“She was pregnant this entire time and was having serious issues with her unborn child, and she’s flying back and forth pretending to film with her dying father in L.A., but really just filming in the car and never saw him,” Bensimon claimed on the podcast, according to PEOPLE.
“And I’m like — you want me to film with a woman that doesn’t even care about her kid in her stomach?” she added. “She’s like, ‘Oh, if I have a miscarriage, whatever.’ She was having serious, serious, serious [pregnancy] complications, and I just didn’t understand why we were there filming and why she was even there in St. John.”
“I land in St. John, where we were filming, and I was getting a massage, and the masseuse said, ‘Did you know there’s a really big movie star here?'” Bensimon recalled of the trip to St. John. “And I was like, ‘Wow, who is it?’ And they said, ‘Her name is Bethenny Frankel.’ And I’m like… movie star?! Like, oh my god, she’s telling the masseuse that she’s a movie star?”
Bensimon also claimed that Frankel she was trying to “executive produce” the Bravo hit reality series.
“She would literally scream into the camera, ‘This is not what what this scenes supposed to be about!’ and I was like, ‘What is going on here?’ You can’t do that. It’s not fair. She’s trying to be the executive producer or the Kim Kardashian of Housewives, fine. But, she created such a disconnect between Bravo and us, so there was so much animosity and underlying tension,” she said.
During the trip, Frankel was pregnant with her daughter Bryn Hoppy, who is now 9. At the same time, her estranged father, Robert Frankel, was sick and then died in November 2010.
Meanwhile a close friend of the Skinnygirl mogul came to her defense and slammed Bensimon's claims. “It’s a shame that Kelly is making these claims especially since she often reaches out to Bethenny for help and advice or to get together.”
“She absolutely did nothing to risk anything during her pregnancy,” the friend told PEOPLE. “Her pregnancy was her priority. Anybody who knows Bethenny knows she’s a great mother.”
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