Baby-bumped: Real Housewife of Toronto says she was fired over timing of C-section
“I’m nine months pregnant, and I’m going to be picketing in my Louboutin heels,” Ariane Bellamar tells me. “I will not be bullied.”
Hell hath no fury like a Housewife scorned, and this one is livid. Dismissed from her post on Toronto’s most anticipated reality series The Real Housewives of Toronto — by lawyers via email near the tick of midnight on Friday — the 38-year-old actress-model is also shining light on a show whose details have been kept secret until now.
The reason for Bellamar’s termination from the 2017 Canadian spin-off of a franchise with monster tent poles in New York, Atlanta and California’s Orange County? It is, she says, because the date of her scheduled delivery by caesarean section changed.
Ariane Bellamar says a date change for her caesarean section interfered with production plans, so she’s been sent packing. She’s thinking of suing
Originally placed in the Google Calendar for Aug. 9 — which the producers knew when she was hired this spring — doctors moved Bellamar’s surgery to Aug. 1, telling Bellamar the baby had dropped into position and it would be too dangerous to wait.
What that meant, she says, is that the birth of her child with Texas businessman husband Tanner Slaught would conflict with a ladies’ trip to Muskoka that the show’s production team was preparing to shoot. Bellamar immediately informed producers about the change. The following night, she was axed.
“Is this a joke?” she asked Grant Fraggalosch, the executive producer of the Lark Productions show, in an email. Her pleas were forwarded to lawyers.
Lark Productions has not responded to queries from the Star.
“I’m supposed to be decorating my nursery right now,” Bellamar says. In front of cameras! Instead, she’s making calls to her own lawyers and considering a lawsuit. (Worth nothing: firing or demoting a woman because she is pregnant is contrary to the Ontario Human Rights Code.)
Bellamar was raised in Hamilton, and has a daughter, Emma.
She has reality TV experience (she starred on the reality series Beverly Hills Nannies), a knack for drama (a quarrel with her millionaire CEO ex-boyfriend Patrick Henry landed her in the Daily Mail in 2014) and was born to screech “I’m done!” like every Real Housewife in every city does at some point. (Bellamar’s resumé also includes porn — movies like The Curse of Medusa.)
“I was supposed to be the firestarter on the show,” she says. “I’m very candid.” Most importantly (and the reason, I think, so many bona fide socialites in Toronto turned down offers to do the show), “I’m willing to say things because I don’t have the connections here,” Bellamar says.
“My whole arc” — no surprise that reality shows have “arcs” — involved “coming back home” and attending the premiere of the movie Suicide Squad, starring Jared Leto. Bellamar has a small part in the film, which was shot in Toronto.
On the show, her entrée into the city’s society sphere was to be facilitated by her cosmetic surgeon, the celebrated Dr. Stephen Mulholland, whose wife, Ann Kaplan Mulholland, is a part of the cast too.
Bellamar says producers were so keen on her pregnancy, they’d already had conversations about her post-baby plot lines. “They were talking about filming me getting wasted . . . for the first time after the baby. I told them, ‘I’m going to be breast-feeding!’ ”
Asked if there might be a reason for her termination, other than her delivery date, Bellamar shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s one of the other Housewives. Maybe they’re jealous.” (For this line alone, I feel like Bellamar should be immediately rehired.)
Bellamar says she gave up multiple TV projects to secure the role and now feels stuck in Canada. “I moved to a pretty house. I bought a Maserati. I adjusted my whole life.”
She continues. “To make matters worse, my husband is in the process of moving his businesses to Toronto but can’t legally do so until his visa clears. . . . I lost my income, my husband cannot work in Canada yet, and we cannot change this situation until the baby is able to travel.” “When I was with RHOT we had hospital and grand visiting experiences planned, but like the show, those are also gone.”
The icing on the cake, she says, is that producers wanted to document her family’s move to Toronto, “which included painting, moving boxes, moving in furniture . . . completing my nursery because the storyline wanted my husband’s character to be developed into the ‘stay at home dad’ who was going to decorate, furnish, and prepare the nursery. It is disheartening to walk around my incomplete house, which is still in the condition that Lark wanted it to be for filming.”
Even more galling to her is the timing of the dismissal. “I was,” she wrote in a letter to the producers’ lawyers, “admitted into the hospital due to a dangerous spike in my blood-pressure, which of course, can lead to pre-eclampsia, endangering my unborn daughter’s life. This has all been well-documented by the specialist professionals who attended the situation.”
Fortunately, all is well now, she says. And, she’s focused on another mission. “I want my job back,” she reiterates. “Let’s take the tweets to the streets.”