Candiace Dillard Bassett insists she will refuse to return to The Real Housewives of Potomac if Monique Samuels is asked back for the show’s upcoming sixth season.
“I hope not,” Bassett said about Samuel’s possible return during a recent appearance on Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast.
“If it were up to me, the answer is, you know, good riddance go home,” she explained. “But I can’t speak for the network. I don’t want to be quoted as speaking for the network.”
“So I don’t know,” she continued. “I just know what I think is healthy for the group as a whole. And this season was, among other things, incredibly toxic. And it brings forth so much toxicities within the group, within the audience who is, you know, watching the show and ingesting everything and it didn’t need to go there.”
“For my mental health, I cannot be around someone who is doing a music video to promote the song bragging about fighting me,” Bassett explained. “And there’s nothing that I need or want to say to her. This is a job. This is still a job at the end of the day. I’m not working with her and that’s not an ultimatum. That’s nothing but my truth. I am not comfortable in that space.”
“I joined a show in a Housewives franchise,” she said, according to Cheat Sheet. “That’s not what we do on these shows. We push the envelope, as I said, but I don’t want to be a part of a show that needs to have two or three security guards, whose job is anything more than to, you know, generally protect us from the outside world.”
“Like when we travel, they always send security with us,” she shared. “Because again, we’re a spectacle. But for us to be having lunch in Potomac and we’ll have to worry about, if I say something that she doesn’t like, which I will. Is she going to jump up and try to fight me? I’m not doing, I’m not doing it.”
Candiace insists she will not return to RHOP if Monique returns to the series. “I will not film with her. I will not work with her,” Bassett insisted.
Dillard-Bassett explains why she doesn’t see Samuels returning to the series as full-time or a friend. “I don’t see how that works,” she told the podcast host Yontef. “I don’t see how that works as a friend or as a full-time Housewife because ‘friends of’ generally are around when the group is around.”
“But if the group is not comfortable, then you’re not a full-time Housewife,” she added. “I have a personal story. What, like, where do you fit? I don’t know, but I mean, again, that’s not my business either. I’m not an executive, I’m not a producer. I’d like to think that I am, I’m not, and it’s only my job to advocate for myself and express my comfort levels and what I’m okay with and what I’m not okay with.”
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