‘RHONY’ Recap: Season 15, Episode 15: Brynn Said, Ubah Said

Oh, sister. Of all the times that Housewives has put me in a terrible position, this one feels like the most terrible position of all. Who’s lying? Who remembers what? Did we really see what we saw? Can we believe the women’s words when the footage is minimal? And of all the things that we’re here to discuss, of all the fights that have to be fought on this stupid little show, do we have to discuss sexual assault?

I definitely argue that these shows are not built to tackle serious subjects. Yes, Erin did a great job earlier in the season opening up about her miscarriage (and almost making me not hate her), and we’ve dealt with things like Taylor Armstrong’s abuse and her husband’s eventual suicide, a few housewives, was arrested for fraud and that time Shannon Beador got an enema stuck in her ass. All were very difficult subjects, but we persevered. But now we’re here dealing with whether or not Ubah knew Brynn was sexually assaulted, and by extension, everything Brynn is going through with people questioning whether that assault is true.

Before we get into that, let’s establish some ground rules. I am convinced, like everyone on the cast, that Brynn was sexually assaulted. I don’t think I should bring that up, although due to the story of whether Brynn can be believed, it certainly will. Brynn has been through enough already; let us not engage in that kind of speculation. I always believe in women. I believe in women so much I believe Selena Gomez when she says she can act and I’ve seen every murder in that building and Emilia Perez twice. So yes, we want to believe Brynn.

But as all the women say, I also don’t believe that Ubah knew that Brynn was raped. Maybe Brynn brought it up on the phone and Ubah “didn’t clock it,” or maybe Brynn made up that whole story in the heat of the moment to get her point across. I don’t know. We’ll never know. However, the show and the ladies give a very good indication that this is a pattern for Brynn. She takes things that happen off-camera and spins them the way she needs to so she can benefit from it. The examples the show gives us were when she said Erin said Sai thought her cheese was weird when she said Pavit wasn’t wearing his wedding ring when she said Erin said Jenna was poor , and when she said Erin told her she was in Boring Becky’s Boring Baby Bump Prankapolooza.

It all makes complete sense. All the women know that Brynn has a tenuous relationship with the truth, and honestly, I think that’s a good quality to have in a friend. I have a close friend who I know has been doing some shit for years. It doesn’t make me think differently about them; it just makes me confirm everything they say. However, this is something else; this is something bigger that could really speak to Ubah’s character.

The whole story goes down in the craziest way possible, at least for Housewives fans. We have several fights breaking out around the house. Then we get the big fight between Ubah and Brynn, where Ubah refuses to apologize for saying that Brynn slept with someone to get her job. Then Brynn tearfully tells the rest of the cast that Ubah kept saying it after she knew Brynn had been raped. But the narrative is not linear; the ladies decide to go to bed and the cameras go down. That’s when Ubah freaks out at this news and starts yelling. We don’t get to see it all, just one crazy attached camera at the end of the hallway. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but this is the exact same camera that was on the front porch still filming the night of the Bolo party on The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Get that camera an extra pension and let it retire. Its service is done.

Ubah is so upset that she and Jessel leave the house to stay in a hotel. The rest of the women gather in Jenna’s room to hear Brynn talk about her sexual assault. At the end of that conversation, according to Erin, she says, “Now that I think about it, maybe she didn’t clock it.” That’s when all the women say it changed for them, that they re-evaluated Brynn and everything she’s said over the course of the two seasons. I understand that. It makes perfect sense. And it’s even weirder for them all in the morning when Brynn acts like nothing happened.

The rest of the episode is about the filming of the opening titles of the show, which I love because it brings the reality of being a reality show back to center stage. These are no longer a group of friends, they are now colleagues who have to suck it up and bob for apples with a known liar. (Also, the way the editors spliced ​​in footage of each woman doing their little intro with the title cards that we usually end the season with was great.) All we get is that they’re wary of Brynn and are afraid. of her and tries to hold her accountable.

She should be held accountable. Sure, I have a friend who is a liar, but it’s another thing to have a liar on reality TV spinning false stories in public about everyone on screen. It’s hard for producers to make a story for someone, especially Brynn, when fans can never be entirely sure if the details are accurate. It’s also hard for viewers to believe anything Brynn says. When so much of the fun of these shows is deciding who’s right and who’s wrong, how do you make those cases when one of our key witnesses is forever discredited?

The craziest thing to me about this whole ordeal is that it was a tactical error on Brynn’s part and now draws far more heat to her than Ubah gets. Brynn did something so bad that everything bad Ubah did is completely erased. If she had just waited and let it get to Ubah, she would be in the clear.

That’s what bugs me. It shouldn’t matter if Ubah knew about Brynn’s sexual assault before she said what she did and defended it the entire time. What Ubah said was absolutely horrible, no matter what. Ubah thinks it’s bad that Brynn lied about knowing about her rape on camera, but how bad is it to constantly insinuate that Brynn is a prostitute on camera, giving rise to a false narrative, which the fandom has already seized?

All of the women tell Ubah that she needs to stop calling Brynn “a whore,” which is not something your friends should tell you about another of your friends. (For the record, everyone is allowed to call me a whore, because it’s totally true.) When Ubah tries to apologize, Brynn asks her what she’s upset about. When Brynn asks if she’s sorry for saying she “sucked dick for a job”, Ubah denies doing it because she didn’t say it. As Jenna points out, this is a semantic argument. Yeah, she didn’t say “suck dick”, she said “sleep with”, but how is that different? If the words are not correct, the spirit is. Ubah need a verbatim quote back to her to apologize? Brynn isn’t wrong when she calls her a delicate six foot toddler.

Ubah also says she didn’t insinuate it because she said “maybe” Brynn slept with someone to get a job. Sorry, but putting “maybe” in a quote like that doesn’t absolve her of guilt. She basically says she believes it, and if that quote alone wasn’t enough, everything she said after reinforced it. Brynn says Ubah said she had a dick in her mouth, but Ubah says Brynn said it first. Yes, because it was Brynn repeat the gist of what Ubah said, something we know Ubah said because we saw it on camera. To erase the “maybe” in Ubah’s accusation, when Brynn joked that she only flies private, Ubah says, “With someone else’s husband,” again insinuating that she’s either an adulterer or a prostitute, neither of which ​​the parts are particularly nice. If she has to say it, she “maybe” doesn’t think Brynn slept with anyone to get a job; she certainly thinks she did.

What I’m saying is that Ubah acted despicable, but when Brynn went and blatantly lied about her for sympathy, it erased all of Ubah’s bad behavior. They are both terrible. Yes, one was worse than the other, but that doesn’t mean she should absolve Ubah of everything she’s done all season. As the other women pointed out in the episode, when they try to talk to Ubah about something, she won’t let anyone speak, but when they have their own problems, Ubah is always the first to talk and dominate the conversation.

Where do we go from here? Well, it’s going to be one hell of a reunion, and from the preview at the end of the episode, it looks like Brynn is going to get a lot more heat than Mrs. Ubah herself. We’ll have to wait and see. But what about their continued employment? It’s now clear that we can’t trust anything Brynn says, which is sad because this show needs a pot stirrer more than kids need polio vaccines. It is also clear that Ubah cannot be argued with and will never back down. If it were up to me, I’d fire them both. The show can’t continue with one or both of them because it just leaves any interaction between one of them and the other women completely at a standstill. I don’t want a season of Brynn saying things about the ladies and them saying, “You’re a liar,” and I don’t want (another) season of Ubah yelling over every discussion until it stalls .

What does this mean for the show? Well, we finally had a good season Housewivesbut it all happened on the trip. We got anger, we got petty feuds, we got silly rivalries, we got Jenna’s pubic marks, we got a nice synchronized swimming number. It was funny, it was real, it was raw. It’s what we’ve come to expect from it Housewivesand I’m now more confident than ever that at least some of this group have what it takes to be great. And when the moon sails over the beaches of Puerto Rico, its light traveling in arcs across the waves of the ocean, it feels a little like hope rising into our hearts, carrying us into the future, skipping us to a time when bad behavior will stop to be unforgiving and will be just what we all look forward to: drama.