The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Debated Brett Kavanaugh Last Night, And It Was Great
Last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills included a surprise dinner guest. No, it wasn’t the morally corrupt Faye Resnick, nor was it Gigi and Bella Hadid, nor was it one of Lisa Vanderpump’s mini horses (likely with names like “Cherry Pie” and “Sexi Boi”) who suddenly upended what would have been a run-of-the-mill ladies group dinner at a Los Angeles eatery lit like a hospital waiting room. It was Brett Kavanaugh.
The turn in conversation occurred when cast member Lisa Rinna addressed why her husband, the actor Harry Hamlin, wasn’t present at the dinner in honor of her 90-year-old mother, Lois. “Well, it’s a pretty big day, politically,” Rinna said, referring to the wrenching Senate hearings on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation that took place in September of last year and were airing on TV at the time. (Housewives “dinners” often start in the afternoon and film for several hours, explaining why Hamlin would have to miss the event if he wanted to watch the proceedings on C-SPAN.) “The fact that this doctor came out, I think she’s changing everything with her courage,” Rinna continued—alluding to but not explicitly naming Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, or Kavanaugh. (If she did say their names at all in the scene, it was edited out.)
Camille Grammer, another cast member, once a full-time star but now a “friend of,” responded to Rinna: “I just have a different point of view on this one,” she said, speaking of Dr. Ford. Getting more heated, she elaborated: “She didn’t have enough evidence. When you’re gonna go up against the Senate in something like that, you better have your witnesses lined up.”
If hearing the tony West Coast Housewives (lest we forget the Orange County franchise) bring up world events wasn’t jarring enough, it was frankly wild to hear one of them unabashedly spouting Lindsey Graham’s talking points from the hearings. Not because, of course, the stars of the Housewives, even in relatively “liberal” cities, are particularly radical—only a few of them attended the Women’s March, which is as close to the resistance as they will probably ever get—but because, as the gutting Kavanaugh hearings waged on, it was customary to expect a pat “I believe women” from their ilk. Grammer went there. However, there being Kavanaugh’s defense. She said that the fact that she was a survivor of sexual violence herself actually made her doubt Ford more: “If you were. . .at 15, you would tell your best friend or you would tell your parents,” later saying that that’s what she herself had done.
The women were eventually yelling at each other across the table, as Rinna replied that that was “absolutely not” true for everyone (we know that, in fact, survivors statistically do not often report). As Grammer continued, she revealed that she was, bizarrely, comparing herself to Brett Kavanaugh, for being “maligned” during her divorce from Kelsey Grammer—Kyle Richards, another cast member at the table, had famously called her a “fucking liar, Camille” at yet another dinner table during the show’s first season. Grammer said that she felt bad for what Brett Kavanaugh, his wife, and his kids were going through.
Thankfully, Lisa Rinna eventually said in her confessional interview what we were all thinking: “Camille comparing herself to Brett Kavanaugh is fucking weird.” At the table, she was a little less confrontational, but nonetheless right. “He’s gonna be a judge on our court for the rest of his fucking life and that is going to be a big fucking thing,” she argued.
Things got back to normal when Kyle’s sister Kim, with whom Rinna had previously feuded over, among other things, a stuffed bunny intended for her grandchild (if you’re wondering, Huh?, best to just move along) happened to be in the same restaurant. But the roughly four minutes of TV was mesmerizing, a strange piercing of the Bravo forcefield that usually manages to keep the goings-on of the real world separate from besmirching the antics of its cast. Of course, those categories are not at all as ironclad as Kelsey Grammer’s prenup; like Dorit Kemsley, another Housewife whose dubious hair decisions on the show belie the sense of the following comment she made, said as Kyle tried to switch the subject: “I just wanted to make the point that it’s not about politics.” The debate was clearly personal for the women at the table, those who chose to believe Dr. Ford and those who chose to believe Brett Kavanaugh, and it illustrated the thorniness of the #MeToo movement beyond platitudes and hashtags. Reality TV, everybody! (When the Housewives get their first Senate hearing, I would be honored to testify.)
