Bethenny Frankel isn’t ready to hold an apple again, despite fans hoping she’ll return to the franchise that made her famous.
The former “Real Housewives of New York” star, 49, told Fortune in a recent interview that while she is “humbled by the threads and comments” that beg for her return, she has no desire to return to Bravo.
“I honestly am stunned,” she said. “I haven’t been watching. I saw the first episode and part of another one, so I don’t know what’s going on there. There’s a lot of talk about what’s going on there, and I read comments that people say to me, ‘Please come back,’ and ‘Please save the show.’ It’s all flattering, and I wish the girls well. I’m doing other things though, and I just don’t know how that really would fit into my life as is.”
The B-Strong founder left “RHONY” in August 2019 to focus on her philanthropy and her family after a contract dispute reportedly did not go her way. She was a fulltime cast member from the show’s inception in 2008 until its fourth season (2011). She returned to the show in Season 7 (2015) and left again at the end of Season 11.
“Everyone thinks I left because of money. I wasn’t leaving because of money, I was staying because of money,” she said in February of this year. “It no longer became this platform to promote my business, because I had done that, and there was more promoting sort of new and questionable businesses than the legitimate ones at this point, if that makes any sense.”
Still, it seems there were some hard feelings for quite some time, as a source told Page Six in April 2020 that she “threw a fit” after a producer said at BravoCon that the show did not need her to succeed and blocked the producer from her phone.
As for her future, Bravo brass Andy Cohen has tried to persuade her to start her own podcast.
She said, “He gets credit, I always like to give credit — was the one who was like, ‘Oh, my God, you need to do a podcast. It’s what you’re meant to do, born to do. I’m good, but you’re better.’ I don’t agree with that, but I don’t listen to him on the radio, so I wouldn’t even know. And I don’t mean that as a negative thing; I just don’t listen to a ton of radio or podcasts. So he urged me.”
“To everyone that I really respect, I said, ‘I’m going to say a lot of crazy stuff that I feel,'” she added. “And they said it didn’t matter. This is all after I had signed on — in the beginning I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion. When I decided to do a podcast, I just decided to do a podcast. And I said, ‘Holy s–t, what are my finances, what is my 401(k), because I know that this could be the end.’ And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I’m well aware that I’m gonna say several things that are going to be very problematic for people. But I can’t do it if I’m not gonna do it. And I’m not saying that for the sake of shock value or anything. It’s just my natural opinions are going to come through.”