Selling Sunset’s continuing fallout

It’s been exactly one week since the reunion of Selling Sunset aired on Netflix – but the conversation and fallout hasn’t stopped, and bombshells continue to drop. I can’t recall the last time we had this much of an explosive reunion in the world of reality TV, except for the season of Scandoval on Vanderpump Rules when Ariana Madix told Raquel Leviss to use a cheese grater for something unrelated to anything culinary. 

Let’s go back to last week, when Bustle released an interview with cast OG Chrishell Stause. The interview that they conducted took place just two days shy of the reunion airing. But at that point, she had already made up her mind that she’d be leaving the show after the most tumultuous season yet. 

“I’ve vacillated back and forth with this decision in the past. I have to be honest — having come from nothing, it’s really hard to turn something like this down,” she said candidly.

Despite persuasive producers and tons of calls from show creator Adam DiVello, the mastermind behind The Hills and its spinoff, The City, Chrishell stood firm in her decision.

“I’ve gotten to a place where I don’t need the show financially,” she said. “I’m lucky to have other forms of employment, because it’s no longer good for my mental health.”

That could explain some of the language and behaviour we saw from Chrishell in the days immediately following the reunion broadcast. She mentioned it all – sharing screenshots of the insanely ignorant social media posts that Blake, her ex-best friend’s boyfriend, had been sharing, much to the dismay of Emma Hernan. She became increasingly vocal on social media, calling out her castmate Mary and letting the audience in on some pretty glaring omissions that were strategically cut out by production – and her ex and one half of the Oppenheim brothers, Jason, who managed to snag an executive producer credit. And boy did he use that title to wield whatever power he could.

His producer credit was something she touched on in a comment left under a clip from an interview that Chelsea did with reality TV producer Carlos King on his podcast Reality With the King last November. That conversation is making even more waves than it did when it was released in light of Chelsea’s experience this season. In the clip, Chelsea is asked about the difficulty she faces being the only dark-skinned Black woman on the show.

“I often don’t feel heard or seen,” she said. “Often when I am heard I’m misheard and I feel like a lot of my mannerisms and natural dialect, my natural personality and persona is always misconstrued. My intentions are always so pure, I’m very much a lover. I have no malice for anyone in this world.”

And over the course of the last season, we saw exactly what she was talking about. We literally watched this play out when Mary refused to believe that she was being genuine in sending her flowers after her home was broken into. Despite Chelsea promising that it was in fact a genuine gesture, and having that be backed up by other castmates, Mary refused to accept her kindness.

“Never in my life up until coming on reality TV have I ever heard that I’m angry or aggressive. It makes me so sad,” she said through tears. “If I say something, I’m aggressive or mean or I came for this person. If someone else says the exact same thing, ‘she’s just giving her opinion’…I would’ve been annihilated. I don’t move like that because I don’t have the space. I don’t have the ability to move like that. I try to watch my tone.” 

After watching the year-old clip that Carlos wisely capitalized on by reposting, Chrishell left the following comment under the post, and followed that up by unfollowing every single one of her Selling Sunset co-stars except Chelsea. 

Before their interview, Chelsea revealed to Carlos that she typically rejected podcast appearance requests, but agreed to go on his podcast because she knew that he ‘sees’ her and would ‘come from a place of love’. In response, Carlos said that the reason he has his own podcast is to hold space for Black women in reality TV, who are often overlooked or disrespected, despite carrying so much of the genre on their backs. This conversation highlighted the reality of the issues that can come from production throwing a ‘diverse’ cast member onto a show without any real representation or consideration for racial undertones. 

In the past, I have pointed out the lack of cast support for women like Katie Ginella, the sole Asian cast member of Real Housewives of Orange County, who was visibly ganged up on by the entire cast this past season. Perhaps her fate, which included not filming the second half of the season, would have been different if she had a Chrishell. 

Production edited the season in a way that made it appear as if Chrishell was just bitter to be losing a best friend to some guy, or maybe being a secret hater of some sort. For a few episodes I was actually convinced that she wasn’t being a supportive friend simply because her beautiful bestie was dating a rich douche that she wasn’t a fan of. 

But she caught onto the fact that she was getting the villain edit and took control of the narrative quickly and swiftly and revealed the true depth of her issues with Blake. It was so much more than just not liking the guy. Essentially, the fate of her friendship with Emma was dependent on whether she would abide by her requests to not expose the truth about Blake’s bigotry – which directly impacted not only her as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, but her partner, musician G Flip, who uses they/them pronouns, which Blake has spoken out against. 

Chrishell was brave in calling out everyone from long-time colleagues, to long-time friends to production and even her bosses for their complacency in advancing racist and homophobic narratives. That is allyship that we don’t typically see in reality TV spaces. So now the question is why production wouldn’t want to expose the true nature of Blake’s bigotry and instead make Chrishell look like the bad guy.

Meanwhile, Mary, Emma and Bre are all doing their own versions of press. Mary, for instance, appeared on Page Six’s Virtual Reali-Tea, and backpedaled on the unnecessary rage she had toward Chelsea this season, which included suggesting she was in danger in the presence of Chelsea. And her backpedaling is likely due to the fact that a majority of the audience agreed that she was being a Karen. She blamed it on production, saying that’s who she was mad at. It’s an interesting claim, considering Jason has proven himself to be such an integral part of that team. 

And Bre, who committed a slew of microaggressions over the course of the season to Chelsea despite having a Black son and getting cosmetic procedures done to look racially ambiguous, is out and about doing podcasts, doubling down on her conduct this season. And then there’s Emma, who lost a gem of a friend in Chrishell for her Taco-Bell-eating-private-jet-flying-bigot-of-a-boyfriend. No shade to Taco Bell. 

And then there’s Amanza, who is interesting because yes, she is Black, but as Chelsea pointed out to her previously, she’s not a dark-skinned Black woman. And despite Amanza trying to reassure Chelsea at the time that she could empathize with some of the experiences she was having navigating an all-white space, as we’ve seen, it’s simply not true. 

I’m seeing a lot of comments on social media that suggest that racism is not, in fact, the cause of a lot of the issues that aired this season. Or that we should ‘normalize’ people having disputes because they don’t like each other, and not necessarily due to race. And when I see comments like this, the only thought I have is ‘What a privilege it must be to not see how deeply engrained racial bias is in our world and in our relationships with the people around us’. But for the people who know it and for the people who live it everyday – and even for people like Chrishell who have the eyes and the empathy to see it and, moreover, the bravery to call it out - it really is right there in front of you.