A BIG 'RHONY' KISS-OFF
Heather Thompson spills all in 'final' show chat
AS Heather Thomson posed for a Post photographer outside BondST restaurant, a young fan came up and said: “Oh my God, are you Heather? From ‘Housewives?’ ” Thomson smiled and happily posed for a selfie with the fan. But she made it clear to The Post, she “has reached the end of the road with ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’ ”
“I went to the show because [producers say they] want to empower women, but at the end of the day they actually do the total reverse of that,” she said. “They’re showing women behaving badly, and at each other’s throats.”
In an exclusive interview, Thomson, 51, insists she can no longer be part of a “machine” that rewards women for this — or of scenes she alleges are faked.
She also claimed that she watched as castmate Ramona Singer, 64, made an alleged racist comment that led Bravo to put a “RHONY” reunion on ice last month.
A production source previously told Page Six that Singer said, “This is why we shouldn’t have black people on the show” — in reference to Eboni K. Williams after Luann de Lesseps kicked Williams out of her home. Singer denied making the comment, calling it a “terrible lie.”
However, Thomson told The Post: “I was there and I heard Ramona say that and I freaked out.
“Bravo said there was an investigation. To my knowledge, they’ve never offered or required unconscious-bias or sensitivity training to the cast or producers . . . Do they care about the effects [the show] has? It’s nonsense. They are not interested in people, they are interested in money.”
A spokesperson for Bravo had no comment for this story.
Asked whether she believed Singer has an issue with diversity, Thomson replied: “What do you think?”
Thomson started burning her bridges when she claimed in the new book “Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of The Real Housewives from the People Who Lived It” by Dave Quinn, that co-star Sonja Morgan allowed men to “put lit cigarettes in her vagina” for fun.
Morgan posted on social media “liar, liar pants on fire” while other housewives said they didn’t believe the story. Then a video surfaced with Morgan and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” star Josh Flagg talking about a night out when the act happened.
“I wasn’t telling a secret,” Thomson told The Post. “It was this thing they were into for a while. I was not dropping tea in that book. I was talking about something that was public knowledge.”
Flagg denied the story, telling the “Juicy Scoop” podcast that it was all a joke and that “Heather [Thomson] is full of s--t.”
But Thomson is standing by her story, saying she had heard that Morgan was working on what Thomson calls a “dark cabaret” show in the book — and which another show insider compared to “the girlie shows in Bangkok.”
And, Thomson said, she was shocked when she and her husband, Jonathan Schindler, ran into Morgan and Flagg at the Boom Boom Room in 2014.
“I saw them together and I saw that she had been drinking . . . and I was keeping an eye on her,” Thomson told The Post. Moments later, “I was like, ‘Wait, where is Sonja?’ ” She found Morgan and Flagg on the roof deck.
“They were about to show [another man] the trick that they do,” Thomson said of the illicit cigarette. She claimed that Morgan and Flagg told her: “Yeah, we’ll show you. We make it smoke.”
Instead, Thomson persuaded Morgan to leave with her, telling Morgan: “‘[Flagg] is not your friend.’ And I took her home. I did what I thought was right and that was [to] remove her from the situation.”
Thomson also noted that she had alerted “RHONY” producers to her worries about Morgan’s drinking, as other cast members have also said they’ve done.
“I absolutely talked to production when I had concerns that it was getting out of hand and it was dangerous,” Thomson said. “I got no response, really.”
It was one of many times, she said, that she and producers didn’t see eye to eye.
Anative New Yorker, Thomson worked for years as a fashion designer, creating clothing lines for Beyoncé, Sean Combs and Jennifer Lopez. But after her son, Jax, was born in 2004 with pneumonia and needed a liver transplant at 6 months old, Thomson let herself go a bit.
“I went to buy shapewear and I was disappointed at my choices,” said the mom of two (daughter Ella is 14). “Like any good designer, I took matters into my own hand.”
She had just launched her company, when she got a call out of the blue from a “RHONY” casting director in 2011. A former employee had recommended her, but Thomson was clueless.
“I thought that they wanted to put my brand on ‘The Apprentice’ . . . They were like, ‘No, no, no, no, It’s ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’ And I went, ‘Oh gosh. Hell, no. I’m not a housewife,’ ” Thomson recalled. “And she said, ‘That’s exactly why we’re calling.’
“I was like, ‘Ding, ding, ding! Marketing opportunity!’ I knew that the benefit of appearing on the show would be exposure for [the company],” Thomson said.
But when she told pals she was joining “RHONY” for Season 5, some were horrified. “I do have friends that were like, ‘Oh, don’t do that,’ ” Thomson recalled.
She added that producers also lured her in by claiming that they were bringing in a different caliber of women.
“They told me, ‘We really want true New Yorkers. People who are running businesses. And we want to raise the bar,’ ” Thomson said. “Who doesn’t want to get involved in raising a bar?”
But when she and fellow newbies Carole Radziwill and Aviva Drescher showed up to meet old-timers Morgan, de Lesseps and Singer, they were put in their place.
“We were the freshmen, they were the seniors,” Thomson recalled. “Sometimes the cast think they know better than [producers]. And they self-produce: ‘No, you come over here. You sit there.’ I mean, I got bossed around a bit. ‘You can’t talk about that. Don’t say that.’ Definitely, there is competition for camera time. And who’s going to have the best storyline.”
Still, she said, “I’m like, ‘I’m not going to embarrass myself on TV’ . . . But I didn’t think about the editing. I didn’t think further into: Why [does Bravo] want this show? Is it because they really want to show nurturing female relationships or do they want click bait and shock value?”
One of the most upsetting incidents for Thomson was what she calls Morgan’s “fake” engagement to Harry Dubin during Season 12. In the episode, Thomson is seen comforting de Lesseps, who was crying over a breakup with boyfriend Jacques Azoulay. Seconds later, Dubin proposes to Morgan.
“It was completely staged and totally fake,” Thompson said. “It was a ring that Ramona was wearing. And she took it off and gave it to Harry to pretend that it was his . . . it was one-upmanship.
“That was more important to the show . . . [than de Lesseps]. And I was incensed by it,” she added. “The authenticity is missing. The women were self-producing, and many storylines were forced and contrived. Fake storylines with a ring that was pulled off of somebody’s finger two seconds before. Borrowed to make this fake engagement.”
She came back as a “friend” of the show for Season 13, which ended in September.
“I went back saying, ‘No judgment. I want to have a clean slate.’ But I’m the one that’s the fool,” Thomson said. She lasted one weekend. “There was some [camaraderie] when I [first joined the cast]. And when I came back . . . there was no camaraderie. It was . . .
everybody out for themselves,” Thomson said. “I only filmed for one weekend. It was at Ramona’s house in the Hamptons. They put me in the basement. I was by myself and I was ambushed . . . They held me in the car for two hours while the other women got dressed and ready for the party.”
She claims a storyline had been cooked up “that I had talked behind the women’s back or something like that, which was just completely untrue.”
Thomson hit the headlines in June for her own issues with Williams, the show’s first black cast member, when Williams stated Thomson did “more harm than good” by wading into a conversation between Williams and de Lesseps about race.
Williams accused Thomson of “whitesplaining” and attempting to be an unwanted “translator” for her, adding that Thomson was guilty of a “micro-aggression” for patronizingly calling her “articulate.”
As the incident spilled over to social media, Thomson said, it “forced me to start asking myself the tough questions, owning up to my mistakes, privately and publicly apologizing . . . I know many people still do not have an understanding of what a micro-aggression is or how to handle the mistake of making one. Nevertheless, I had to be accountable for myself, and formulate a plan of action to take what I learned and be a part of uniting versus further dividing people.”
She adds that she also has empathy for the women of the “Housewives” franchises.
“Generally speaking, the women that join the show are not self-absorbed, catty, horrible people. They’re birds in gilded cages. They go in there with the right intention, but then you get sucked into this system of what the viewers want,” Thomson said. “These women are part of a machine that has awarded them and fed them for outrageous behavior. It’s a career. It’s their check. And they don’t have other jobs outside of it. And so you become a product of the environment of what the fan is looking for.
“Let’s be honest: Watching women behaving well and doing great things for each other doesn’t make must-see TV.”
And to that end, she blames the audience as well as the cast.
“You can’t really talk about the people without talking about the system,” Thomson said. “Everybody has culpability in this . . . the viewers, the network, the women on the show. We’re all complicit.”
These days, Thomson, a certified integrative health coach, is focused on her organicsupplements business, Beyond Fresh.
She claims that this will be her final interview about her time on “RHONY.”
“After this, I will never talk about ‘Housewives’ again, period,” Thomson said.
“That chapter is closed in my life — everybody knows what they need to know and I’m moving on. Good luck and goodbye.”