The biggest scandal in Housewives history? Erika Jayne’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills costars can’t avoid talking about her tumultuous divorce from Tom Girardi and the spouses’ subsequent legal drama.
Roughly one month into the production of season 11 of RHOBH, Erika filed for divorce from her husband of more than 20 years in November 2020. The following month, the Pretty Mess author and the former attorney were accused of stealing settlement funds intended for the families of victims killed in a 2018 plane crash.
“It was shocking. It was absolutely shocking. I mean, you don’t wish this on your worst enemy. So to have Erika going through all that and the fact … that she showed up, I don’t know if I would have showed up, honestly,” Garcelle Beauvais told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen in June. “The fact that she showed up, I think, was really tremendous on her part.”
As season 11 airs on Bravo, fans are watching Beauvais, Kyle Richards, Lisa Rinna, Dorit Kemsley, Crystal Kung Minkoff and Sutton Stracke learn about the divorce and lawsuits in real time. The scandal was also explored in Hulu’s The Housewife and the Hustler, which featured Tom’s alleged victims, legal experts and former Housewives stars Danielle Staub and Dana Wilkey.
While the ABC News Originals special has made waves on social media, Cohen isn’t so sure about the doc, noting on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live on June 16 that he doesn’t think The Housewife and the Hustler “will affect [Erika’s] future on the show.”
The Bravo producer added, “I will say the idea that Danielle Staub and Dana Wilkey are the experts in this documentary about Erika is questionable at best. So I kind of realized I wasn’t gonna learn anything new from them about Erika. …The Tom Girardi stories continue to be deeply disturbing, and we have to see how this plays out.”
Erika, meanwhile, told Beauvais in the trailer for the season that she didn’t know about the fraud lawsuit — or the other allegations against Tom.
“I did not see it ending this way,” the performer told her castmates in another clip. “I was gonna hold that man’s hand until he died.”
Scroll through for everything the cast has said about Erika’s drama:
