“I was on a date at the beach, and our show-runner, Thomas Kelly, he sent me a text and 'Hey, can you talk in 15 minutes?' I said, 'Sure,'” she told Entertainment Tonight. “So then I went for a walk down the beach to where we couldn't hear the waves crashing, and he just said, 'Hey, how are you?' I said, 'I'm good, I'm hanging out with so-and-so at the beach.' He's like, 'OK, good. I'm glad you're in a happy place.' And once he said that, I was like, OK, all right. And he's like, 'The network decided to go another way. They're not going to be renewing your contract.'”
“I was a little bit heartbroken, to say the least,” Braunwyn admitted. “And then I said, 'Is my girlfriend who's been auditioning, is she on?' He said, 'Yes.' And so it was like a double hit.”
While Braunwyn wouldn't confirm whether the girlfriend she mentioned is Noella Bergener, multiple outlets have reported that Bergener is joining the cast.
“I was really looking forward to filming with her,” Braunwyn says of her friend, again not confirming if it's Noella or someone else. “I've never done the show with a friend. I've never really done the show with anyone that even liked me a little bit. So I was really looking forward [to that] after how hard last year was. And so, I made it off the beach. I went and grabbed my stuff, got my towel and stuff, and then I got to my car and I just broke down crying. Just sobbing.”
Braunwyn says she spent the next 24 hours in bed “self-sabotaging" and thinking her “life is over." She says she was somewhat blindsided by the news.
Meanwhile, during a separate interview Windham-Burke shares more details about her RHOC exit.
The mother-of-seven said in a new interview that she was “looking forward” to celebrating Pride Month as a gay “Housewife” when she received the call that she had been fired from the Bravo reality show after only two seasons.
“I was at the beach with a friend, and the showrunner said, ‘Hey, are you free?’ … He called and just said, ‘Hey, you know, Bravo is not renewing your contract. They decided to go a different direction,'” she revealed on the “Reality Life with Kate Casey” podcast on Friday.
“I just sat down on the ground and cried,” Windham-Burke added. “I didn’t want to break down in public. But I kind of just sat down behind my car and I just cried.”
The former Bravolebrity, who came out as gay in December but remains married to Sean Burke, said she was most disappointed by the decision because she had hoped to share more of her story on the upcoming 16th season of “RHOC.”
“I was really excited. It’s Pride Month. It’s June. I was really excited that we were finally going to have a gay ‘Housewife,’” she explained. “And I was really looking forward to that, you know, and filming that and filming with the person that I was with that day.”
In an Instagram Live chat, Windham-Burke denied that her firing was due to her sexuality and said that the producers “[tried] to be as nice as they can” when they delivered the news.
Photo Credit: Courtesy via Braunwyn Windham-Burke/Instagram; Courtesy via Noella Bergener/Instagram
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