Hi friends!

This is not going to be a normal newsletter, but a long analysis of the recent Summer House scandal and season 10 reunion episodes (parts 1 and 2). If that doesn’t interest you, no problem! I’ll be back soon with my regular programming.

First, I really want to encourage everyone to check out Kara Berry’s recaps on her podcast Everyone’s Business (But Mine). As one of the few Black women podcasting in the Bravo/reality space, she brings a really important perspective to the table on this scandal, which obviously has a racial component to it, as well as a gender one. Kara also happens to live in New York City and has some local intel on the cast. She’s also just so insightful and funny and good at what she does, and does not get nearly enough credit for it. Lady is putting out a podcast almost every single day! The amount of work that takes, especially for a solo recap podcaster, is impressive. Go listen to what she has to say before you listen to me!

This scandal has captivated me because it feels like a real thing that happened in a surreal environment, and there are so many different angles through which to look at it. I’ve had a lot of thoughts on it, but have struggled with how to organize them in a newsletter. I think I will just try to group them by person. So, here we go:

Ciara

Amanda and West’s actions affected everyone in the cast, but I think we can say quite easily that Ciara was treated the worst. There’s this new narrative emerging that “it’s not that deep,” that she and West only dated for a few months, that she and Amanda were never really friends. That her feelings are invalid, basically. As the kids say, that’s garbaggio, Mama! (They say that, right?)

I don’t follow most of the people who I watch on reality TV on social media, so I can really only go by what I’ve seen on screen, and what I’ve seen is Ciara being an incredible friend to Amanda. Even people who have only watched this past season have seen over and over again as Ciara comforted Amanda, built her up, told her how great she is, how she deserves better. Hell, Ciara put more energy into fixing Amanda’s relationship with Kyle last summer than Amanda did! We also know that after filming wrapped, Ciara was still checking in on Amanda, trying to drag her out of her apartment, continuing to invest in the friendship.

We also saw Amanda sitting right there while Ciara shared with everyone, very painfully, about how things are different for her as the show’s first Black cast member, how the audience doesn’t give her the same grace as her castmates, how much shit she got for dating West and “letting a white boy play in your face.” And speaking of West, Amanda had a front row view of how poorly he treated Ciara, how he acted obsessed with her in the house, how she restated over and over again that she did not want sex without commitment, how he took her home to meet his parents and acted all in, and then how he dropped her and acted like she was crazy for thinking it was more than a casual thing. Amanda saw his little press tour and his pathetic reunion performance. She saw Ciara put up walls with this man to avoid being hurt by him again, she saw him very much pushing on those walls, and then when they rekindled their friendship and suddenly people were talking about them getting back together, Amanda acted sooo worried about West repeating his behavior.

So THAT’S why we are all so appalled by Amanda getting with West. I don’t think it’s a blanket “never date your friend’s ex” thing, it’s this particularly painful ex of her particularly supportive friend, and how they went about it with zero transparency, with Amanda lying about it to Ciara while gleefully breadcrumbing their relationship on Instagram. Which, by the way, I think was a move to mark her territory and force West’s hand, but that’s another discussion.

There’s also an aspect of this where it just seems so unbelievable that Amanda would go all in on this man while knowing full well his pattern of fuckboy behavior with women. That cast knows even more about this dude’s fuckery than we do, and what we know ain’t good. I suspect there’s some white exceptionalism going on there, mixed in with the pick me of it all. I also find it shocking that Amanda would make such a reputation-killing move right at a moment when the audience could not have been more on her side. After leaving Kyle, the world was truly her oyster. I’m not saying she was going to be in Chicago like Ariana Madix (that would require leaving her bed), but this was going to be a very lucrative year for her in terms of brand deals and opportunities. That’s done now. This scandal has even put her role on Summer House into jeopardy, and if that goes, what does she have left? If she was smart, she would not have blown all that for some dick. Not in this economy!!

But then, we’ve learned a lot more about Amanda’s lack of motivation when it comes to finances, how she hadn’t given Kyle any money for rent for the last three years, how she seemed utterly unbothered by the fact that her husband was in debt, his business on the brink of bankruptcy. I think she just assumes a man is always going to pay her rent, whether her daddy or her boyfriend, so why bother working?

But back to Ciara. This has all made me think about what dating must be like for exceptionally beautiful women, and I think, counterintuitively, it’s actually harder for them. Ciara said this season, heartbreakingly, “I feel like everyone just wants to experience me.” Like, yeah, there’s more male attention, but there’s also the fear of guys just wanting you for your looks or your body. (Also, who says more male attention is a good thing?) Ciara deserves to be truly seen. Ciara is not only stunningly beautiful, she’s funny and quirky, creative, unafraid to look silly, she’s an amazing friend, a caring family member, and she was a fucking ICU nurse in Brooklyn during Covid. I mean, c’mon. Unlike Amanda, she is also meeting this moment of audience support and increased opportunity by working her ass off. She truly deserves the world, and damn, do I hope she gets it.

Amanda

When watching the reunion, it was pretty shocking to me that Amanda started by stating, “I’m prepared to apologize,” and then she not only didn’t apologize to Ciara or Kyle, she rolled her eyes and scoffed and acted defensive the whole time. It was like she was saying she was willing to apologize, but only if she absolutely HAD to. Girl, you should WANT to!! If I was in her position, it would’ve been the first thing I did! It wouldn’t matter how many times I’d already apologized, either (because we all know how Bravo people like to complain, “I’ve apologized 100 times already”). I would’ve done it over and over again, and I would’ve done it with no expectation of being forgiven.

Lest you think I’m talking out of my ass, I have been in a similar situation to Amanda before. Well, kind of. One time, when I was in high school, I got drunk at a party and made out with a guy who one of my best friends had a huge crush on. I know this is not the same situation because they never dated, and he never broke her heart, (and we were all teenagers), but I knew she was really into him, and it was a fucked up thing to do! It has been 20 years, and honestly, I STILL feel terrible about it! You better believe that first thing Monday morning in school, I was marching my ass over to profusely apologize to her in person. I didn’t expect her to forgive me, I just wanted to tell her that I was sorry for hurting her, and destroying our friendship. We eventually ended up back on friendly terms, but were never that close again, of course. It is truly one of my biggest regrets.

So it’s just kind of wild to me that Amanda is spending far more energy trying to minimize the hurt she’s caused than apologizing for it! Saying things like, “Oh, so this is just the worst thing anyone’s ever done in the history of the world?” Like… I don’t know lady, does it really need to be that bad for you to apologize for it? Also, “you can’t help who you have feelings for!” is a very immature position. We all know that adults can certainly help how they act on those feelings, if nothing else. I know that West was likely telling her all the things she wanted to hear during a very vulnerable and emotional time for her, and she is being manipulated, but she has doubled and tripled down on her choices so many times that it’s really hard to feel sorry for her.

And please believe me when I say that she is aiming for sympathy with those weaponized white woman tears. We’re going to hear a lot about how Ciara was soo mean to her, and she’s really struggling with her mental health, you guys. To be clear: I empathize with mental health struggles, and I do not want Amanda to be suicidal. I’m sure she’s getting a lot of abuse from unhinged Bravo fans right now, and people need to chill out. But the position she’s in is also the result of her own actions, it’s not Ciara’s fault for calling her on it. Also, Ciara has her own mental health struggles! She’s on the same SSRI as Amanda, for fuck’s sake. Somehow we’re not tiptoeing around Ciara’s feelings, though.

And of course, when West inevitably drops her, Amanda’s going to act like it was somehow way worse than when he did it to Ciara. Because her playbook has been to constantly minimize Ciara’s feelings and rewrite history. It’s very telling to me that it seems like her primary feeling towards Ciara is annoyance. Ciara is an inconvenience to her, her boyfriend’s crazy ex, not a close friend whose trust she betrayed.

It’s also very telling to me that even now, Kyle is defending Amanda more than West is, and certainly far more than Amanda ever defended him. And I’ll be clear: Kyle’s behavior toward Amanda has been shitty and even abusive at times, and he has not been a good partner to her. How he yelled at her during that conversation at Lindsay’s Freedom Dinner when everyone was coming at him was not okay, but I understood where the emotion was coming from. Amanda whined afterward, “I didn’t even say anything,” but THAT WAS THE POINT! She has not had Kyle’s back all summer. We’ve watched all season as she’s complained constantly about the state of their marriage, but every time Kyle’s tried to connect with her, she rejects him. At some point, that refusal to move forward either with or without him is just not fair.

But I think, ultimately, Amanda is very comfortable being someone people feel sorry for. She likes being constantly propped up by other people, and having an excuse not to thrive. I’m telling you, watch out for the sob story when West drops her, it’s going to be a doozy. In some ways, I look at how she was being set up to take on the world after leaving Kyle, and wonder if she simply couldn’t handle it, and so she self-sabotaged. Who knows what goes on in the mind of that coddled white woman?

West

I feel like West is not getting quite as eviscerated as Amanda because we expected more from Amanda. West had a lot of people fooled, but it’s more of a “fool me twice, shame on me” situation. And while Kyle and West were friends, we never saw Kyle comforting West while he cried, telling him how great he is. Still, I don’t want to let this disgusting man off the hook. However curious you might be about this scandal, please don’t follow him on social media, and please don’t listen to his stupid podcast with MAGA Barbie (the WNBA one, not Sydney Sweeney). He cannot be allowed to profit from this situation!!

I guess it’s not surprising to see West continuing his reunion tradition of sitting there passively with a hangdog expression on his face. He and Amanda certainly seem… sedated “calm.” I just would think that after he previously “shat the bed” at a reunion, in Andy Cohen’s words, he would at least think to hire an image consultant or do some media training or SOMETHING. But then, maybe he feels like that approach actually worked out for him before. He got to stay on the show, after all. He was able to charm everyone into forgiving him eventually, even Ciara.

As more and more information comes out confirming that West was sleeping with half of New York City, a lot of people have been asking how this man has been able to get with so many incredible, beautiful women. I’m actually not trying to insult West’s looks, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how he looks, it’s just that some of his exes are literal models (Ciara), and West is just kind of A Guy.

Something I was lucky enough to learn relatively young is that not all fuckboys lead with their looks.* Some lead with charm, or talent, or personality, or love bombing, or being nonthreatening. Sometimes, in fact, these guys use the assumption that no one wants to fuck them to their advantage. If everyone is thinking, “oh, this poor sweet guy, nobody wants to fuck him but me,” they won’t see it coming when he cheats on them.

*btw, I’m not talking about anyone I’ve dated or hooked up with, more what I observed from attending a college that was 60% women, where a lot of guys who didn’t get laid in high school suddenly got to punch above their weight.

I think that Dara was very wise when she said early on in the season, “West is the best guy on Earth - unless you’re falling in love with him.” He acts like a boyfriend to women until he doesn’t, and then he acts like they’re crazy for feeling blindsided. The way he downgraded making out with Ciara to “ear stuff” (gross)... we all saw it, dude!!

I also think that a lot of his current reunion performance comes down to placating Amanda and trying to keep up the lies he’s told her. For example, there was a moment when Ciara was talking about buying her grandparents’ house when Andy asked West if he knew how much that meant to her. Honestly, it was a softball question that should have been an easy win for West: “Yes, I knew how much that meant to her, and it was sad to not be able to celebrate that with her because we weren’t really speaking, but I understood why.” Instead, he gave a very clinical timeline-y answer about how he didn’t know she was buying the house, but then she told the group at dinner, so then he knew. It came off very odd, but my little crackpot theory is that Amanda is probably very insecure about Ciara, and so he constantly downplays their relationship to her, and acts like he never had any feelings for Ciara, and it’s sooo different with Amanda. Keeping all his lies straight in front of that group is hard, though, so he mostly stays silent. Watch through that lens and let me know what you think.

I really hope that West and Amanda are done on Summer House. I don’t see the women ever forgiving Amanda, and it seems like the guys are fed up with West’s bullshit. I wonder, though, are the guys upset with how West hurt Ciara? How he hurt Kyle? Or are they really just mad that he lied to them? Time will tell.

Kyle

I do not think that Kyle has been fully vindicated or absolved of guilt for his poor behavior this past season just because he was one of the people hurt by this scandal. He’s been a shitty partner to Amanda for years, and I hope someday he’s able to really work on himself and make some changes. Until then, I don’t think he can be a good partner to anyone.

That said… it broke my heart a little when Kyle was reading their one-sided text chain of “taking off” and “just landed” and “good morning” and “going to bed” and the whole time, she’s just ghosting him. It’s become obvious that he still really cares about Amanda, and that she stopped caring about his feelings a long time ago. She had every right to decide she didn’t want to invest in their relationship anymore, but I do think she owed him honesty. I thought it was pretty cruel on In The City, when they were on one of their first date nights in a long time to celebrate their anniversary, that that’s when she chose to tell him she was moving out.

(Sidebar on In The City: Can we talk about how much Kenny sucks? When he was giving advice to Kyle and comparing his relationship, which has only been “official” for six months, to Kyle’s marriage, in which he’s been with Amanda for 10 years? Sir, you’re still in the honeymoon phase, kindly shut the fuck up. I don’t like how he talks about his girlfriend, either. “She’s just happy all the time!” It’s giving, “she doesn’t have any needs.” Okay, sidebar over.)

Final thought on Kyle: how do you think he got Meghan King Edmonds to kiss him in the street on his tippies? It was outside a friggin’ Page Six party, that was not a spontaneous moment.

KJ

KJ was my favorite new cast member this season, initially introduced as a friend of West’s. Now, we know that when someone introduces a new cast member as a “friend” on a Bravo show, that could mean many different levels of friendship, from lifelong best friends to barely acquaintances. Still, however thin that connection was, it was really shitty of West not to text KJ after the scandal broke, when he texted all the “main” players. It was definitely more evidence of West being a social climber.

In the first part of the reunion, KJ shared a lot about his struggles with mental health over the past year, being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and even being hospitalized and entering treatment last fall. I thought it was incredibly brave of him to share that. There is still so much stigma around men seeking support for mental health issues, and Cluster B personality disorders are especially stigmatized. I love KJ and really want the best for him, he seems very sweet. He even went running with Carl last summer, bless him. People online are speculating if he might be too “fragile” for this show, which I think is kind of gross, but maybe it’s a valid concern, idk. Summer House seems like one of the easier Bravo shows to be on since they only film for two months in the summer, and mostly on weekends. It’s basically like half the time commitment of a Housewives show, and there’s (usually) a lot less drama. But of course, there’s everything else that comes with having that level of fame and being the first Black man on this cast. I cannot imagine that social anxiety mixes well with fame. I’m glad that he’s so tight with Ciara and Mia, they seem like amazing friends.

Ben

Ben was another new cast member this year, and he’s not really involved with this scandal, other than the fact that there was talk of him flirting with Amanda earlier in the season, which now seems to have been mostly coming from Amanda. I could not believe when it came out on the show that when Amanda first met Ben’s girlfriend, Sabrina, she told her, “everyone in the house thinks that Ben is in love with me.” What is wrong with this woman? A true demon.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of Ben, he just constantly seemed to be in a snit about something. Still, the fact that his born-again-Christian dad didn’t speak to him for YEARS because he caught him hooking up with a girl when he was a teenager… WOW. I have honestly never heard of a straight boy facing those kinds of consequences from parents for having sex. It’s almost kind of refreshing! (No, I’m kidding, it’s batshit crazy and horrible. Have house rules, sure, but it’s not like he murdered someone!)

Lindsay and Carl

I’m glad Lindsay and Carl are standing up for their friends, and I’m glad the two of them are friends again. People online are starting to ship them again, because people have absurdly short memories. These two do not need to be in a relationship. They can be friends and maybe hook up once in a while. I think that’s a much better track for them.

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Alright, that’s officially everything I had to say! This is now the longest newsletter I’ve sent all year. If you’ve made it this far, my hat is off to you.

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page. This post is public, so feel free to share it on social media, or forward it to a friend.

Until next time—viva Ciara!

Love,

Liz

XOXO