Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images
The Real Housewives of New York returns to Bravo tonight for its 15th season — or second, depending whom you ask. Last year, the series was completely overhauled, ditching its entire veteran cast for a rebrand and a new crop of women. And while we’re grateful to have Jessel Taank on our screens describing Tribeca as “up and coming” and being horrified that Jenna Lyons’s real name is Judith, we still want cameras on the franchise’s OG and legacy Housewives, some of whom we’ve followed for over a decade. We caught up with some members of that “fabulous circle” of women to hear all about what we’d be seeing if they were still on the show and how they’ve since adjusted to life without cameras.
Dorinda Medley
The start of fall means one thing: Dorinda Medley is decorating Blue Stone Manor. “I put up an inflatable 26-foot pumpkin every year. It actually blew away last year and I got a call from the fire department. They were like, ‘A 26-foot pumpkin has flown off your property and is on the roof of your neighbor’s house,’” she said over the phone earlier this month. The property has become a character of sorts in the Bravoverse, so much so that she’s developing a new spinoff for Peacock set there. Between that and her upcoming turn on The Traitors, she’s proof that there are more places than ever for Bravolebrities to land after leaving their motherships. “It’s a hard transition at first, because it does become your world. But it never really goes away; you’re part of a family.” And she’s found that the show goes on with or without cameras, especially when with her former castmates. “I went to Cabaret on Broadway with Luann — it was literally cabaret meets Cabaret. I was like, ‘Please don’t jump onstage.’ She goes, ‘Darling, I would never do that … although I’d be fantastic at it.’”
Kelly Killoren Bensimon
The face of Scary Island has probably had the starkest career pivot since leaving RHONY in 2011: entering the world of luxury real estate. “A lot of people thought I decided to randomly get into it because there are shows associated with it, but the truth is my mother fell ill and I had to get my license to sell our family home,” Bensimon tells me, which ultimately led to her closing a monumental $42 million deal downtown. Since then, she’s dipped her toe back into the world of reality with a season of Ultimate Girls Trip, but that formula may no longer suit her. “Housewives is basically Love Island without the sex. It’s, ‘Let’s have a chat,’ all day long. It’s 21 episodes of having chats in restaurants, in bars, in homes. They’re only having a chat.”
Interestingly, even though the lasting perception of Scary Island could have left her disgruntled, Bensimon doesn’t feel any need to correct misconceptions and even dismisses the notion of a poor edit. “The greatest thing that ever happened to me on reality TV was being called crazy. Because I spent every single day since then educating myself, providing for my children, and showing up. I was like, game on. Call me crazy all day long, but I’m just crazy successful.”
Tinsley Mortimer
Tinsley Mortimer traded in her apple for a peach, moving to Augusta, Georgia, in 2022 and marrying Robert Bovard, the president of Augusta Iron & Steel Works, in November 2023 — making her a stepmom to three young kids. Maybe a good set of lashes really can fix anything?
Sonja Morgan
Forget the reboot — the biggest end of an era for RHONY was the sale of Sonja Morgan’s townhouse. It was sold at auction for $4.45 million, nearly half of what it was purchased for in 1998, and Morgan says finally unloading the property is a weight off her shoulders. “I never was attached to the townhouse as a symbol of affluence,” she tells me. “I’ve always looked at it as a home. We mostly lived in Connecticut on our private island, but the townhouse was our little pied-à-terre,” she explains. “Then it became a place to give my daughter stability, where we could be surrounded at dinner with interns, designers, drag queens, stylists, PR people.” Now she’s traversing the country with her Sonja in Your City tour, naturally featuring some caburlesque (“a word that I coined”). As for her spinoff Welcome to Crappie Lake? “We were supposed to film last September, but then there was the writers strike. As time went on, we lost our opportunity,” she explains. “But I’ve been getting calls from people who enjoyed me as the comedian of the group … basically the boozy floozy.”
Jill Zarin
My call with Jill Zarin began with a detailed aside about how calmly she handled a customer-service issue at the airport, demonstrating how much she’s grown. “That would’ve been a great scene on Housewives 20 years ago, because I would’ve had a meltdown,” she laughs. But now, thanks in part to anxiety meds, she says she’s like a different person. “As you get older, your life gets better,” but that life would still make for good TV (and still might one day). She says her boyfriend, Gary Brody, would be “TV platinum,” and her daughter Ally just got engaged. “So if you were watching me on the show, you’d see the party planning, the fighting — her fiancé wants a kosher wedding because his father’s kosher. So for one person, am I gonna make a whole kosher wedding?” She’s shuttering the Jill & Ally brand launched during the pandemic to instead focus on Jill Zarin Home and a new candle she’s been working on for two years (recently lauded by Bethenny Frankel on TikTok). Plus, her Pomeranian Bossi just scored his own line at TJ Maxx.
Zarin says she was approached when the network was developing its since-discarded Legacy spinoff but was offered a “pittance” compared to the other women, so she pushed for a favored-nations deal where all the Housewives would be paid equally, à la the Friends cast. That negotiation played out in “Page Six,” where it was implied that some women were asking for Friends money. “Bravo put out a story that I was asking for a million dollars an episode,” which she denies. “They wanted to make me look bad, which wasn’t nice.” When Luann de Lesseps tried to convince her to sign on, Zarin says she suggested the network instead do the series as an Ultimate Girls Trip — which is exactly what happened, but without her. “They wanted to punish me, so they didn’t invite me. But really the punishment was for the fans.” Between that and her accusation that Bravo filmed outside her late husband Bobby’s funeral without her permission, she’s closed the door on the network. “I will never do a television show that I don’t have control over again.”
Heather Thomson
Though she sold her shapewear company Yummie, Heather Thomson is “entrepreneuring” more than ever. In addition to a podcast, her businesses include the newly launched Hapbee (a wearable tech device that emits frequencies re-creating your body’s magnetic signals in different states to naturally encourage sleep or alertness), her high-altitude adventure retreats (“I took 19 women to the Roof of Africa; we climbed Kilimanjaro”), and the supplement company Beyond Fresh. The latter came about after she studied nutrition while combating her young son’s health issues on the show. Now that son is off to college with his sister not far behind, leaving Thomson on the brink of being an empty nester. As for her time on RHONY, she considers herself lucky that she was there when she was. “It’s like a garden: Even though there’s beautiful flowers, if you don’t weed it, the weeds will overpower the flowers. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’ve got too many weeds.” But perhaps the biggest change since we last saw her is that her house in the Berkshires now has air-conditioning. “The minute I hit menopause, the air-conditioning went in. I’ll give credit where credit is due.”
Bethenny Frankel
We all know what Bethenny Frankel is up to. Thanks to TikTok, we somehow see her more now than we ever did when she was on our television screens — typically reviewing beauty products, making lunches, or complaining that a Hamptons deli didn’t recognize her despite her promoting its chicken salad online. Her relationship with the show that made her famous is perhaps the most fraught, having launched a “reality reckoning” and recruiting other scorned stars against the network — a campaign that seems to have been largely abandoned last year.
Ramona Singer
The sole cast member to remain with the show full-time through its entire original run, Ramona Singer says her life has only improved since cameras went down. “Filming’s a lot of pressure; you don’t realize it until you stop,” she says. “I’ve never looked better. People say I dropped ten years. I look younger than ever.” Her daughter Avery, whom we met as a 12-year-old critiquing her mom’s fashions, has since founded the party-planning company BachBoss and remains her mother’s “best friend and sister.” Singer also just celebrated her second anniversary with her boyfriend, financier Bill Luby, whom she might not have met if it weren’t for the end of RHONY. “It was a blessing that they decided to get rid of us because one door closes, another one opens. I was able to be receptive to him and other people,” she says. “People laugh about my 50 friends, but I now have more than that.”
Luann de Lesseps
It feels as though the Countess’s life has only gotten bigger since leaving our screens, touring her cabaret show all over the world, staying at Tilda Swinton’s castle, and playing for a massive festival audience at Mighty Hoopla. “I was like a pop star over there, their reaction was overwhelming,” she says over email, à la Beyoncé, since she’s currently busy filming the new Bravo dating show Love Hotel. “I’m actually writing a new song for Love Hotel. I’m inspired by the men on this trip.”
Carole Radziwill
Turns out Carole Radziwill’s infamous 2015 proclamation that she only has five good summers left wasn’t fact. “It was great,” she says of this past summer, which included seeing Taylor Swift. Radziwill’s life has had eras too — journalist, princess, author, and Real Housewife. She looks back at that latter chapter more positively as time has gone on, saying, “It really made me focus on my life in a way that I hadn’t really previously. There were these odd opportunities that I wouldn’t necessarily have done had it not been for the show” — like being the queen of the mermaid parade or running a marathon. “I like to think about those things instead of dwelling on the dark relationship stuff,” she tells me. “There were a few good lessons that I think I needed to learn about the dynamics of female friendships.”
Being on a reality show, you also get accustomed to recognizing what would make for good TV. “We’ll be having dinner and I’ll say, ‘I could have filmed this and made a seven-minute segment, you all sound crazy,’” she laughs. But without the cameras, she says, “My life now is a more authentic reflection of who I am, and that feels nice.” That includes her work with the Moth, like her story “The Cartier Curse” about Jackie Kennedy’s potentially cursed watch, which was originally part of a new memoir she’s working on. “At the end of the day, I’m really a storyteller. Whether it’s writing, spoken word, or even stories I told through the show, I really enjoy that.”
Ironically, the Housewives she bumps into now are from the new cast rather than hers. “I sat next to Erin [Lichy] at a dinner, and she said, ‘Hi, it’s really nice to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Do you watch the show?’ I felt like such an idiot,” she laughs. Having joined the series during a quasi-reboot herself (the season-five mass exodus), she has a unique perspective on this changing of the guard. “My first season they had fired half the cast, and I remember hearing the ratings are terrible, ‘we want the old cast back,’ everyone was nostalgic for seasons three and four,” she says. “You gotta give the new cast a chance because it’s really hard to have that instant chemistry. It takes a few seasons.”
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