The lies, the lies, the lies!
It turns out Erika Jayne wasn’t telling the whole truth when she told her Real Housewives of Beverly Hills c0stars she had no idea about the now-infamous L.A. Times article exposing her estranged husband Tom Girardi’s alleged crimes.
During one episode of RHOBH, Erika told her castmates, “I don’t have a heads up on an L.A. Time s article…nobody calls me to say, ‘Hey, by the way, this piece is coming out on you.’”
She added that the article was a “hit piece.”
According to Los Angeles Times staffers, Matt Hamilton and Harriet Ryan, they did speak to Erika and revealed that she was aware of the article before it was published. They also added that the RHOBH star was given the opportunity to comment on the allegations but did not.
“This whole obsession with whether Erika knew our story would be published was frustrating to observe. It became a distraction from the central allegations of the story. The root of the fixation is whether Erika left La Quinta to escape the scrutiny of the other cast members — which I found somewhat irrelevant. So what if she did? It’s really an ancillary issue, given the enormity of what was going on,” Hamilton revealed.
“We had reached out to Erika’s publicist, and later, attorney, to get [a] comment. We sought comment on the lawsuit that accused the Girardis of a sham divorce. Two days before our story was published in mid-December we sent questions to her representatives,” he continued. “We did not specify when the story would go live online, but gave a sharp deadline of the day prior.”
Ryan added, “When she called the story a “hit piece,” I thought either she doesn’t know what that term means or she didn’t read it.”
They also commented on what Bravo showed through season 11 of RHOBH.
“The widows and orphans and other alleged victims of Girardi mostly remain out of the picture, and if they’re discussed, it’s in a vague or remote way, or as rhetorical bludgeons. Their suffering and loss really gets short shrift, compared to the other topics that absorb attention” Hamilton noted.
“The show also skirted the mechanics of Erika’s escape from her marriage. When did she hire her lawyer? How does she pay her assistant? How and when did she hire a moving truck? When did she put her rent down on her new residence? The logistics are intense, especially considering she was also filming. And Bravo’s cameras caught none of this? Really?” he added.
“The timing of her divorce. At the start of the season, she presents their marriage as solid. They’re chatting over breakfast every morning! Then she files for divorce and says Girardi was unfaithful and verbally abusive to her for years and she stayed only because her substantial “RHOBH” checks were sent to the Girardi Keese office. Couldn’t she have just called Bravo HR and changed the address? Even if she did feel handcuffed financially all those years, what specifically changed in November 2020?” Ryan wondered.
As for what they learned about Tom and Erika’s life from watching this season of RHOBH, Hamilton said, “My main takeaway was the portrait of the somewhat bleak inner life of the Girardi marriage’s last years: the power imbalance, his multiple affairs, the financial control that Tom allegedly wielded, the attempts by Erika to get Tom help, the ring of people that surrounded Tom and limited Erika’s access.”
RHOBH will return to Bravo for season 12 in 2022.
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Source: L.A. Times
