God knows, it wasn’t her only problem.
But as Brandi Glanville stood amid the wreckage of her life for a third time, she finally recognized at least one of her problems.
It was a friendship. Or, better put, what she had thought of for nearly a decade as a friendship.
“I realized I was involved in a very abusive, manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen,” she tells The Post.
At one time, Glanville had been one of the standout stars of Cohen’s “Real Housewives” reality franchise on Bravo, on the cusp of making $500,000 for a season with adoring viewers hooked on her trademark “truth bombs.”
Today, she’s a couple of months from not being able to pay rent, blighted by a perplexing, disfiguring illness, all but unemployable, desperate and panicking.
The path to her ruin led also to her epiphany about Cohen.
Their strange bond dissolved in an even stranger confluence: they were both accused of sexual misconduct at almost exactly the same time.
They both denied wrongdoing.
But Bravo soon announced that an investigation had found the claims against Cohen to be unsubstantiated, and that he would continue to work there.
Meanwhile, Glanville hasn’t worked since, for Bravo or anyone else.
Their different fates, Glanville says, revealed everything she needed to know to finally understand the truth about their relationship.
Sitting in a makeup chair about two years earlier, she felt a flush of joy.
Glanville, a former star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” was in a studio in Manhattan in June of 2022. She’d just got a video message from Cohen, a former senior executive at Bravo who, by then, was the executive producer of Bravo’s entire “Real Housewives” franchise and the host of the network’s late night show “Watch What Happens Live,” among other shows.
In the video, Cohen was goofing around with a mutual friend, Kate Chastain of Bravo’s “Below Deck,” at a work event in the South of France, a few time zones ahead. They were clearly hammered.
Referring to Chastain, he said, “We’re f**king tonight, and we’re going to talk about you the whole time.” He added, “If you’re around in like 90 minutes, two hours, do you want to watch us on FaceTime?”
Glanville showed her fellow “Housewives” cast member Tamra Judge, who was getting ready next to her. (They were doing promotion for spin-off “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.”)
Glanville remembers Judge — one of the first “Housewives” ever hired, back in 2008 — as saying: “Wow. He really likes you. He doesn’t send videos like that to me!”
(Judge told the Post she doesn’t remember Glanville showing her the video. “I do remember her mentioning it,” she said, “We both thought it was funny.” Judge is one of many, many “Housewives” cast members who adore Cohen. “I’ve had a close friendship with him for 17 years, and he’s been nothing but kind to me,” she said.)
“I felt special,” Glanville says. As an executive producer, he was both women’s boss (or, at least, one of their bosses — there’s a whole constellation of Bravo executives and producers-for-hire who run the sprawling franchise), but, she thought, the video showed that he was also her friend. Her real friend.
Seven months later she accused him of sexual harassment.
In February 2024 her attorneys — Bryan Freedman and Mark Geragos, Hollywood lawyers who took the case up as a central plank in their “Reality Reckoning,” a campaign that, they said, would expose all manner of malfeasance in the reality TV business at large — sent a letter to Bravo calling the video “an extraordinary abuse of power.”
They demanded that NBCUniversal fire him on the spot as, they said, it would fire “any other supervisor who engaged in this behavior.” They said Bravo and Cohen should prepare to be served with a lawsuit.
New York Magazine wrote that “it looked like the beginnings of a familiar story: the unraveling of a powerful man.”
Cohen responded by tweeting: “The video …was absolutely meant in jest, and Brandi’s response clearly communicated she was in on the joke. That said, it was totally inappropriate and I apologize.”
The same month, Leah McSweeney, who had appeared on “The Real Housewives of New York City” and a different season of “RHUGT,” also filed suit against Cohen and other producers.
In the suit, McSweeney — a recovering alcoholic — accused them of pushing her to abandon her sobriety, believing she would make better TV if she were drunk. She also claimed in the suit that she was “forced to work in a sexually hostile work environment” in which “Cohen repeatedly commented on [her] breast augmentation surgery,” among other things.
But Bravo announced that an outside investigation had found the allegations against Cohen to be unsubstantiated. (Lawyers for Bravo and Cohen have filed a motion to dismiss McSweeney’s suit and his attorney has called the allegations “categorically false.”)
And… that was it. Everyone went back to business.
Then, at almost exactly the same time, Glanville’s “RHUGT” co-star, Caroline Manzo also sued, claiming that Glanville had sexually harassed her. She claimed that while filming a boozy party scene, Glanville went way, way over the line, kissing her and aggressively touching her body when she didn’t want her to. (The defendants in that suit have filed a motion to dismiss it, and Glanville has strenuously and repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Bravo told the post it wouldn’t comment on ongoing litigation).
