Catholicism does this to people.

I only mention Catholicism because the visual archetype of The Garden of Earthly Delights is intimately familiar to the ways in which I interpret the things that give me happiness. It begins with purity, it leads to bacchanalian hedonism, and ultimately ends in hellfire. In the same way biblical stories of pleasure for pleasures sake end often in destruction and despair I assumed the journey of the painting was one of ruin, the end of paradise. We had paradise briefly on television, but the perversion of authenticity has done something irreparable to the viewer, who seems to think that what we’re doing is just Watching A Show. Enjoying anything is never just enjoying something. At least, not for me. There are people that are able to engage with Bravo and not immediately look for what it all means, and I am endlessly jealous of those people. Simplicity, watching a stitched together amalgamation of Quotable Moments and acting as though what we’re watching isn't grotesque theatre.

I love to hate it. It’s my paradise, the disgust I feel when I see these people and their over-contoured, smug, Ozempic faces. Or, it’s the false paradise. The one from the Bible.

Real paradise died in Beverly Hills.

I’ve put off writing this because I’ve already talked a lot about reality TV in other posts, and there are more important things happening in the world than whatever is airing on Bravo. In the time since I last wrote I went on my honeymoon and did my best to forget the broader corners of the world, choosing instead to eat delicious food, drink beautiful drinks, see art, hear music, dance. We had an unforgettable time, and none of it quite seemed like reality. There was no work, there was no family, no cat, and only one friend that we met up with for diner food and martinis.

On our first real night in New Orleans (which also happened to be my wife’s birthday) we drank too much Sazerac, wandered Bourbon Street, I ate the best fried oysters of my entire existence, and retired back to our hotel relatively early. Nestled in bed, we realized that it was Tuesday night - The Valley airs on Tuesday’s.

The Valley is an ill-fated spin-off of the Vanderpump Rules universe centering on the trials and tribulations of a selection of ne’er do wells that got fired in 2020 for being bad people, but it premiered last summer to instantaneous delight. Its first episode was the most watched season premiere for a series on Bravo in almost ten years, and it was almost destined to be a hit. The central characters (i.e. those fired from their previous show for being bad people) are Jax Taylor and his soon-to-be ex-wife Brittany Cartwright, and Kristen Doute, and they wasted zero time in reminding us what exactly it was that made them both Horrendous people but dynamite television. The first season was a joyous romp through some of the worst dysfunction I’ve ever seen, featuring two intensely toxic marriages ending in divorce, substance abuse, and whatever the hell is happening with Zack Wickham’s hair.

The show was a bona fide hit, and its success buoyed it through the ensuing year so that by the time season two premiered people were frothing at the mouth for content. By that time it was public that Jax had entered into rehab, that Kristen and her longtime boyfriend Luke Broderick were not only engaged but pregnant with their first child, and that Jesse had doubled down on the accusation that his soon-to-be ex, Michelle, had cheated on him. People were excited. I was excited.

And yet, seeing the show’s opening credits begin to play in our hotel room in New Orleans I felt a strange dread. It had become increasingly clear to me that I was watching a completely different show than what seemed to be the majority of the audience, and it had begun to make me feel like I was living in a separate reality. Usually I have a very sturdy sense of time and place, but the reaction that other people had been having to The Valley made me feel disoriented in a way that hearkens back to that really upsetting commercial they used to air about living with schizophrenia in a train station (I looked for a link to insert here but inexplicably nobody else seems to remember this commercial and the implications of that are not lost on me). It had started in the first season, but had already started to get worse now that the second had begun to air.

Like most things, I guess we can blame this on Janet.

The most hated woman on Bravo right now is a woman named Janet Caperna. Janet was never officially on Vanderpump Rules, save for a few glimpses in the background of scenes, but she has since become one of the most recognizable and reviled characters currently featured on the reality TV stage. Even trying to go back through my memory of why and when people began to hate Janet I almost draw a blank since it seemed to be something everlasting, something without beginning or end. This was initially confusing to me because Janet came off in the first season as a pretty dull person, who had a few middling dramas but who I mainly remembered as being The Pregnant One. At a certain point I became aware that people hated her, but the realization was like floodwater - I turned my head and I was already up to my waist, leaving me only able to think of how to get out and not the direction it came from.

In her inaugural season her primary nemesis was Kristen Doute, so she already started off on the wrong foot in terms of the audience. Kristen made up a rumor about Janet calling a fellow castmate a racist, it was proven to be untrue, and as a result Janet iced out Kristen from her events and trips for the rest of the season. This was ambitious for a rookie, and it resulted in ire from the audience who were watching The Valley almost exclusively to see Kristen, so now having the back half of the show feature her little to not at all stuck Janet at the top of the heap as far as villains went. Add in her conflict with fan-favorite Zack Wickham and we spent almost the entire year talking about how Janet was a liar who constantly made herself the victim, and in truth I didn’t understand the vitriol then and I fail to understand it now. Janet seemed kind of boring, and she still is, and that’s fine by me. I think the onus for this should instead fall on the people producing the show who should have better explored storylines with other cast members, as Janet generally just seems over-exposed. The audience spends a lot of time bitching about how they’re sick of stupid, manipulative Janet, but it isn’t as though Janet gets a choice in how much they choose to feature her. There are primary storylines with her this year, but it wouldn’t be the first time that editors worked around a conflict to better showcase other characters.

The issue is that Janet showed up to work on this show, and the audience resents her for it because they already didn’t like her on the basis of last season. The second season was probably going to be about a lot of things, but all of that got dwarfed when Jax and Brittany separated and he entered treatment, so storylines had to be hastily reconfigured and side characters promoted to primary characters. Generally I think it’s sloppy to blame editing, but it comes to mind as a possible result for why people are so blindly enraged by Janet on The Valley, when overall she doesn’t seem to be giving very much by normal reality TV standards. She and her husband, Jason, have been harassed consistently from the beginning of the season for being mean to Kristen, for confronting Danny and Nia about Danny’s drinking, and just generally seeming like “bad friends”. As though anybody on Bravo is a good friend. It’s one of those labels that gets waved around when you just need an excuse to dislike someone - like saying a woman isn’t a “girl’s girl” (see my post about Paige DeSorbo for more on That).

The line that I take the most offense to in regards to Janet is that she’s just “a fan” who ended up on the show the same way her friend Brittany Cartwright did: she saw Vanderpump Rules, thought ‘that could be me’, and moved to Hollywood to parasitically befriend the cast. There are a few things that make this theory pretty ridiculous that don’t fall under the banner of “that isn’t how people behave outside of erotic thrillers”, and one of them is that there is a cast member on The Valley who pretty closely fits that description and it isn’t Janet, it’s Zack Wickham. Zack was Brittany’s high school friend from Kentucky, and when she moved to WeHo to be with Jax he followed close behind. People don’t seem to think there was anything malicious or clout-chasing in this, and indeed I think we only ever saw Zack once in a three minute scene on Vanderpump Rules despite he and Brittany being best friends for years, so why do we assign this to Janet? Janet was close with Scheana Shay while the show was still airing, and similarly to Zack I think we only ever saw her in background group shots. If she moved to Hollywood to get on this show she did a fairly shit job of it, as - in reality - it seemed pretty easy to get on Vanderpump Rules and she never did, either because she couldn’t or because she didn’t want to.

Additionally, I feel we need to have a real conversation as a community regarding how the term “fan” gets used on Bravo. These days it is being used to denote someone who, in the parlance of The Bachelor, is not there for the right reasons. And this might have held some weight back in the halcyon days of dating games and OG Housewives, but what exactly are the right reasons in 2025? Back when The Bachelor was first airing you would likely try to avoid people who were too excited to be on a television show, and you would do this because they would care more about themselves than about creating connections with other characters. They were wild cards, they would maybe give good Moments but they didn’t give Good TV. The unfortunate thing is that in 2025 nobody is on TV “for the right reasons”, not even your favs. We’ve evolved into a status obsessed culture, and despite the evolution of social media systems like TikTok that can create celebrities out of normal people, television is still the people’s medium. It can still make and break celebrities just as easily - if not more so - than any other medium, and especially so on reality shows where you don’t even really need to have talent to gain fans and create a following.

Labeling anybody a “fan” and therefore not worthy of serious consideration is just ridiculous in a day and age where we’ve now had recognizable shows on Bravo for 22 years. Back in the glory days of the early aughts it might have been reasonable to assume a candidate for Housewifery wasn’t lying when she said she had never watched an episode of the show, because at that time there were less franchises and significantly fewer episodes, but that wouldn’t be a realistic statement anymore. There have been 11 different franchises of The Real Housewives, with hundreds of seasons and thousands of episodes. It is not realistic to assume that the people who want to be on reality TV are not also students of the medium that they want to be a part of, but for some reason this is worthy of derision. As though wanting anything is somehow embarrassing. Everybody wants to feel as righteous and all-knowing as Kendrick Lamar when he referred to Drake as “a fan”, but not every person can be Kendrick Lamar. White people hate this!

The original iteration of Vanderpump Rules ran from 2013 until 2024. It had a lot of fans. Janet was probably one of them, but this is just a fact and not an assessment on someone’s character. But don’t tell the subreddit for The Valley that.

The people who inhabit the subreddit for The Valley are some of the most unwell people I’ve ever encountered in my life. What they pick and choose to be upset about eludes sense, to the degree that I - a person who notoriously wants to argue with everyone - cannot even bear to read 90% of the posts because I so vehemently disagree with almost everything that these people say. If a post is created that does not outright condemn Janet for the crime of being on television there will certainly be comments below that somehow link the issue back to Janet, even if the topic at hand is a storyline that has nothing to do with her. I’m shocked there aren’t people in there at this very moment claiming Janet murdered JonBenet Ramsey.

Part of this must be blatant misogyny, and I’m confident enough in that statement that I won’t couch it in a qualifier. I know it’s very popular in Taylor Swift’s America for any criticism of a woman to be blamed on the patriarchy, but just because something is wielded by bad actors doesn’t immediately negate its original intent. It is not a coincidence to me that Jax Taylor began this season detailing how he has physically and emotionally abused his wife, and by proxy his child, and yet the primary antagonist in the eyes of the viewers this season is Janet. Janet who, by all accounts, just seems like kind of a bad friend and a fairly boring reality television star. These are not exactly the worst things we’ve seen people do on camera, and they don’t even really make you a bad person, they just make you a human. But the viewers of The Valley have a reaction to Janet that borders on allergic: they swell up, they became inflamed, their needs become precise and their fury at not receiving those needs is acute.

I won’t blame all of this on people hating women, even if I do think it accounts for a lot of the ways people seem particularly bothered by Janet. After all, there are women on The Valley that the audience is disproportionately protective of. One of those women is Nia Sanchez, a former Miss USA and runner-up for Miss Universe, who skated through the first season of the show appearing fairly milquetoast aside for the time her husband got pants-ed at a pool party and it brought her to tears. Season two has brought out more of the qualities that we only just got a glimpse of in season one, including how she appears to ignore or even cover-up for her husband, Danny’s, relationship with alcohol. The Darkside Danny sublot would require a post of its own to truly break down, but I’ll summarize: Danny got too drunk and spoke in a sexually suggestive manner to his friend and castmate Jasmine, as well as grabbing her girlfriend’s ass once she was out of the room. He also got too drunk on two cast trips, but my personal feeling is the response to both has been a bit overblown. We have a clear example of his drinking being problematic in the situation with Jasmine and Melissa, we don’t need to belabor the point by whining about how Danny took a nap during dinner one time. There have now been potentially three instances in which Danny has had consequences for his drinking, but he at least does not appear to be taking any steps to address it or the way that it is potentially affecting his family dynamic. Nia seems openly anxious and even angry when he drinks, and even if this is something they’re addressing in couple’s counseling it doesn’t seem that Danny has progressed enough in his journey to give up drinking to excess on camera.

This is a difficult topic, and Nia and Danny are difficult people, quite honestly. Truly, I do like them both and think they seem like nice people. I think that Danny does become a different person when he drinks, and also that his apologies to his friends seem genuine when he makes them, and that should be even more reason for him to reevaluate his drinking. I feel very sorry for Nia, who appears to be a person who has been through a lot of struggles, including being homeless as a child, and has made it out somewhat intact, and for that I’ll always be impressed by her. Together their marriage seems very strong, and they clearly love each other a lot and work on their issues privately. Their family is incredibly cute, and for the sake of their marriage I really, really think they need to leave the show while they still can.

I like Danny and Nia. But the way the audience reacts to Danny and Nia is another one of those things that I don’t entirely understand. They react to Nia downplaying, or even lying about, the effects of Danny’s drinking by arguing that this is an issue they deserve to deal with privately, and that might be true were it not for the fact that they are On A Reality Show. To ask some people, Danny and Nia are the kind of television that they want, but in reality there is not a lot of material to work with if a subject is not willing to be at least a little open about their struggles. It took a lot of bravery for Nia to open up about her childhood struggle with homelessness, but it was also brought up in the context of the women on the show trying to have an open conversation with her about Danny’s drinking. She is entitled to the privacy of her feelings, but if you are going to choose to appear on camera with your husband you also have to recognize that there will be moments you have to answer for things.

But, no. The conversation about Danny has now been reduced to being all about how Janet is a bitch who wants to hurt this beautiful, god-fearing family by invoking the fact that he got too drunk and sexually menaced their friends. This doesn’t bear in mind that at the time Janet was initially talking about it Jasmine had been clear that it was something she was still processing herself, and that perhaps she would always be somewhat angry at Danny. Somehow Janet always emerges as the principle antagonist, even when it’s other people who operate around her. It’s almost Trumpian, the degree to which we can always reliably blame a problem on this show on Janet, and now that it’s become a habit there’s nowhere else to go.

Speaking of Trump, there’s a certain right-wing quality to Danny and Nia, even if they are not themselves conservative (which I don’t believe they are). You can only have this soft-spoken, beautiful Miss Universe runner-up talking to you about doing things “prayerfully” before you start to see the eyes of Tammy Faye blinking out from her face. Even if they’re just middle-of-the-road Christians it gives me slight pause, as Christians are notoriously people who traffic in the business of secret shame. If Danny has a drinking problem it may be something he’s afraid to express not only for fear of career consequences, but also of the fear of what it will mean for his relationship to his faith. The traditional Christian man is supposed to have it all together - they are, after all, the patriarch - so those men who struggle with any manner of addiction may feel trapped, or unable to express their pain in a meaningful way. This often just makes the addiction itself even worse. Additionally, there would be serious implications for the incident he had with Melissa, wherein he grabbed her ass without consent, which could even qualify as adultery depending on the exact shade of Christian they are.

I sympathize with Danny, I believe his apologies, but he also gets off the hook too easy in favor of people blaming his drinking on Janet.

Janet has talked about Danny’s drinking reminding her of an ex-partner who struggled with addiction, and made reference to Nia attending Al-Anon meetings (a scene which has since been edited out by Bravo). This was discussed within the subreddit as Janet maliciously trotting out another woman’s experience just to cut her down, but once again this erases the larger context at hand. Danny’s drinking bothered a lot of people last season and it still seems to bother people on the cast now, so it’s not strange to me that Janet would bring it up in a conversation that at least started because of the overall feeling amongst the girls that Nia wasn’t being completely honest about it. The only people who don’t seem that bothered by Danny’s drinking is the audience. And Kristen.

Kristen…

For some reason people have always felt very protective of Kristen Doute, and I’m not here to argue that I think she’s a person who doesn’t need help, but it isn’t help from the viewers that she needs. When she was on Vanderpump Rules she was often her own worst enemy, consistently in bad relationships where she was taken advantage of (and abused, in the case of James Kennedy), and yet refused to leave, always acting out of pocket and then decrying that her nickname became “crazy Kristen”, and generally giving loyalty to the wrong causes and people. I liked Kristen a lot when Vanderpump Rules was airing, so at the root I understand why people are very warm towards her.

However, I feel that I differ from the primary audience of The Valley in the way that my relationship to Kristen has changed over the years. In 2020 she was fired from Vanderpump Rules, along with her co-star Stassi Schroeder, for actions they took against a black castmate named Faith Stowers in 2018, including at least one incident where Kristen attempted to have her arrested. This information came to the public’s awareness because they were bragging about it on a podcast. Needless to say, I was fairly disgusted by what they said and even more so by what Kristen had done, and almost overnight I felt a lot of my warmth towards her disappear. I could still watch the show, but everything Kristen did now seemed that much darker, that much more heavy with the knowledge that this was not just a persona she had for the cameras but that she earnestly did behave this way in real life, and believed it was her right to act that way. When The Valley was set to premiere I was gently curious - it had been a few years, Stassi had gone on a self-congratulatory book tour about how much she had “grown”, so what about Kristen? Had she learned anything? Had she changed?

Reader, she had not. One of her first dramas on the show revolved around her falsifying a rumor that Janet had called their castmate Michelle a racist, and in the course of this drama she referred to racism as “the R word” several times, and made reference to how damaging it was to have “the R word” thrown at you. You can’t make this shit up.

But people are very, very protective over Kristen. They believe she has changed, and you can’t argue them out of that viewpoint.

Maybe we have reason to think Janet is a bad person who lies about things, but it would be idiocy to act like we don’t have the same shit and worse on Kristen. And while people say they want a nice family-centric show about Danny and Nia, they also say that we have a right to enjoy watching bad people with the other side of their mouths when you bring up Kristen. Which is it? It can’t be both. It’s that same tonal dissonance that’s making bearing witness to this fandom so scatological: post after post about how Janet is ruining the show interspersed with posts about how Kristen “has really changed!”, rounded off by an image of Danny and Nia with what seems to be AI generated text underneath it saying the haters will never win. Girls, you’re the haters lol and you are winning!

I generally subscribe to the belief that you shouldn’t get so emotionally invested in any form of media so that something related to it hurts you in a real way, and I know that a lot of people have never had to level with themselves about the ways they consume television and film so it can be hard for them. I was raised by the TV, and it taught me everything I know, and this has presented me with myriad problems, not the least of which being the ways in which I’ve put outsized importance on analyzing What It All Means instead of enjoying it. Become a paid subscriber today! lol

Subscribe now

But I’m one person, and we live in a different era of media consumption, and our response to media is encouraged to be more and more reactionary to account for the speed of posting about something so other people are urged to engage. The quicker we eat one property the faster it’s replaced by something else, so in a sense we’re not trained to think of the people on our TV’s as real people anymore. Reality has been made less real by virtue of our need to react to it. We used to watch things, but now the importance is placed on what happens after we watch it, what made us angry, what details we’ve spotted in the background or in a timely tweet from a cast member.

People hating Janet with the sheer power they appear to seems unreal to me by this metric. She doesn’t bleed to them, because she isn’t capable of it. At the time of this writing Janet just released an episode of her podcast, This Side of the Hill, titled “Addressing the Hate.” In it she details only some of the truly mind-numbing volume of hate mail she’s received, including instances of death threats and threats to harm her family and friends. The Valley subreddit, being a place of sound mind and spirit, condemned the threats but felt the need to double down on the “well, what did she expect?” angle of the criticism. Janet and her family have left the country on a planned trip, making reference to the fact that they were anxious to do so because of the threats being lobbied at their family. I got in a few arguments this weekend with people who outright claim that she’s lying for sympathy, and at least to them it makes more sense that Janet would make up threats because “she’s a proven liar”, rather than accept that there are those in their midst capable of being this deeply affected by a reality television program. It’s better to believe that she’s lying about “fleeing the country” than accept that someone wants to put significant distance between themself and us.

They say if she just apologized maybe it would all stop.

Apologize for what? This woman hasn’t done anything to you.

The accountability of the audience goes completely out the window when it comes to Janet. Everything somehow becomes her fault, or Lala Kent's, or Alex Baskin's. It’s easier to blame Janet for the actions of her own haters, as many have done in recent days, by claiming if Janet was really scared or really hurt she would just leave the show. Maybe she should leave the show, but we shouldn’t act like forcing a person into a corner allows them anywhere else to go. She’s faced with a Faustian bargain: stay on the show to spite the people who have hurt and lied about her, or leave the show and bear with the smug chuckles of an audience who will act like they didn’t force her hand, that her leaving is some admission of wrongdoing. It’s easier to act as though Janet is a compulsive liar than to admit that the activity we engage in has consequences for the people that we talk about, or that we might think of our engagement with media as completely normal and benign when in reality we traffic in the same corridors as people who send death threats to people they’ve never even met. What disturbs me primarily about this whole thing is that this interlude within the fandom has not prompted any self-reflection at all as far as it relates to how and why people are getting this upset over a television show - indeed, people are happily deflecting the blame from the fandom and instead saying that it must not be true at all because Janet is a liar. We’re normal, and Janet is the one with the problem, so even if one or two people told her they hoped she died it isn’t even really that big of a deal.

What Janet has done on The Valley is child’s play when you consider what the average cast member on Vanderpump Rules did in a single season, and yet the audience has reacted with the kind of venom we didn’t even see when it was reported that James Kennedy threw his girlfriend to the ground. It isn’t real.

Perhaps it isn’t that The Valley has become un-real, it is instead that it has become all too real. We’re all like goldfish swimming around the same little bowl, and we can’t contextualize that what we see on one go-around is the same exact thing we are seeing on the second. We like to make documentaries and podcasts and books about how one woman or another was brutalized by a culture that both celebrates and condemns Women Behaving Badly, and yet when presented with another imperfect victim we never learn our lesson. It’s just too fun to stop. Or, it is for some people. The unspoken subtext of this is that when I see thread after thread and post after post blasting Janet for things that she likely isn’t doing purposefully it reminds me of the way people treated Amber Heard, and I’m honestly still traumatized by that. I probably always will be. I don’t care who agrees.

I’ve thought of a lot of different ways to write this post, and I’m never very happy with it. I think that I keep trying to find ways to convince people, to try and urge the audience into understanding that this isn’t right, that Janet is not the thing that’s wrong with The Valley. But I keep stopping short. I know nobody is going to change their mind, and that’s a disheartening feeling. I’ve felt it a lot recently, the numbing, stomach-sinking feeling you get when you’re trying to explain why you feel the way that you do about something to someone who clearly just doesn’t care to hear it. Probably a lot of people are feeling that, too. Maybe that's why they're so angry.

The problem with The Valley isn’t Janet Caperna. It’s us.

To preface this, I’m a feminist. I was a Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies major at my university, and to this day it really chaps my ass that the new byline of the so-called cool girl is that feminism as we recognize it has no value. It isn’t popular (especially for women) to be seen being earnest about their beliefs, because admitting you have feelings about politics is déclassé, so out-and-proud feminists are both set up and punchline. It’s better to seem jaded until eventually you do become jaded.

Usually these people are referring to the concept that because all waves of feminism were flawed movements spearheaded by flawed people we should discount them entirely, and I don’t really buy that as a cogent argument for completely fucking off the core principles of the entire theory. Yes, we can all agree the pink pussy hats were cringe, but the arbiter of whether a movements principles are worthy of political acceptance and change shouldn’t rely on whether they can be classified as cringe. If you get “the ick” from people earnestly striving for equal rights under the law you should take that up with someone who can guide you through why you’re so miserable (lol).

So, to be clear: it was not popular to be a feminist for a very long time for reasons that I think are pretty horseshit, and at its face I think the “feminist” shirt is cringe but ultimately go girl because we can’t overstate how much people hate women. The shirt wasn’t really the issue.

I only say all of this because I feel like the ways in which we interpret feminism, especially in our relationship to current pop culture, has become deeply perverted. And this is something that I first saw screeching in on the wings of Katie Maloney’s shirt, and I have since seen it divebomb into myriad other reality shows.

What is wrong with Katie Maloney wearing a shirt that says “feminist” across her tits? you might ask. Well, because she’s Katie Maloney. When I saw Katie wearing that shirt her life flashed before my very eyes: going on Scheana’s bachelorette party after she knew Scheana had watched Stassi’s stolen sex tape, slut-shaming Lala for taking her top off on vacation, calling Lala a whore in the back alley of SUR, referring to other women as skanks, disparaging her husband’s penis, and generally only taking up for women that she likes in the moment.

And, once again, to be clear: all of this makes Katie stellar TV (or it did for about 5 seasons), because it needs to be said the attributes of a good person rarely make for good TV. Bad people have created the reality television genre, and - as my favorite podcaster Liz Bentley likes to say - if we start interrogating the ethics of reality television we have to stop watching it altogether. And I don’t want to stop, but I do want to complain about the ways in which I have been talked down to as an audience member in regards to how these stars are framed within their individual tableaus. Katie doesn’t need to be a good person, but we do all need to be on the same page about who and what she is. To do otherwise would be to trigger dissonance that transcends space and time.

Which is what happened to me when I saw her wearing that shirt and I had the horrifying realization that Katie, a bad person, wants us to think she’s a good person. Thankfully I have the gift of hindsight, so I was able to see this image and hold fast to my belief that just because Katie now wants us to look at her as a feminist does not negate any of the horrible things she’d done to other women.

However, this didn’t exactly hold true for the majority of the audience.

Season seven of Vanderpump Rules is the beginning of the end as far as the original formula of the show goes, and it passes as only just barely watchable. The cast is too savvy about hiding things from the camera, the storylines are getting too produced, and the central drama of the season revolves around the majority of the cast refusing to film with James Kennedy after he bodyshamed Katie. An unforgivable act to be sure, but no more unforgivable than showing a coworkers sex tape, sleeping with your best friends ex-boyfriend, or cheating on your girlfriend while an elderly woman is dying in a bed in the corner of the room. And yet this transgression served as the primary motivator to the whole cast for the most part refusing to film with Kennedy (who up to this point had served as secondary antagonist of the show), and as a result the season was widely panned.

James Kennedy was a bad person then and has since become an even worse person than we even knew, but his initial cancellation coming on the heels of a slight against Katie was odd to me. Or, initially it was odd to me. Katie, for all intents and purposes, played her cards exactly right.

Up until this point Katie had been reviled due to her past behavior (watch season 5 to learn more), but she cunningly took note of the way the audience seemed more interested in the past seasons storylines of women supporting women. The female side of the cast had banded together the year prior to support Brittany Cartwright as she navigated Jax Taylor cheating on her, and the whole season had a somewhat feminist and sex-positive bend (more on that later) as the group of girls seemed to become closer than ever in spite of the foibles of their male costars. Katie being bodyshamed by James was not planned by production and nor was it an acceptable thing to do, but Katie was able to spin it in real time to draw a dividing line down the center of the cast using feminist talking-points such as gender equality and body positivity. These are two noble things, but they are not immune from manipulation by people in these types of situations in which you need to draw a clear distinction between Good Guys (woke feminist girlbosses) and Bad Guys (retrograde bodyshaming misogynists).

Her spin was successful, and it only further heightened her supposed girlboss narrative when she parlayed the bodyshaming into successfully getting James fired from being a DJ at SUR and proceeding to take his dedicated Tuesday night party and re-branding it as a Girls Night. Sigh. They all looked so lame in their little robes.

Not long after that came the shirt, and her rebranding of herself from bad mean asshole to feminist girlboss queen was complete. Thankfully Katie is lazy, and her attempts at taking the throne of the show was half-baked at best. She sold us a story, and we bought it.

Reality shows only work when the cast isn’t in on the joke. Vanderpump Rules became unwatchable when the cast started trying to present themselves as good people, and most current shows on the Bravo network suffer these days because the cast is over-exposed almost from the moment a show begins to air. We can blame Scandoval for this only partially, as far before that dark day in reality TV history the casts of these shows began to feel like they could control the narrative. They shouldn’t be able to, but we also shouldn’t let them. And we have.

The “voice of reason” as a character used to have a real narrative use on these shows (Ariana Madix was one, as was Bethenny Frankel in the early seasons of The Real Housewives of New York), because we the audience used to be able to watch these people behave like savages and recognize that what we’re getting is a heavy, gelatinous carapace over reality. Some time in the past five to seven years we, the viewer, have lost the plot regarding what we’re watching and what it means. We take for granted that much of what we’re seeing has been carefully choreographed, even though it’s common knowledge at least since 2018 that scenes on reality shows are often re-filmed and discussed with producers in advance to ensure that the seasons narrative is being effectively transmitted, and that producers themselves are not immune to their own biases against certain cast members. The information that came out regarding the editors of Vanderpump Rules purposefully giving Scheana Shay a poor edit because she was disliked by the crew at that time was shocking at first, but seems to have been hastily forgotten in the interim years.

We aren’t immune to propaganda, and especially not on television. And if this was merely a case of a small faction of fans stanning against their better judgment it would be one thing, but there appears to be a collective agreement amongst the fandom for certain shows that there are perpetual heroes and there are perpetual villains, and for the most part these run a gendered line. Which isn’t a bad thing, as men are badly behaved generally and on Bravo specifically, but it creates situations in which I hear the screeching dissonance of the “feminist” shirt coming close again.

With this framework, I’d like to talk about Paige DeSorbo and Craig Conover.

I’m doing a lot of prefacing, but I do want it to be known that I actually like Paige a lot. There are elements of her personality I don’t vibe with, but that applies to everybody on TV. Generally I think she’s very funny and has a good birds-eye view of things, but even she is not immune to the curse of not really owning her part in situations. She waits to confront people until reunions, she saves her feelings for confessionals, and yes, I do think she’s cliquey with Ciara and Amanda. But these aren’t bad things, they're just things she does on TV because she’s on a TV show. As with Katie, the issue seems to be how the audience is reacting to what Paige is giving them in the moment and not what we really have to work with.

So what is Paige giving us on this season of Summer House?

She announced on a December episode of her podcast Giggly Squad that she and her boyfriend of three years, Craig Conover of Bravo’s Southern Charm, had ended their relationship. There was no cheating, no nastiness, no nothing according to this initial statement, but that narrative didn’t linger too long. It has since turned quite, quite nasty on both of their parts. Craig is a liar. Paige led him on. Craig was jealous of her. Paige cheated on him, he cheated on her. These little scraps of nastiness flew by day after day, sometimes quickly refuted, sometimes chewed over like the fat off a steak.

Being a consumer of any reality show these days often feels like being a detective. We know so much about the people we’re watching, we know where they go to dinner, to party, sometimes we even know where they live. Some of this information comes from what they themselves are sharing with us on social media, and a lot of this comes from secondary sources that for one reason or another become trusted by the fandom. It isn’t normal to know this much about a person’s life, to be presented with the access that we have to a persons family, work, trauma, and friendships, but it’s normalized to the point now that we analyze what people are wearing in TikTok’s to try and guess where they are and when they were there.

I think in all likelihood this breakup goes both ways. On this season of Summer House we’re seeing a textbook presentation of a couple in the moments right before they’re going to break up: she wants him to support her business ventures and he’s concerned that her business ventures are going to undercut their relationship, he feels like he’s not able to be vulnerable around her and she feels like he holds to much back from her. What used to make them laugh now only conjures dead silences. A few episodes ago Paige made a joke about breaking up with him and you could see in both of their eyes they could see the gleam of the knife as it plunged closed and closer towards their shared heart.

People have primarily been on Paige’s side in this, which is obvious to those who know the genre. Nobody wants to stand on a side that has the cast of Southern Charm on it, least of all me. But there are layers to this drama. There always are.

Last season featured a breakup that was very much not textbook, even if the outline of its monstrous form seems familiar to those who know its patterns. Carl Radke and Lindsay Hubbard broke off their engagement mere months before their wedding after a summer in which they fought constantly, she accused him of relapsing, and the internet lost its collective mind. This breakup cast a long shadow over the current season, and no more apparent is this than within the fandom for the show itself. Because, reader, the dissonance between what we were seeing and what people chose to be angry about were not one and the same. Arguably, people were and are still way more angry that Carl chose to break up with Lindsay on camera than they are about the fact that Lindsay accused him of breaking his sobriety just to win a pointless argument, and personally that bothers me. Lindsay’s fans have always been way more unsettling to me than Lindsay herself, because Lindsay at least has displayed that she’s willing to apologize for her misdeeds, but this is a quality her fans don’t share. Everything she does is met with a chorus of “yes queen”, snaps, and a fair amount of shifting the blame, and this works in petty arguments but fails to hold much water when placed within the scale of a life-altering relationship breakdown.

One of the most famous - and polarizing - examples of this came towards the end of last season. Up to this point Carl had been struggling in figuring out where he wanted to place his energy in his career, and Lindsay had not had a lot of patience for it, which is her right. Carl, hitting the wall, breaks down and begs Lindsay to be “soft” with him, a choice of words that I’m certain haunts him to this day.

Perhaps it’s because I’m gay and women speaking to women is just different from the way in which women and men speak to each other, but if my wife asked me to be soft with her I don’t think I would take it the way that Lindsay seemed to. I would probably assume that there were some deeper emotions at play, as well as a fair amount of stress both from planning a career and planning a wedding and maintaining sobriety as well as dealing with constantly fighting with the person that you’re supposed to feel most comfortable with.

But that’s just me, and this is definitely not how Lindsay took it. She accused him of wanting a Stepford Wife (ugh), forcing her to conform to a gendered standard she didn’t agree with, and basically not really wanting to be with her at all if that’s what he needed from a partner. The mental gymnastics one would need to clear in order to hear an earnest request from your partner about the way in which they’d like to be treated and translate it as gaslighting is Olympian, but Lindsay was able to do it and she stuck the landing hard. And her fans backed her up all the way, because it’s not right for a man to tell a woman to change.

The gender dynamics in heterosexual relationships are endlessly fascinating to me, and the Bravo fanbase has served as a sort of petri dish. Because at its face, I do agree a man shouldn’t tell a woman she needs to change in order for the relationship to continue, and the same goes for a woman to a man. If you want to change each other maybe you should not be with each other at all, and should instead just find somebody who is closer to what you want. But where does gender take a backseat to the things you are allowed to request of your partner? A woman can ask a male partner for support emotionally because women are socialized to be more outward with their emotions, but it’s a lot harder for men to be emotionally available with their partners and thus harder for them to ask for the help they need. It isn’t a “poor men” issue, it’s an issue of having an equal partnership. And ideally, you shouldn’t be asking your partner for something that you aren’t willing to provide for them.

I bring this up because in this same season there was a parallel scene between Paige and Craig that - at least at the time - nobody thought much of but stuck in my mind hard and fast. At this point I was already fairly certain they weren’t meant to last because they had been together for a while but he still lived in Charleston and she still lived in New York, and neither one of them seemed to have any plans to move for the other one (Paige literally burst into tears at the thought of moving to Charleston). This on its own would have been an issue, but there proceeded a scene of them having a picnic by the river in which they began talking lightheartedly about some of their recent stumbling blocks. Craig had been emotional of late, and somewhat self-consciously laughed: “I guess I don’t want to be a pussy”, to which Paige replied, stone-faced: “yeah, I don’t want you to be one either.”

The fans were silent on this scene, and yet in the full picture of the season the two of them go hand in hand for me on what’s wrong with heterosexuals on Bravo. A man asks for his partner to be tender with him and is hence dubbed a misogynist, but a woman tells her partner she doesn’t like him when he’s vulnerable and it’s simply taken as a given. Women on Bravo (and generally) seem to walk a fine line between wanting men to be completely evolved creatures that support them unquestionably, but who are also traditionally masculine men. It’s a nice thought, but I don’t know how realistic it is.

Straight women, do you like men? Like, literally, do you like them or are you pretending? Subscribe and lmk.

Subscribe now

There had been a few instances before this where Craig had been outwardly emotional and Paige had either brushed him off or explicitly told him to get over it (him crying over missing his mother’s birthday “gave her the ick”). Whether she was right or wrong is less to me than the overall takeaway that Paige’s values within her relationships have always followed this same traditionally gendered line: men should be stoic, strong, direct, and women can do whatever they want. This is the impression because despite this tendency to rely on tradition in her romantic relationships Paige herself is modern in her views on women. She has a successful business that she takes very seriously and a career modelling that she treats professionally, she’s informed in what she says and stands in her convictions, she supports her female friends with all she has and even comes out to defend the women that historically she’s had issues with (like Lindsay). There’s a lot to like about Paige, and yet her relationships continue to stay stuck in these harmful patterns in which men have to be one way and are worthy of derision if they can’t meet that standard.

But this isn’t a problem for the fandom, who primarily react to men and women like cavemen. Men are all sloppy underachievers in desperate need of a revamp, and women are slay girlboss queens until they’re involved in cheating scandals in which case they’re dirty whores. Because, truly, cheating is worse than murder on Bravo. There are people who have already forgiven Jen Shah, Erika Girardi, and Shannon Storms Beador for endangering the lives of humans, animals, and defrauding burn victims and the elderly, and yet will be harassing Tom Sandoval until the day that he dies.

Women on these shows are a tender thing, as the origins of Bravo as a network are shades of gray. The first original programming Bravo produced didn’t hit gold until The Real Housewives of Orange County, and even then it was mainly an excuse to laugh at the female stars. It was a year before the recession and we were already more than willing to laugh at the tackiness of the rich, their petty dramas, their lack of warmth and depth. Make no mistake, Bravo only became popular through misogyny, because of a horde of people that wanted to laugh at these women and their troubles and their passions. Some of it was funny, but some of it was only funny when seen through a funhouse mirror. And it bears acknowledging, just because it started this way doesn’t mean that Bravo has not also produced authentic moments of female empowerment, or facilitated hard but necessary conversations not just from their casts but from their fans, or showcased women supporting one another in the face of immense struggle and trauma. There’s nuance to everything, and it stands to reason that some of the fan reaction is an explicit act of defiance against the misogynistic origins of the network.

Fans of these shows love these women, and they love nothing more than women supporting women on shows that historically have centered women being adversarial to one another. The Taylor Swift 2015 brand of “feminism equals friendship!” can only be blamed so much for this tendency in the female audience to lean on terms like “girl’s girl”, to side-eye female characters who lean more into hanging out with their male castmates (Lindsay was a victim of this for a long time). As such, the Bravo fanbase and its relationship to women on these shows is a complicated one, and moreso in recent years it has become the norm to characterize the values of reality stars along a feminist or social justice line in order to distinguish them as separate from their more badly behaved co-stars. Look at Ariana Madix in the wake of Scandoval, who had every quasi-feminist quote she ever uttered turned into a quippy mug, or - indeed - Katie Maloney’s shirt. If the fanbase likes a women it gets deemed an act of feminism. Nay, an act of female bravery.

The only real roadblock to that line of thinking is who it’s coming from. There were seasons where Ariana wasn’t as liked and her feminist leanings were deemed nagging, and there have been many characters across the network who were too ambitious in what they were attempting to do within the confines of an already established show (Eboni from The Real Housewives of New York is a good example of this). But the audience has consistently liked Paige for a very long time, and she only grew in the esteem of the fanbase after Lindsay and Carl’s breakup. She’s confident but doesn’t put too much out there, and in truth a lot of her true feelings are held very close to her chest until such a time where they can be valuable to her. She’s infamous for waiting to bring up issues until reunions, and at those reunions as well as her confessionals there are moments where she’s clearly rehearsed what she wants to say for maximum impact. Because of this it can be hard to say exactly where Paige lands on anything, and especially so in matters of feminism and social justice. It isn’t a prerequisite to be “woke” to be seen as the face of the Bravo girlboss, but it undercuts a fair amount of her self-proclaimed empowerment to know that she liked some of Ivanka Trump’s posts and that despite craving independence she cannot seem to stay out of relationships.

Whatever feminist thought that Paige appears to exhibit seems to be primarily class-based, as opposed to any real striving for the rise of intersectional feminism. The average feminist would hopefully take it as a given that all women are inherently equal regardless of their proximity to wealth and power and as such are deserving of the same privileges and rights as anybody else, but the modern girlboss feminist has a different take. Indeed, it appears as though a certain subsect of women who preach about empowerment learned everything they currently know about being equal to men from pop lyrics.

This new interpretation of feminist thought places importance on monetary equality over anything else, as though we have successfully eradicated misogyny by becoming rich. Effectively this tells women that they can only be recognized as equals if they manage to reach an upper echelon of wealth that for most is never going to be accessible, but the aesthetics of this ideal are doubtlessly attractive to those for whom this lifestyle doesn’t seem impossible to attain. And make no mistake, Paige certainly comes from a world in which this lifestyle would not only appear attainable but would be very easily within reach if she worked just a little harder than the average model. This attitude explains certain things away entirely, such as her backhanded threat to Kyle Cooke that he was lucky she didn’t buy his company and sell it, as well as her belief that Craig should prioritize moving to her place of residence because she is “the breadwinner”. For women who see money as the arbiter of equality it stands to reason that they would continue to see things along a gendered line, since they don’t seem to integrate any other serious feminist theory into their thought process, and that this tension would cause understandable hardship in relationships with men. You now have your bag, you have your hustle, you have your man, but you can’t be happy about any of it in a way that feels authentic to you because money is not actually an equalizer between genders. Men will always have an advantage, and unless you integrate actual feminist theory into your dealings with them this is not going to stop pissing you off.

I do not envy straight women this task. It seems rough, and I mean that sincerely.

And yet.

The women of Bravo have always prioritized financial dominance in place of any actual change or attempt at equality, because in all likelihood the majority of them look down on feminists as “man-haters”. This is why younger casts are more exciting, as they actually trudged through the waters of female empowerment, but even this misses the real point of why women should be empowered at all. To them women should be equal to men because girls just want to have fun and make that money the same way as men, but it stops just short of any political implications. It’s safer that way, and it allows them to wriggle sideways out of any relationship to actual activism on behalf of gender equality by centering their brand of feminism to instead be about empty catchphrases like “supporting women” or being a “girl’s girl”. The last time anybody watching Bravo heard someone refer to themselves as a feminist would probably be Lala Kent, who espoused “new-age feminism” that boiled down to asserting that women should be able to suck dick for a Range Rover and not be called names about it because it hurts her feelings. And, yes, that is a mean thing to do to somebody, but it also is not the cornerstone of a movement. And thinking this way certainly never stopped Lala from calling women bitches and whores when she didn’t like them.

We have allowed these people to pull a joke on us. We let them look through the TV at us and tell us that they were good, principled, feminist people, and the unfortunate thing is that a lot of people believed them. I don’t know why or how, but they did and they do. They are now taking this situation in which two adults broke up because they wanted different things and they’re making it into an effigy for the plight of the girlboss. The girlboss who preaches the hustle but loves bed-rotting, who doesn’t meaningfully support equality but decries her lack of support as misogyny, and digests the criticisms of her relationship by her partner as simply him being threatened by her success.

This is why Katie Maloney’s shirt managed to fill me with so much dread, as this particular shade of feminist discourse is a swamp through which we all need to wade now. And I’m tired of watching a horde of bozo’s miss the point of something I spent thousands of dollars learning on a college campus in the middle of nowhere next to a cemetery. Maybe instead of buying bags, or whatever, some of these people could shell out for a night class at DeVry and figure out what exactly it is that they’re trying to say.

The girlboss as we now recognize her is as toothless as a splat of pink jello. She stands for nothing but her own success, and her perceived success is just the endless fight for more money under a capitalistic system. She has no political beliefs beyond the belief that she has the right to whatever she wants, and if you don’t support her right to have whatever she wants then you don’t support women. And if you don’t support women you mind as well be storming the capital, girlfriend, am I right my queens?

March thus far has been dedicated to content primarily dedicated to religious mania, which started as an accident and has since ballooned into something like a hyperfixation. At the beginning of the month I read the Wired article that ignited the recent fascination with the so-called death cult of the Zizians - an offshoot of a loose coalition of some of the most insufferable people you’ve ever heard of that refer to themselves as Rationalists - who have allegedly been responsible for six murders. Rationalism is treated with the gravitas of a religion simply by nature of its followers being avowed atheists who still seem to yearn for God-daddy, and Zizians share this quality and take it to further extremes that won’t be explored to the depth it deserves here simply because it would take no fewer than 10,000 words. It would, however, be hilarious to note that Rationalists are people so self-satisfied in their own intellect that they eschewed religion and yet they inadvertently created Calvinism by Mr. Bean-ing themselves into a prolonged metaphor with a Basilisk (I beg you to read that article so you can understand this).

It was pure coincidence that at the same time this group was capturing the imagination of a select few unwell people the hit podcast Last Podcast on the Left released a series on the Daybell-Vallow murders, which in the early days of COVID became a true object of fascination for true crime enthusiasts and normal people alike. The series dove deep into the history and ethos of its title couple, Chad Daybell and Lori Vallow, both of whom are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and who - not unlike the Zizians - could be characterized as more zealous than some of their peers. Chad is effectively a charlatan who used LDS talking points around the apocalypse, which followers of the LDs believe to be imminent, to inflate his own standing in the church and convince a gaggle of impressionable zealots that he was capable of seeing the forthcoming doomsday and could tell them who would live and who would die. Lori Vallow was one such impressionable zealot, and she followed his teachings all the way down to believing she herself was a deity, which led to the murders of her husband, two of her children, and the probable murder of Chad’s wife and perhaps even her own brother who was accused of helping to carry out the murders. Like the concept of Rationalism, this story deserves more time than I can afford to devote to it.

Needless to say, while discussing the Zizians, or the recent film Heretic which heavily features and challenges LDS ideology, or finally watching the withering portrait of the FLDS lifestyle in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey on Netflix, there were several moments where I turned to my wife and I said the words: I could never. Each time I earnestly meant it, as I’ve now reached the age where I’m comfortable admitting that my combination of laziness and misanthropy eliminates me from most earnest expressions of faith (most, not all). Even if I did believe that a particular person was the living God-daddy on Earth the second he asked me to subject myself to physical labor I would joyfully retreat to my own damnation. Had I returned all those calls that the Minnesota Church of Scientology made to me last year (don’t ask) and became enmeshed in their lifestyle, and completely allowed myself to be subsumed by them, I know with my whole being the second they took me into that tiny room and revealed that this was all in service to Xenu I would begin planning to fake my own death. As I understand it, this is the only true way to escape.

None of this is because I’m better than anybody else, or smarter, or more exceptional. Once again, most of this is sheer laziness. It takes real effort to allow yourself to become enmeshed in the chaos of believing in something, be that a person or an abstract concept, and oftentimes that impulse simply grazes my cheek before embedding itself in something just behind me.

Oftentimes, but not all times.

Lori Vallow was recently interviewed by America’s last surviving monument, Keith Morrison, on a program called Dateline. The way that she speaks hearkens back to Squeaky Fromme outside the L.A. courthouse, still telling people that Charles Manson was innocent, still talking herself into the endless hole of apocalyptica that she’d been promised. In all fairness, what else was she to do? She’d allowed her children to be murdered to sate the ego of a man who looks like a fat, haunted ventriloquist dummy, probably all she can do to justify it to herself is keep reassuring herself the day of reckoning will come. It was not all in vain, because one day the world will see what she’s seen.

Anyway, this is how I’ve been feeling about Caroline Calloway lately.

It might not be fair to qualify Caroline Calloway as a has-been, but people do. Sometimes I do.

Technically she has never been so “been” - she published her first book (the memoir Scammer) in 2023, and released her second (Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway's Guide to Life, which seems more like a zine crossed with The Period Book) just last year. She can be seen lighting up Instagram with frenetic stories about events she’s helping to organize in New York City, encouraging people to commission her paintings, and she’s been the subject of stories in Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker, Nylon, Cultured, and New York Magazine. Her refusal to evacuate from Hurricane Milton on the eve it was set to hit Florida became a bona-fide sensation, inspiring a wave of anger laced with incredulity from those who were not “in the know” on what and who Caroline is, as well as a mixture of shock and delight at those who are familiar with her game. She announced her survival of the hurricane with a meme: I lived, bitch.

She’s always presented herself with that same manner of defiance. Even her apologies are less apologies and more like she’s stroking you with the back of her hand, her mouth tilted as if to coo: sorry you feel that way. Most of what these moments of contrition boil down to is begging for our understanding of her place in this world. She’s just a young girl, after all, she makes mistakes, what matters is she’s doing her best, she never meant to hurt anybody, she’ll grow from this.

Caroline is 33 years old. I’m 30, and I can tell you I would not categorize myself as a naïf untested by the world. But then, the life that Caroline has had is not the life that I’ve had. I would say it’s not the life that many of us have had, but that might not be precisely true. Indeed, there are lots of women just like Caroline wandering the grimy streets of any given city. What differentiates Caroline from these ne’er do wells is that she seems assured of a certain destiny where any other woman in her position might be happy to simply let the current take them. It’s worthy of a certain degree of respect.

But not too much.

I found out about Caroline Calloway in much the same way I would imagine most people found out about Caroline Calloway. I wasn’t one of her many thousand Instagram followers during the early peak of her fame (the majority of those followers were later found to be fake accounts she had purchased to inflate her perceived influence), I didn’t follow the initial saga of her thwarted book deal, and I never signed up to attend the “creativity workshops” that first had her labelled a scammer. No, I found out about Caroline through the viral article her former best friend and ghostwriter wrote for The Cut. To say the article is scathing would be an understatement. The author, Natalie Beach, depicts Caroline as a self-obsessed, deluded drug addict with an inflated sense of her own talent and prestige, living large off of the hard work that Natalie devoted towards helping her write the captions for her infamous Instagram posts and helping to create the manuscript for her almost-book.

Their friendship plunged its fist through the chests of sad, borderline alcoholic 20-somethings everywhere, and wherever you looked people were swearing their allegiance to one side or another. At first blush most people found it easy to side with Natalie. She was, after all, the one who seemed to be the more hardworking and dedicated to the product, and haven’t we all felt like the ugly friend at one time or another? It didn’t hurt Natalie’s case that Caroline had begun a sharp spiral upon the news of the forthcoming article, regularly posting stories to Instagram with tears streaming down her face. She seemed caught between the two extremes: she told her fans she knew that what Natalie said was true, but the admission seemed to pain her. This was familiar to me, as I imagine it is to everyone who looks back on their past selves with a mixture of awe and disgust.

This combination often follows Caroline: pity and exasperation. She scammed people with her workshops, and later cried about it on Instagram. She was called fat by the puerile hosts of the Red Scare podcast, and she responded by trying to become friends with them (with truly cringe results). She was trashed in the pages of a major publication by her former friend, and she could only respond by spinning out on social media. She charged money for people to read the response she crafted to Natalie’s article, but she forwarded the money she earned from it to charity.

She is as hard to understand as any things that occur in the natural world are, like an uncharted scatter of stars. It shouldn’t be coincidence that her early signature was a crown made of orchids, as her brilliance seems to follow that same logic: transitory, briefly beautiful, capable of longevity only through real care and hard work. And despite these glimpses of creativity, Caroline didn’t seem capable of putting her nose to the grindstone for too, too long. Even her response to Natalie’s article seemed breathless, harried, something she vomited up at the end of a workout class.

For a while she faded into the periphery of the New York social scene, becoming somewhat of a literary It-girl even though she famously had not published anything. Her peers were poets, pseudo-scholars in the way that most of That Set in New York often characterize themselves, and trust-fund babies. Caroline looked the part, but she wasn’t of their ilk. Not really. There was real power in her accomplishments, as it takes a particular amount of tenacity to become as famous as she did with no books under her belt, a tarnished reputation as a flake and a scammer, and a gaggle of friends who seemed to all be laughing at her behind her back. Seeing rarefied images of her within the New York scene has the same feeling of catching a glimpse of a picture taken of your own self in High School, surrounded by people you no longer speak to, a big, happy smile on your face as everyone else smirks. There was a joke, and she didn’t seem to be in on it.

There’s an eagerness within her to be marginalized, to be the victim. She’s open about her love for Taylor Swift, and you can see the footprints of this all the way along the path of Caroline’s nonsense. She attempted to brand herself a sex worker when she halfheartedly engaged in OnlyFans, she began identifying as bisexual simply to wedge her foot in queer spaces, she downplays how much money her family has, and every criticism lobbed at her is branded the handiwork of a misogynistic culture. It’s all very typical White Woman. And this is not to say that every time Caroline cries “patriarchy” it’s false - the patriarchy dictates that this is so - but certainly not all takes on her actions are in bad faith (see above, below, and all around the internet).

Every few months she dipped her toe into a new gaffe: she had to explain she knew nothing about Art History even though she supposedly majored in Art History, she sold “snake oil” on her website and buyers complained of cat hair in their vials, she started an OnlyFans based on fictional literary characters and got cancelled for depicting underage characters. None of it seemed malicious, and in truth all of it only seemed to highlight that Caroline simply might not be as smart as she thought she was, but the internet - much like the body - collects. Her reputation got worse and worse.

My personal favorite of these miniature dräm’s is the story of her apartment. In short: she announced she was through with New York and that she would henceforth decamp for Florida, leaving her apartment of the past decade (or so) free for occupancy. The poet Rachel Rabbit White (who I met briefly at a poetry reading I really hated in 2019) took her up on the offer and sub-let the unit, which was discovered to have been thoroughly trashed through a week of partying before Caroline left for Florida. Caroline was subsequently sued for $25,000 in damages, and an additional $40,844.56 in unpaid rent.

The apartment is when I really began to like her.

I’ve always been drawn to fabulists. Some may call them liars, but I would guess Caroline prefers fabulist (even though she claims to have embraced being called a scammer). Some people feel true hatred when confronted with Caroline and her Everything, but an unsavory aspect of my personality is just how fast I turn to defend something when it seems like everyone is beginning to agree on it. I’d say I was addressing this with a professional but I’m not (become a subscriber today!).

Subscribe now

That someone could live their life inside such chaos has always been something I both admire and fear. Caroline and I both share a fascination with Cat Marnell, former beauty editor of Lucky and XO Jane, who famously chose long-term addiction to drugs over having a career in the early 2010’s (“I couldn’t spend another summer meeting deadlines behind a computer at night when I could be on the rooftop of Le Bain looking for shooting stars and smoking angel dust with my friends”). Cat’s book How to Murder Your Life strikes many as myopic, and that criticism isn’t necessarily incorrect when you bear in mind how similar it is to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s work (another oft cited inspiration for Caroline). We both seem to be fascinated by trainwrecks because there have been moments in our lives where we more resemble Cat than we resemble our best selves, which is a quality that may be more universal than most would want to admit. But there’s ambrosia to me in works where the protagonist refuses to make the right choice, choosing instead to follow the silvery line of their impulse down into the black depths of ruin and despair.

In short: I love mess! And nothing is more messy than lying about a chandelier you hung directly in the pathway of the door of the apartment you ruined costing $3,000.

Once I began liking Caroline I slipped hard and fast into finding her eccentricities endearing, into looking sideways at creators who derided her as simply not understanding the grift. Now that Caroline acknowledged herself as a scammer how can we really be that surprised when she scammed people? She’s a dummy who says dumb things sometimes, are we shocked? The vitriol aimed at her seemed more and more petty to me, and as such her refusal to go away seemed even more astounding. There’s something spoiled and arrogant about it, but I’ve always liked women that can’t seem to see past the end of their noses. I stare at them like butterflies in a bell jar.

It should surprise nobody that upon learning that Natalie Beach was set to publish a book of essays Caroline spun out again. But this time the breakdown seemed more a shedding of the skin, a little moment of inevitability. Perhaps New York had been the problem, perhaps being a literary It-girl was the very thing keeping her from becoming the writer she always hoped to be. She delivered Scammer mere days before Natalie’s book, Adult Drama, was published by Hanover Square Press. If Caroline had divinity within her it’s the sort that crackled in the lightening of the old testament, something that’s terrifying and vengeful and masquerades as goodness.

How Scammer was received almost isn’t the point, even if the response has been characterized as “generally positive.” The point was reclaiming whatever she felt she had lost in the competition with Natalie, who had now become as central a character in Caroline’s story as she herself was. There’s even a passage in Scammer in which Caroline creates an interaction with an old professor telling her she’s a better writer than Natalie of of whole-cloth, such is her desire to correct the record that she, Caroline, is beautiful, and talented, and everyone who matters knows it. Once again, it’s both exasperating and somehow pitiable. She’s telling a story to herself more than she’s telling a story to us.

Scammer is the dangerous pivot of her story, as it gave her the gravitas she had always sought after: she was now a published author. It wasn’t long before she announced a new project: Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway's Guide to Life. Her fascination with Wurtzel is an interesting thing, because on the surface I can see exactly why she’s called to her (see the above paragraph on Cat Marnell), but the reasons she puts forth for why she wanted to write this…book (?) are not immediately clear. First of all, she posits that Wurtzel is her favorite writer, which in itself is a little weird. I know this is rich coming from someone writing somewhat favorably about Caroline Calloway, but if Elizabeth Wurtzel is your favorite author you have bigger problems than owing $65,844.56 to a landlord in New York. Second of all, an “advice book” from Caroline Calloway and Elizabeth Wurtzel is redundant on myriad levels not just because Wurtzel herself published an advice book in 2004, but because Wurtzel and Calloway are so similar on superficial levels that any advice purported to come from their lived experiences would just be the same advice Caroline would give anyway.

Creatively, this seemed to me to be bit of a stumbling block. She got a blank check when she released Scammer, and this seemed a bit of a cop-out. Not only was it relying on the fame of a dead woman, but again, this book appears to have more in common with The Period Book than anything else, with its illustrations, it’s little captions.

I didn’t get it.

So, of course, I ordered one.

I ordered my copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway's Guide to Life right after the election. Everything I did in the days following that rainy November night occurred in liminal space and time, something Lynchian and intangible, and I made a lot of bad choices. I smoked cigarettes, I drank Fireball, I wore all black, and I purchased things I had no business purchasing like books that I halfway knew wouldn’t come.

Because yes, I ordered the book in November and it still has not arrived. It’s March 2025, Trump has been president for far too long already, Michelle Trachtenberg is dead, and Caroline Calloway is still a scammer.

But am I surprised? No.

There’s something almost comforting in the certainty of a scam, of knowing in your bones who someone is. I watched the entirety of D’Angelo Wallace’s video, in which he details how his copy of Scammer never arrived, and still I thought: I want that. There’s an immediacy to being scammed that reminds me of the surrender you only experience in very choregraphed BDSM scenes, having my money snatched from my hand by a dominatrix in teal latex.

You go to Caroline to be lied to the same way you go to church to be lied to. I can’t explain why I want it the same way people can’t really explain why they believe in God. I can’t explain why I like her in the face of her awfulness the same way people love God after he allows kids to bring guns to school. The way people hate her is all vitriol, like punching a mirror, and I like watching it just as much as I like watching her create chaos and call it art. I have allowed myself to be tricked, the same way I imagine most religious people allow themselves to be tricked. The stakes for me were just as high as they are for the average schmuck walking into a confessional, all vulnerability, all hope that things could be made right again.

But then, I know who Caroline is. She made her name by letting her mouth write checks her ass couldn’t cash, she’s taken a lot of people’s money with zero explanation. The event that made her Known to a lot of people centered around the idea that the Caroline Calloway we thought we had was never really her at all. There’s truth to that, but there’s also a shadowy underbelly. There always is.

I struggle a lot with what I believe about the infinite. I don’t believe in God as a formality, but I do believe in beings that walk among us who possess inarguable power. I believe that artists (be they musicians, writers, painters, what have you) are the last true magicians because they create something from empty space. Do I see them to believe in them? No. It’s a kind of belief. Caroline Calloway is exactly the kind of god that I think we deserve: greedy, deluded, with lies spilling out of a beautiful face.

This week I went to bed with a fever and this is what I saw:

A crown of wilting orchids melting into the top of a cake. A microwave painted teal with light popping from it like the fiery flashes of a sparkler. My best friend, Natalie, with her face turned away from me. A blank page with the cursor throbbing like a distant ache.

Had I been her, or had I been me? Every man and every woman is a star.

I woke up in the middle of the night covered in sweat, the fever breaking steadily.

Over a month ago my wife and I started watching Martha Stewart’s Cooking School.

What precipitated this was, as it usually is, watching a documentary. Martha (2024) is as revelatory about the subject herself as it is a back-to-basics of why we are, and have been, so fascinated by Martha Stewart. In the film she appears cool, somehow aloof from the many messy facts of her life even as the film lays them all bare before us and asks us to take her in as a whole person. What’s curious is that Martha does not seem to want that from us in the same way that the filmmakers do: she’s happy to leave things unexplained, to shrug and choose to continue telling her part of the story as opposed to the whole story, to allow herself to remain a sort of household God.

So enraptured, we began watching Martha Stewart’s Cooking School before bed, falling asleep to images of yolks bursting like sunshine from poached eggs, a smear of mayonnaise across a toasted sandwich, the perfect green of a blanched vegetable. We take for granted that cooking is a skill - that not everybody has the tenacity (nay, the guts) to involve themselves in the preparation of the food that nourishes them. I’ve never loved media that made cooking look too simple, because I know that it’s hard work to cook certain things, but Martha is historically the exception. She’s otherworldly in her calm, comforting in her stone-faced resolve as she removes bones, whips at a meringue, lets hot oil splatter over her hands. Her fearlessness is what encouraged us to cook like she did, just as it also kept her removed from us ever truly understanding her.

Because of Martha I roasted a chicken for the first time, an act I had heretofore been terrified of undertaking due to past snafu’s. I prepared the bird with my phone propped up on the countertop, Martha’s hands showing me the steps to tie it below the breast, around the bones of the legs, on the screen.

It was heaven. Or, it was my kind of heaven.

This week, inescapably, I thought of Martha a lot as we watched With Love, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex’s newest Netflix venture. As we watched the dazzling California sun beat down on her vegetables, the easy push of wind through her hair, I was also helpless but to think of one of California's greatest biographers. Joni Mitchell's voice pulsed through my ears as I watched her hands, the memory of Martha's still imprinted across my retinas: will you take me as I am? Will you?

Share ✨ believe in the existence of the devil ✨

Meghan Sussex (formerly Markle) has a Netflix show. There are eight episodes. For some reason this has really irritated a lot of people.

People have, over the course of this week, lambasted the show as showboating a lifestyle that nobody could ever afford to have, bemoaned its pointlessness, dunked on Meghan herself as unrelatable and out of touch, and generally penned some deeply self-satisfied reviews of a show that on its face seems fairly inoffensive. It reminds me, earnestly, of the period of time when chronically online adults began to get too emotionally attached to children’s media and would try to cancel certain TV shows based on woke-left politics (COVID affected us all in different ways, I guess). It’s the only comparison I can reasonably think of that captures just how pedantic, petty, and yet deeply fraught these reviews are, because - believe me - these people seem peeved as fuck over literally nothing.

It is, quite frankly, a little pathetic.

I have watched all the episodes of With Love, Meghan now, and to read these reviews you would think that she was serving pasta shot with spun gold in the sauce. In reality her kitchen, her food, and her aesthetic are way more at home in Martha Stewart’s world than it is in ours, but that’s also just part and parcel of this genre of cooking and lifestyle television. I get the sense a lot of the people who are criticizing the pointlessness of shows like With Love, Meghan don’t actually engage with a lot of that content themselves. I’ve read many articles this week begging for what The Point of it all is, watching Meghan create snacks for a garden party, or mix her own bath salts, or show us how to make one-pot pasta and Korean fried chicken. Do these people not understand that these shows - which openly crib off of the vintage Cooking Channel aesthetic - don’t have plots? A man isn’t going to burst into the house with a gun and order her to give him all the snap peas, because that’s not the intention of the show.

Lifestyle porn operates devoid of plot because the only point to that content is to, in a sense, see how the other half lives. What do people with unimaginable resources eat, what do they wear when they cook, what pots do they use? What I enjoyed about With Love, Meghan is that not only does she present us with an aesthetically clean presentation of a manageable skill, but that she also provides tips and tricks that can actually be transposed onto real life. I’m not wealthy, but I can come into possession of lavender oil and a towel and create a relaxing lavender towel for myself to enjoy after a long day. I might not be able to afford a huge platter of rainbow colored fruit, but I can translate that to a much smaller plate and more accessible fruits. No, I can’t have Meghan’s garden, or her huge kitchen, or her money, but this summer I can plant tomatoes and strawberries on my balcony and know what to do with them. It’s the same intentionality that dogged Martha Stewart’s work - no, the average person cannot afford to use their limited time and resources to prepare and enjoy a whole Sole Meunière, but does that mean we can’t enjoy watching her do it?

It seems some of these reviewers are at least trying to present themselves as having moved past the need for luxury, or for whimsy. Perhaps it’s retrograde to still enjoy the aesthetic of opulence, of achievable perfection, but a part of me thinks that isn’t entirely the case. Just as so many want to remain absent from the preparation of the food that nourishes them so too are people uncomfortable getting too close to the activities that nourish them, to the joy one can feel when creating something subject to consumption. It’s cringe. It’s alienating. Watching Meghan joyfully harvest beeswax, sprinkle the shiny tops of glazed donuts with flowers, accidently slam a fridge door, it’s embarrassing because she’s enjoying herself. It’s embarrassing because she is not embarrassed in a way that the everyday person would be, because often we people of significantly fewer means conflate having and flaunting wealth with being embarrassing. We are taught to prioritize the hustle, the grind, mobilizing every hour of every day in terms of productivity. Anything that tells us to slow down, to enjoy, is seen as extraneous unless it comes with a signifier of some type of status (luxury makeup hauls, Instagram-worthy vacations, buying a big house). Kendrick tells us to sit down and be humble, and anybody not doing that is subject to our disdain.

Envy, certainly, also has a part in this, but that goes without saying. Meghan Sussex is a beautiful woman with a big house, adorable dogs, and a great life. It’s natural to feel jealous of that. But having something that others don’t have is not explicitly a moral failing, even if it means you won’t be spared in the revolution. By all accounts, Meghan seems like a very nice lady who has a lot of long-term friends and clearly seems to care about the work that she’s doing and how it’s going to affect people. Her having a big house doesn’t take any of that away, and it doesn’t stop anybody from enjoying a celebrity normally. Normally, but then very little about how people behave in relation to Meghan has ever been normal.

I could write point by point about how in reality it’s quite stupid to criticize a lifestyle show for being inaccessible to what we can charitably call The Layman, but I feel it would be waste of time. People don’t actually care that the lifestyle Meghan is presenting on her show is a lifestyle that not many can afford to have (people never seem to mind when influencers do this, after all), the reason is that we can never get enough of dunking on Meghan Sussex. The racists enjoy it because she’s mixed race, the Monarchists enjoy it because she’s an American, the normies enjoy it because she’s rich, and everyone else enjoys it because we love to hate women generally and women like Meghan in specific. That she is all of these things and appears happy is just salt in the wound. People would be feeling this exact way if every 10 minutes she looked directly into the camera and acknowledged her privilege, said that she was standing on stolen land, and apologized for her very existence.

Make no mistake, there are legitimate areas through which we can criticize Meghan Sussex. That she and Harry seemed to have embarked on this deal with Netflix with no real plans in mind is worthy of an eyeroll, especially considering that this show is specifically in Meghan’s area of interest historically (she founded a very successful lifestyle blog called The Tig in 2014). They’ve had a few of these running starts that lead nowhere, from the podcast, to the American Riviera Orchard, to the Oprah interview and subsequent Netflix docuseries, to Meghan’s new venture As Ever. These people have absurd wealth and privilege, but they seem clueless as to what they should be applying it to, if applying it at all is really their goal here. That’s a very valid criticism.

Is With Love, Meghan the best use of a multi-million dollar deal with Netflix? Probably not. But it’s not as though the show is incompetently made, or lacking in quality, or lacking in the substance that it promises. That people are watching the show and expecting to receive the hard details of Meghan’s life and walking away empty handed isn’t the fault of the show, because the branding has never promised anything different.

The depersonalization of content designed to be instructive is, again, part of the genre, but people are easily confused when the genre is being headed by a personality that is well-known to them. At its base it makes sense that people are confused by the significant lack of Who exactly Meghan is from the meat of the show, because she’s Meghan Sussex and we know her and we know the superficial facts of her life. We’ve read about her in magazines, we’ve watched her on the TV. So why is she not talking about herself on her own show? People complain that the show is not personal, but that again is not the point of the show, that’s simply what we’re accustomed to from Meghan. We forget that when Martha Stewart first stormed the cultural landscape we didn’t know half as much about her as we know about Meghan, but that didn’t detract from the experience of watching her.

How many people back in yesteryear watched Martha Stewart teach them to cook a tenderloin and whined: but what’s the point? The tenderloin is the point. Martha is the point.

The point of With Love, Meghan, dear hater, is simply the pleasure of watching a beautiful women create beautiful foods, and balloon arches, and snacks for her friends and family. That’s the exact kind of content that created whole networks and made stars of otherwise unlikely hosts: Martha Stewart, Nigella Lawson, Ina Garten. That might not be content that you like, and it seems very likely that you don’t respect it, but nobody is forcing you to watch it either.

A show like With Love, Meghan is not designed to withstand our current cultural fascination with hate-watching. If people didn’t like Martha Stewart it used to be common practice that people would just not watch her show, but things are no longer that simple. With Love, Meghan becoming a cultural curiosity has enabled individuals who don’t normally ingest this kind of a show to feel as though they’re doing something highly intelligent by pointing out that it doesn’t have a plot, that the interiors are fancier than their house, and that Meghan herself isn’t an expert on everything she’s doing. It gives one war flashbacks to the last time a horror movie reached true cultural relevance and then your least-informed family member all of a sudden wanted to act like Roger Ebert when complaining about the amount of blood. You can’t say ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ because by the time something has reached the mainstream (read: the For You page) everyone is an authority.

Whatever Meghan and Harry used their Netflix money for would have been subject to intense scrutiny - this is, unfortunately, the life that they live. What has caught me particularly off-guard with the reaction to With Love, Meghan is the sheer fragility of all of the insults being lobbed at it. People find the wealth-porn alienating, the quirky tips and tricks cringe, the myriad guests boring or underutilized. These are confusing complaints to me because, again, this is nothing that the average lifestyle influencer is not schooled in and traffics in heavily, and we hear few complaints about them these days. Gone are the days when influencers were labelled grifters by society, as with the ubiquity of TikTok most people are presented influencers often without even knowing that they’re being sold something.

And, not to leave it unsaid, this content being skewered so viciously is doubly odd to me considering we’re still very much in the age of the TradWife influencer. There is certainly a reading of With Love, Meghan that could linger on the gendered dynamics of the work that she’s performing and how these play into our perception of womanhood, motherhood, etc., but what’s curious again is how quiet the criticism is on the other end of the scale. Of course, there are the odd YouTube videos or articles in studied magazines pondering on what the resurgence of Traditional Femininity will come to mean for society (nothing good!), but overall the consumer seems very interested in a certain type of content. That content being reels and TikTok’s in which women play The Homemaker, creating a life for themselves and their families that hearken back to a “simpler” time, utilizing materials and skills that we take for granted now in a more modernized world. These are women that grow their own food in their own gardens, make their families homespun snacks, craft an aesthetic out of beautiful and simple materials in order to present their lives as something that isn’t quite reality. Meghan is doing all of that too, but for some reason when she’s doing it it is worthy of review after review decrying her phoniness. I’m sure the reasons for that are many, and TradWives themselves are emerging as some of social media’s most tragic villains, but you don’t have to look far to come to the realization for why these white women get to be lauded and Meghan gets to be jeered at.

Even her most sympathetic of critics cannot help but add a note of disdain to their scraps of understanding. To them, Meghan is simply doing this because she can’t be royal anymore, so at most her attempts to create should be pitied and nodded politely at. I don’t appreciate the characterization of Meghan Sussex as someone who had the experience of being royal taken away from her. She and her husband made an active choice to leave the Royal Family, and obviously it wasn’t a choice made lightly. She and Harry clearly still care about being royal (hence the pointed request to be referred to as Meghan Sussex to a stupefied Mindy Kaling), and why shouldn’t they? She’s suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of the British press who continue to batter her with insulting headlines to this day, and the least she can get as a consolation prize is to put “Duchess” in her Instagram profile and have a silly show on Netflix where she drinks a ton of delightful cocktails.

What probably irks, and what has surely caused at least a small margin of these bad reviews, is that Meghan doesn’t seem bothered by not being a part of the royal system anymore. She very well might be, but she’s putting on a hell of a show.

These people keep waiting for the “real” Meghan to break through, for there to be tension, for her to roll her eyes at her actions or grimace at her words. Perhaps I’m naive, but as somebody who has partaken of a lot of content both by and about Meghan I feel like this might just be who she is. She enjoys the finer things, she likes personal touches, she likes to garden and create lovely foods. She seems incredibly patient, and I don’t know why we should be so surprised by that. If she wasn’t this calm, or friendly, or mannered, there’s no way she would have been able to keep her cool this long in such deeply uncomfortable circumstances, to not rise to the bait that her detractors are constantly swinging towards her.

But we don’t want this to be her. We want her to be our worst imagining of her.

The same curse befell Martha Stewart, who was constantly lambasted for her work being inaccessible or unrelatable, even when we really don’t need to know anything about a person to know that they make crudites like a motherfucker. I don’t care to know a lot of the details of the life of the woman who taught me how to properly truss a chicken, and I only came to know much that I know about Martha against her will. Much in the same way I know Meghan. I don’t need to know what keeps these women up at night, I just need to know how many cups of flour to add to the bowl.

But people have always had trouble looking away from Meghan. She’s beautiful, and smart, and has a prince on her arm, and people love to look at her. Even when they hate her. Even when nobody asked them to.

We are living in very hard times, it’s the unfortunate, sad, infuriating truth. I can understand the place that the reviewers who begrudge Meghan her privilege are coming from, because not having a lot is a deeply unenviable position (become a paid subscriber today lol). But I don’t personally buy in to the notion that just because things are bad that there cannot also exist good, or that escapism is somehow irresponsible, or that to want something better or more beautiful is a moral failing. People act as though just because the world is dark and times are precarious that we don’t deserve to have something that makes it seem lighter, even for the space of 45 minutes, and I just don’t think that’s a tenable mindset. You can exhaust yourself on your misery, you can blind yourself with anger, and that doesn’t make either feeling less useful or less motivating, but it does make it harder to stop and appreciate the good that comes along. Because there is good. And there will be good.

With Love, Meghan doesn’t accomplish much by way of activism, or drama, or class consciousness, but it does tell us consistently to stop where we are and find joy. Just because my life and Meghan’s life, or my life and Martha’s life, aren’t immediately comparable doesn’t mean that I can’t also do this, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t either.

Who knows, maybe after the revolution eliminates Meghan Sussex’s two houses in Montecito, lays waste to her lovely gardens, and shatters the off-white brilliance of her Le Creuset pots we can all pat the back of our necks with a lavender scented towel.

Reddit likes to do this particular flavor of indignity to this particular kind of reality star, the ones that strike at nerves sometimes on purpose and sometimes by purely existing. Look below any post on a Vanderpump Rules subreddit, in particular, and you will find yourself awash in smug mouthbreathers patting themselves on the back for referring to a woman who has gone by Raquel much of her life as Rachel, the name on her birth certificate. The most pervasive instance of this occurs under any post about Lala Kent, in which you can practically hear the tittering of her most virulent haters as they refer to her as - say it with me - Lauren From Utah (LFU, to the initiated). Refusing to grant these women the dignity of the names they chose for themselves scratches a violent itch in the age of dark-room internet trolling, in which even soccer moms have Reddit and Instagram accounts they can use to become Top 1% Commenting Pop Culture Intelligencia, and why shouldn’t it? It doesn’t hurt anybody to call a cis woman with money her name.

It’s never sat right with me that people do this, but again, who does it hurt? Raquel Leviss’ name is Rachel, Lala Kent’s name is Lauren. In the grander scheme of things this is a piss in the ocean.

John Mellencamp’s Daughter is Teddi Jo Mellencamp Arroyave (at this time she is in the process of divorcing her husband, Edwin Arroyave). She was a cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills from seasons 8 to 10, during which time she became one of the most hated cast members ever to be featured on a program that also included Brandi Glanville, Lisa Rinna, and whoever the hell Carlton was. As you can guess, Teddi’s father is John Cougar Mellencamp, which is a fact that she mentions on the show sparingly, having cited her complicated past feelings at having a famous father and the myriad ways in which this affected how people treated her. At the time of her casting Teddi marketed herself as an Accountability Coach, which is a made-up title that basically amounted to serving as a professional nag to the women who could afford to pay her to text them multiple times a day about whether or not they ate and worked out properly.

Teddi, who has openly discussed struggling with weight and disordered eating, also had a weight loss - excuse me, fitness - program under her banner during the time she was a housewife. All In by Teddi is a three-part program designed to help you detox, develop responsible habits in health and wellness, and ultimately to hold yourself accountable with the assistance of what she calls a “clean menu”. Part of this program is the lucky registrant receiving a specialized coach (read: professional nag) that regularly checks in with them to be sure they are sticking to their regimen. The show itself never went too deep into the logistics of All In by Teddi, for reasons that became clear with very little adjusting of the sheet that covered it.

Teddi dealt the first blow to her reputation herself, coming across as a Pick-Me who detested glam and just wanted to ride horses, two characteristics that wouldn’t lead one to believe that she would ever want to be on reality television. And yet, there she was! This dissonance followed her everywhere she went: accusing Erika Jayne née Girardi of fake amnesia, claiming other people don’t get her jokes because she’s just too direct, and slowly but surely driving a wedge between newer besties Dorit Kemsley and Lisa Vanderpump. The latter proved to be the beginning of her real undoing, as she was roped into a plot to ruin Kemsley’s reputation via a dog named Lucy Lucy Apple Juice (not Appley Juicey as is often erroneously claimed) that backfired on all participants and resulted in fan-favorite Vanderpump’s hasty mid-season retreat from the show. Teddi held out for one more season, but her reputation never recovered in the eyes of the audience, who labelled her a fake, a liar, and a bully.

None of this is wrong. Teddi lied about texting John Blizzard about the dog, Teddi runs a shady business, Teddi and her castmates conspired to chase Lisa Vanderpump and Denise Richards off the show, and she was at least complicit in secondary plots to do the same to Sutton Stracke and Kathy Hilton. There are lots of reasons the audience dislikes, and sometimes outright hates, Teddi Mellencamp.

So who cares if the internet calls her John Mellencamp’s Daughter?

In March 2022, only three years ago, John Mellencamp’s Daughter had a mole removed from her back. By October she had been diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma, and was undergoing positron emission tomography (PET) scans, seeing a hematology specialist and surgical oncologist, and underwent wide excisions to her back to remove as many of the cancerous moles as they could. The first go removed 11 melanomas, the second removed 3, the third only 1. She was seen for bumps on the neck, brown and white spots, she tried an immunotherapy cream, she had more surgeries, but nothing changed. It spread to her arms, so she had surgery on her arms.

Skin cancer sounds less involved than other types of cancer, but this is an obvious fallacy. The skin is the biggest organ in the body, and it is besieged by bacteria, sharp objects, chemicals, and - most dangerous of all - sunlight every single day even when it’s not sunny. People often believe that because we observe the outer layer of our skin we have a better handle on understanding what it needs, and corporations like those people because it is easy to sell the idea of health to people who think that if you buy the right thing cancer can’t get to you. It’s comforting to think that way, and it probably makes a good deal of people feel very safe indeed while they juice cleanse. We are, after all, the same people that willingly bought into Belle Gibson’s grift The Whole Pantry, in which it seemed a true contingent of people believed that eating The Right Way would stave off and even reverse cancer. But cancer can happen to anyone. It will probably happen to all of us.

After battling skin cancer for two years John Mellencamp’s Daughter began to suffer from debilitating headaches. It wasn’t long before she announced that she had multiple brain tumors, and though they haven’t explicitly said, it is likely related to the spread of her melanoma. Once melanoma metastasizes to the brain it is classified stage 4, and the chances of survival past five years is low. She had brain surgery to remove two of the tumors, and rumors abounded in the days after that she had accidently posted a video of her doctors grimly discussing her treatment options to her Instagram story and hastily deleted it.

As furious and harried the dislike of her was, the audience still wanted to know. The consensus seemed to be: yeah, we hate John Mellencamp’s Daughter, but we don’t want her to die.

I don’t like Teddi Mellencamp, but I try to keep my dislike of her in perspective. The reasons I dislike Teddi are probably the reasons most viewers don’t like Teddi. I think her sob story about weighing 200lbs One Time is stupid, I think she can dish it out but she can’t take it, she and Kyle Richards fought each other’s battles (a capital sin for any housewife) and then denied that they were closer with each other than the other women, and she willfully participated in the outing of the hookup between Denise Richards and Brandi Glanville even as Denise begged them to stop.

Tangentially, Teddi changed the landscape of the The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills arguably for the worse - prior to Teddi the overemphasis on being “open and honest” was relegated mainly to Kyle Richards, who used it as a battering ram to accuse her co-stars of duplicity, but after Teddi entered the scene with her patina of accountability politics it became practically the law of the land. Anybody could be accused of not being honest if they simply stated an opinion that wasn’t shared by the larger group, and though her attempts to hold her co-stars accountable in her first season was met with derision it very quickly gained traction when being used against the perceived villains of any given season. Even when Teddi was found to be a hypocrite upon lying about her part in Puppygate she insisted that indeed her honesty about initially playing a part in the scheme was just her own accountability working its process. And, even then, she wasn’t even lying that much, ok?

And, lets not leave it unsaid, I don’t like Teddi certainly because I’m also jealous of her. Her, and her cute little body, and her cute little black romper, and her long, dangling solar system earrings, and her awesome hair, and her gorgeous face. And her money. Oh, her money.

This was even before we discovered just how rancid All In by Teddi really was. Those who participated in the program (and monthly paid upwards of $389 without all of the hundreds of dollars of add-ons to do it), have reported body terrorism to the point of hilarity. Participants have to send photos of everything that they eat as well as their morning weigh-in on the scale to their coaches, who will either encourage their process or chastise them for refusing to be accountable for not making significant headway. This is before they are “encouraged” to have 60 minutes of cardio a day while ingesting no more than 400-500 calories, and are forbidden to drink or deviate from their clean diets lest they be instantaneously dropped from the program. These coaches, by the by, are not trained or certified to be giving anybody health advice or supervise a diet that is designed to significantly impact an individuals body. These are simply people who have themselves gone through the All In by Teddi regimen and come out the other side.

Remember when The Vow was airing and a huge part of the secret inner circle of women being abused by Keith Raniere was them having to report everything that they ate to his deputies to see if they were eating too much? That’s basically what All In by Teddi is.

A wellness program that promotes from within and requires no certification with little oversight has more in common with the shake shop MLM I pass on the bus than anything else, but it was a while before people fully came alive to the realization that all of the petty reasons to hate Teddi paled in comparison to the actual damage she did to participants in her program. And, in typical Teddi fashion, she only halfway owned it (own it, baby). She stated obliquely that she never said the program was easy, and that if people didn’t know what they were signing up for it was on them. This seems to be the convenient part about being the arbiter of other peoples accountability: if people don’t like what you’re saying you can simply claim they aren’t holding themselves accountable for their own reaction to what you’re saying, because if you’re speaking from a place of truth and honesty that’s the most important thing. Because people don’t ever speak from a place of distortion, or have a reactionary outburst, or simply don’t have all the facts. Or, are just wrong.

This past November Teddi solidified her fixed position as universally hated housewife when she announced that she and her husband, Edwin, were filing for divorce. Both of them had conducted affairs, but Teddi’s dug its fingers into the exposed nerve of the Bravo fanbase when it was revealed her affair partner was in fact her children’s married horse trainer. Teddi and her trainer were on a vacation together while his wife gave birth to their second child.

There is nothing so perfectly poised to enrage the people who watch Bravo like a beautiful woman fucking a man in a relationship. From the moment we had Teddi it seemed destined this would happen.

She was somehow born for this: the beautiful woman ugly from within, the crusader for truth who lies, the woman who shows up and makes fun of the Glam and the Outfits on the Glam and Outfits show. Of course people fucking hated her.

But they didn’t want her to die.

I think there are some healthy people that watch Bravo. I don’t think there’s a lot of them, but I’m sure they exist. Every sub-sect of what we laughingly now call our cultural landscape has a few unsavory characters that send death threats at the drop of a hat, so that is not a trait that’s distinct only to Bravo fans. What differentiates the Bravo fanbase from others is that most of us are cis women who are too emotionally invested in the lives of these fake people living their fake little lives to really allow them the grace that other celebrities get. Because these celebrities are reality stars we take for granted that what we’re seeing is real life, even in this day and age when the girls on Teen Mom wear continuity wigs, when Denise Richards looks straight at the camera and yells “Bravo, Bravo, fucking Bravo!”.

The audience feels betrayed when we don’t see what we want to see when we want to see it. Last season on Summer House there were at least three fights that happened between engaged couple Lindsay Hubbard and Carl Radke that were not captured on camera, and people were angry about it when ultimately these altercations led to them calling their wedding off. We need to see it all to know how we feel about it, to have a side to take, a thoughtful comment to make in a thread.

We used to like it when Teddi suffered. How are we supposed to know how to feel about Teddi now that her suffering is happening in another room? This is something I’ve been dreading, in all honesty. From the moment I first got a glimpse of the deliciously potent darkness that weeps through the Bravo network - the lives it ruins, the habits it encourages, the nastiness it engenders- I began to wonder what would happen to us when these people began to die. Part of me thinks it isn’t that big of a deal - I’m far more worried about how I’ll feel when my parents die, or my sister, or my wife. These are people that I know.

But don’t I also know Teddi Mellencamp, even just a little bit? I know Teddi as well as I know an old friend I haven’t seen in a long time, as well as I know some of my cousins. Well enough that I know what parts of her I dislike, what parts of her I grudgingly enjoy, that she had a friend who died falling from a horse, that she would get angry when people told her to lose weight, that it bothers her when people only look at her in relation to her father. I don’t know Teddi. But I might know her a little bit.

These are things about Teddi that everyone knows. None of it stops them from beginning comments about her brain surgery “I don’t like her, but -”, or “she’s annoying, but -”, as though we need to clarify that just because we feel sorry for a woman with six tumors doesn’t mean that we support her lying about Dorit’s dog. The past of all the people we’ve watched and hated on TV will precede them in the days when they all start to die, and we know this for a fact. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills will certainly be in the first few sentences of Teddi’s obituary, followed swiftly by words like “controversial”, or “polarizing”. I’m sure when it happens there will be posts about it on social media that mention the dog, or Lisa Vanderpump having a champagne toast, or how Kyle Richards is doing, or whether anyone has checked on Scheana Shay. These things would be in bad taste, would probably be reported and deleted by a mod, but they would still have existed.

It’s possible we’ve gotten too close to these people, and yet not close enough. Close enough to jeer, but not close enough to have our first thought not be a nasty one at times. I don’t think everyone who watches Bravo is like this. Not always, at least.

It used to be endemic to Lifetime movies: someone sitting alone in front of their computer as messages filled with hate rolled in to patter against their self control like raindrops, but now that’s just part and parcel of what it is to be in a fandom. It’s justified as much as it is discouraged. You shouldn’t comment mean things under someone’s picture, but if that person is famous it doesn’t matter. Calling someone names in a Reddit thread isn’t nice, but if they agreed to be on reality TV then they’re really just asking for it. I’m not condemning any of it, but it’s curious that these behaviors that we used to live in fear of - look no further than the hilariously on-the-nose Cyberbully starring Emily Osmont - have now become so normalized that decrying it is seen as just a symptom of a society as sensitive as peach skin.

Nobody has to like Teddi Mellencamp just because she has cancer. But nobody has to say anything, either. Not even me. We all fall into this trap with people we don’t like who go through times of great pain. I don’t like her, but -

But I don’t know how I’d feel if my comment history was filled with John Mellencamp’s Daughter on the day that Teddi Mellencamp died.

I don’t want Teddi Mellencamp to die. She might - but I really hope she doesn’t. Not now, at least, before people have had a chance to think about what it will mean.

On Wednesday Teddi announced on Instagram that four tumors were removed from her brain, which is more than they expected to remove. The accompanying images were stark: an x-ray of her skull with orbs of glowing white like the pit of an avocado breaking through, a selfie of Teddi in a hospital bed with her hair shorn down to a dark pixie cut, a crown of golden positioner donuts lining her brow like a corona.

This is not the end for her, which is as terrifying as it is comforting, I’m sure.

Teddi’s name is Teddi Mellencamp. It would be a disservice to both her pain and to the many mistakes that she’s made to not call her by her name. Referring to her as anything else is petty, yes, but it also allows her to slip sideways out of being held accountable (she’d love that), and both are things that we shouldn’t be doing.

I will call her Teddi Mellencamp because it is her name. Because she cannot have another in her life. Because she lies and signs herself to lies. She has given us her soul; leave her her name1.

“It doesn’t come from the obvious source. Actually it’s English 101, Euripedes’ Medea. When she kills the bride, and her own child, she says:

‘There’s a hole that pierces my soul.’

And my mother’s this kind of new age psychologist, and I said ‘I had this terrible childhood,’ and she said:

‘Well, you can’t have a hole running through you all the time, Court…

Read more

People who whine about the seasons - née the weather - are really annoying. Even as a child waiting in sub-zero temperatures at my bus stop I would roll my eyes at the bums slumped against the cracked glass of the enclosure, their faces rigid and pale with the cold, far more familiar with the ache of winter than I was or ever would be. Why complain about something you can’t change? The snow doesn’t care, after all. It’s as comforting as anything else - there are thing we don’t control, and the weather is one of them, so why complain about it? This attitude has made my understanding of Climate Change very difficult, as you can imagine. I do believe in it, to be clear, but the kneejerk impulse to roll my eyes at people screaming up at the clouds never really goes away.

I’m missing something these days, but I don’t know what it is so why be upset about it? I don’t know, but I think I am upset. That’s the thing about this time of the year, too, is it begs me for contradictions. The white of the sky makes me want to be everything at once, the cold makes me want to burrow into skin that isn’t mine.

February, baby. It would be my favorite month, but these moods are so insufferable.

All week it was freezing, and all week I’ve worn two pairs of pants on the walk to work. It was meager insulation, but insulation all the same. That’s a necessary thing these days, or so I understand. I need two to three layers of something to protect me from the world and all of its contradictions, its cruelties. I hate the president, I hate his master, I hate the wind, I hate my skin, I hate the walk to work, I hate my boots, I hate that the cat doesn’t play with me and only plays with my wife.

Last weekend three old friends were in town and they didn’t call me. The week before one of them had texted me, asked me if I was free, and I was free. Every time one of them posted to their Snapchat stories my phone would show me pictures of them 15-10-18 minutes from my apartment, all smiles, all glitter, having a marvelous time. They knew that I was free and they still didn’t call. I hated that.

But it’s February - I can’t escape loving things for long. This morning my wife hid Post-it’s all over our apartment for me to find, and I loved that. Loving things in times like these - with climate change, presidents, acne, etc. - is really, really hard for people like me who earnestly love to feel a hot rush of genuine affection push through my veins like sugar. I want to love things so much that they throb like big cartoon owies under my hands, that I start to think that I might die if I keep loving something that much. Love should be sitting at the right hand of pure annihilation. Like February seems to, all fat with its contradictions, its Both Sides.

There’s something somehow missing from me. It makes my friends not text me. It makes writing hard. But I want to write. That should be enough, but it isn’t.

Who cares? Substack is just Tumblr for people whose hearts have died.

Happy Valentines Day!

Subscribe now