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).
After a summary investigation, Glanville was immediately pulled off the Bravo airwaves.
Glanville grew up in “the ghetto of South Sacremento” in California and signed with Elite Models at 16. She wrote in her 2013 book “Drinking and Tweeting” that she retired in 2001 to become a “trophy wife to a little-known but relatively successful, made-for-TV-movie actor,” Eddie Cibrian.
The couple had a six-bedroom home in a salubrious suburb of Los Angeles, and two sons. But in 2009 their marriage collapsed in a tabloid scandal when Us Weekly published a video of Cibrian kissing country star Leann Rimes.
According to “Drinking and Tweeting” the divorce cost Glanville over $250,000 and left her with no savings, no credit, no skills and a not-terribly-generous alimony agreement, that was, in any case, due to expire a few years later.
“I was desperate to maintain some semblance of my former lifestyle — not for me, but for my children,” she wrote.
In 2010, she found a way to do it: the producers of the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” gave her a call.
Today, 14 years later, Glanville is a small-business owner.
It turned out that she is overflowing with some of the qualities that make good reality TV.
She’s extremely impulsive, for one thing — prone to make the kind of decisions that others might consider catastrophically ill-judged; it’s almost as if she’s missing the chip that registers awkwardness; she can be almost scarily, almost naively honest.
She’s learned how to make assets of these, how to deploy and market them, and she has turned that into a modest living.
“I call alcohol my reality juice.”
Glanville
Glanville says that her real commercial value in the reality marketplace is this: she’s a utility player. She’s not the kind of “Housewife” who’s there to lend an air of wealth and glamour to the show — cast members like her and McSweeney (i.e. the ones who “need the paychecks”) do the grunt work, she says. They’re the ones who producers can count on (and sometimes direct) to drive the action.
In some ways, this line of work comes at a cost. She’s nobody’s idea of shy. But she is sensitive; insecure, even. Alcohol helps. “I call it my reality juice,” she says, “It gives me courage to act like a fool on TV.”
That’s complicated, though, because Glanville has had an uneasy relationship with drinking at times. In her book she said she scared herself with how much she drank during her divorce — especially when she found she had to drink to have sex with new partners.
“That makes me sound like an alcoholic,” she wrote, “Maybe I was, but it wasn’t the booze I was addicted to; it was the need to escape my problems.” (She says she’s “fine” now.)
That hang-up about sex may be a surprise. “The public perception of me is being wasted with no bra on,” says Glanville. “My nipples had their own Twitter account.”
With “Housewives,” came Cohen.
But it wasn’t until two years after Glanville joined “RHOBH” that they became friends.
Before that she’d exchange businesslike emails with him on his NBCUniversal email address.
Having a texting relationship with Cohen is a major status symbol among the “Housewives” — it conferred intimacy, and perhaps influence.
“A lot of the ladies would say, ‘I texted Andy blah blah blah.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, Andy just emails me — I’m not cool enough to get a text.’”
On May 2 2013, he sent her an email with the subject: “What’s your cell?” (She sent it, adding, “Am I in trouble again?”)
So when he began texting, she says, “I wanted to keep that relationship alive.”
“It was [from my side], ‘I need a job’ or ‘What do you think about this season?,” she said, adding that he often asked about her love life.
She says that was essentially the course of their relationship for the next decade: he’d allegedly ask about her romances, she’d bother him about work. “It was never like, ‘Hi, how are you?’”
Can a friendship be as meaningful as a fling?
Can a friendship gone bad be as painful as some breakups?
Can a friend have real power over a friend?
Glanville’s story raises these questions. Because if the answer to some or all of them is, fairly obviously, “yes,” it raises yet another: Since we’ve interrogated the sex/power dynamic so rigorously over the past few years, isn’t it also worth considering the friendship/power dynamic a little?
If friendship can be just as powerful as sex, can’t it also be abused? And when it’s mixed with money and power, can’t it – just like sex – be devastating?
There is, perhaps, nobody who should understand the power of friendship better than Andy Cohen. In 2011, the New York Times wrote that “for years, an unusually star-studded social life has been for Mr. Cohen a perk of his work in television… Since he has become a popular talk show host on Bravo his social life has been a perk for his work.” Cohen cajoled his A-list friends into going on “WWHL” — the kind of stars who would usually only go on much grander shows. It was “low-budget bliss for Bravo.”
And thus did Cohen’s friendships and Bravo’s bottom line become entwined.
Meanwhile, he’s long seen the entertainment in friendships. He wrote in his first book, “Most Talkative” that his female friends in adolescence “were training wheels.” “‘Lil’ Housewives – lots of entertainment and… turmoil packed into training bras and junior high botherations,” he wrote. “I… stirred up plenty of sh*t between them, constantly putting my foot in it, telling one something that the other said about her, getting involved where I shouldn’t.”
Glanville rarely saw Cohen in person. The few times she did, it was backstage before she appeared on “WWHL.”
“He would always ask me about who am I f–king,” she said. “It was very odd, but that was what we talked about. And of course, kissing the ring, I talked about it.”
Glanville says she made $14,000 in her first season on “RHOBH.” By her fifth, she was making $350,000 and she expected $500,000 for her sixth.
“I was going to buy a house,” she says, “I was just excited to do something like that without Eddie. And then I got fired.”
Fans of the show might say that Glanville was cut in 2015 because viewers had fallen out of love. She’d become the star of the show, but, according to a consensus, it went to her head and set her on a bell-curve trajectory — quickly reaching a “Housewives” Hall-of-Fame peak in the company of Luann de Lesseps, Lisa Rinna et al, but just as quickly returning to the “Friend of the Housewives” shadowlands. Glanville would say that she was fired because she “went on Twitter and told [Cohen] to f**k off” and then
“wrote all the heads of Bravo that they were ruining my life… and, again, they could f**k off.”
She went on a tour of the reality bush leagues. “I just did every reality show that asked me,” she said. But “Real Housewives” was always the prize she had her eyes on.
Cohen would pop up in her texts now and then with the offer of a guest spot or more on “RHOBH,” she says. She’d do it, then feel exploited because she’d get paid $5,000 for an appearance, then they’d seem to string the footage across several episodes, wringing the value from the pittance they’d paid her and even crafting major season storylines from her fleeting shoots. She says it made her feel “discounted.” (In more ways than one).
“I couldn’t say no because I needed the money,” she says. “After I got fired from ‘Housewives,’ I got sued by Joanna Krupa.”
When Glanville joined “RHOBH,” she was sold to viewers as having “no filter.” It became her thing. In 2013, Glanville was on “WWHL,” and doing that thing. She said that a lover of “Real Housewives of Miami” star Joanna Krupa had told her that Krupa’s genitals smelled bad. If Cohen thought she’d crossed a line or unfairly injured Krupa, or that she should take a breath and apologize, you couldn’t tell from his obvious glee. It was great TV.
Krupa sued Glanville for defamation in 2015.
Glanville’s life was ruined for a second time. But it didn’t have to be that way.
A source familiar with that case says, “Her comments… [were] made on Andy’s show [and] were part and parcel of her role as a Bravo star. As such, [it would have been fair to expect] Bravo… to indemnify her.” (In other words, guaranteed she wouldn’t personally have to cough up money, even though, it seems, it wasn’t legally obliged to do so).
But the network never actually had to decline to indemnify Glanville — in the end, it was she who protected the network.
“I went to Bravo, and I said, ‘Hey, listen… [my lawyer and I are] wondering if Bravo would help with this lawsuit, you know, financially, and they were like, ‘No, stay away from that if you want to continue to work for Bravo.’”
“I spent $500,000 on that,” Glanville says. “So I’m starting again from zero dollars. And I [had] been able to work myself back up to have a couple hundred thousand dollars in the bank,” she says. “Not right now,” Glanville adds, “because I haven’t worked in a year and a half.”
On January 29, 2023, Glanville’s life was collapsing for the third time.
In 2022, Bravo hired Glanville for the new show, “Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip.”
It was a much shorter version of the show – a “vacation” filmed over a few days, and aired in a handful of episodes on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock. Glanville would get a check for $200,000.
“It felt like [Cohen] was throwing me a bone because he’d promised to bring me back to the ‘Housewives’,” she said.
The season, filmed in rural Massachusetts, went great. She was on a high, she says, “Getting that money gave me a little relief for the next couple of years,” she says. Plus, “I felt kind of important to him again.”
But Glanville was determined to use the foothold to find her way back onto the main show.
So when she got feedback, she listened — carefully. And she got it from the top of the top. On the night the first episode aired, she and the other cast members got an email from Susan Rovner, then chair of entertainment at NBCUniversal, and Frances Berwick, then the president of its various lifestyle networks. “A huge congrats… on a fantastic season… which really ups the ante in every way!,” it said. It was the first time she’d got a note like that. “I was like, ‘Oh, wow – we really must have impressed someone.’”
And then she was cast for another season of “Girls Trip,” this one to be filmed in Morocco.
She figured, naturally enough, it was something to do with how pleased they’d been with the first season. “So I wanted to do [on the second] what we did on the first one: get drunk and high and make out.”
“I wanted to leave them with, ‘She did so good’,” she says.
This time, Glanville says there was something of a conflicting message. “We hadn’t had HR on any of the Bravo shows [before her second season of ‘RHUGT’]. And on this one, we had HR,” she says, “So they’re sitting there telling us we can’t talk about anyone’s age, we can’t call anyone fat. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry — how are we going to make ‘Housewives’?’”
When the cameras rolled, it seems that nobody else had a good way to resolve that dilemma either.
“Producers are saying ‘Bring the party,’ to me, specifically — because they knew that I would do something,” she said. Glanville claims that producers told her of Caroline Manzo, a longtime member of the cast of “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” who was doing her first “RHUGT,” “‘Make sure she participates. We want her to have fun.’ I got her doing shots – she doesn’t drink.”
“I wanted to do on the second what we did on the first: get drunk and high and make out.”
Brandi Glanville
A few months earlier, Berwick had sent out new guidelines to companies like Shed, the production outfit that makes “Girls Trip” for Bravo, saying, “we will require that you deliver an expanded alcohol-related training to the cast, crew and production team, which must include details on how production will monitor alcohol, including when consumption limits may be appropriate and when and how to intervene to maintain cast and crew safety.”
One evening after two or three days of unusually intense filming, Glanville and other cast members were, according to court papers, good and drunk. Many had been smoking weed for much of the day. (It’s not clear where the weed came from).
“[The producers were] like ‘bring the party,’’” says Glanville, “That’s the reason I gave her a lap dance.”
What Glanville describes as a drunken lap dance read differently in very sober court papers Manzo filed a year later.
A “clearly intoxicated” “GLANVILLE [kissed] MANZO with a closed mouth,” read her
lawsuit, “GLANVILLE then proceeded to mount MANZO on the couch holding MANZO down with her body, forcibly squeezed MANZO’s cheeks together and thrust her tongue in MANZO’s mouth, while humping her.”
According to the suit, Manzo, “distraught, scared and confused” went to the bathroom. But “GLANVILLE entered the bathroom and came behind MANZO, forced her vagina against MANZO’s buttocks, breasts against MANZO’s back, wrapped her long arms around MANZO forcibly restraining her.”
The suit claims Glanville “pinned” Manzo against the locked bathroom door. “MANZO [cried], “HELP, HELP, HELP, HELP” but no one ever came,” the suit claims.
(Glanville adamantly denies any rough behavior and maintains that Manzo appeared to be comfortable with her advances).
The next day Manzo told Shed staff that she had been uncomfortable with the way Glanville acted the previous night.
Manzo filed the suit against Bravo, Shed, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros., which owns Shed. But, notably, not against Glanville — it addressed her almost like a prop rather than a human. It alleged those companies “ply the Real Housewives cast with alcohol, cause them to become severely intoxicated, and then direct, encourage and/or allow them to sexually harass other cast members because that is good for ratings.”
It claimed that Bravo and Shed had “overwhelming prior notice of Ms. GLANVILLE’s prior deviant sexual proclivities and sexually harassing conduct” but hired her anyway and “allowed, condoned and even encouraged Ms. GLANVILLE’s sexually aggressive and offensive conduct.”
(The defendants have filed a motion to dismiss the suit).
In an affidavit, Shed staffer Lisa Shannon, who produced the Morocco show, said that after the incident, Manzo had told producers that she had been sexually abused as a child and that the Glanville incident had triggered memories of the assault.
“She told us that she did not feel sexually violated, she felt ‘disrespected’ by Glanville,” Shannon said under oath.
Shannon testified that “the following day, Manzo… wanted to speak with the other cast members, in part, so she could explain why her external reaction during the events did not match how she was feeling.
“[Manzo] told us that she did not feel sexually violated, she felt ‘disrespected’ by Glanville”
“RHUGT” executive producer Lisa Shannon about cast member Caroline Manzo
“Manzo explained that her prior sexual trauma dramatically affected her conduct during, and feelings about, the incident,” she said. Meanwhile, the other cast members “explained that although they were sympathetic to Manzo’s prior trauma, they had perceived the events very differently than Manzo had just characterized.”
One cast member, Gretchen Rossi, who was with Manzo in the bathroom where Manzo said in her suit that she was “distraught, scared and confused”, said that her memory from the bathroom was that “we were all having fun.” Another cast member, Alex McCord, said she remembered “giggling” in the bathroom. Shannon claimed that Manzo said during that conversation: “I can’t explain my non-reaction” [at the time to Glanville’s actions.]
Just before 6pm on January 29, a few days after she got home from Morocco, Cohen texted Glanville. The Manzo story was leaking to the press, and the version of events that was forming in the minds of the public was ugly for Glanville. She was anxious to get a more positive spin going in the press.
“Hang in there,” he wrote, “and don’t lose your mind.”
“OK, thank you,” she wrote back.
“Say nothing now,” he wrote, “There’s no gain in it. This thing is airing so long from now.”
She told him Dave Quinn, a People writer who also wrote Bravo-approved book “Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of The Real Housewives” and has appeared onstage at Bravo massive fan event, BravoCon, was writing a story, as Glanville put it, “from Caroline’s perspective.”
Cohen asked if she’d spoken with top NBCUniversal public relations executive, Jennifer Geisser. “Yes,” wrote Glanville, “She said to send him a… text saying I’m really sorry I’m too stressed out and I can’t talk about this because of legal.”
“EVERYONE tells me I’m stupid for thinking this, but I do love you.”
Brandi Glanville to Andy Cohen
“Good,” Cohen wrote.
“Just stay off social media and clear your head for right now,” Cohen texted her, “Take a breath and let the plates settle for a bit.” He added, “OK I’m a little stoned and that betrayed it.”
“There are so many fake things out there,” she wrote. He replied: “And they will evaporate. It’s not going to work to play it out in the press.”
“OK thank you so much,” wrote Glanville, “I feel so much better.”
On January 30, a story appeared with Quinn’s byline. The headline read: “Brandi Glanville and Caroline Manzo Exited ‘Ultimate Girls Trip’ Early After ‘Unwanted’ Kisses.”
“Well, I’m canceled,” she wrote on February 2.
“You’re not canceled,” wrote Cohen.
She said that Geisser had just let her know she wasn’t going to be invited to film the reunion show for “The Traitors,” another Bravo show she’d worked on. She worried that the exclusion would make her “look guilty.”
She collapsed into their decade-long friendship. “I can’t sleep I can’t eat I’m overwhelmed with anxiety I don’t understand why I wouldn’t be able to do the the reunion. it’s gonna look so bad for me.”
She added, “I know you’re pushing for me and I appreciate that so much.”
“Sorry to text you,” she said, “But you’re the only person I trust.”
“A. You should speak to the psych we offered you,” he replied, “B. Hold tight because I will get further into the reunion thing tomorrow.”
“I do believe that you and I are ‘actual friends’ & we give 2 f**ks about each other a bit. EVERYONE tells me I’m stupid for thinking this but I do love you I also know your priority is the show and I get it however I’m on level zero mental stability today,” she told him.
“She has been a puppy for Andy Cohen.”
Mia Hasche on Brandi Glanville
She didn’t do the reunion. “Girls Trip” was the last time she worked.
Glanville says now that she felt as if she were “the fall guy for their HR crisis.”
“Andy would call me and say, ‘Trust me, [Manzo’s] not going to serve Bravo a lawsuit,” Glanville says, “I’m like, ‘Yes she will.’ He was like, ‘Trust me. I just saw her. We were talking. She’s not going to do anything.’ That’s his mindset – he thinks he’s so powerful that he has the control that Caroline’s not going to file a lawsuit.”
Here he was again — putting his foot in it, “telling one something the other had said about her, getting involved where [he] shouldn’t.” Except now it wasn’t junior high botherations at stake, but livelihoods – perhaps even criminal charges.
Glanville’s moment of joy in the make-up chair was fleeting. “I was like, ‘How do I respond [to Cohen’s video]?’ And [Mia] said, ‘Say, “You’re disgusting.’ And I said, ‘What — and never work again?’ You have to play along.”
She says she responded to the video by saying that she’d “get my vibrator” and that she had a “magic p–sy” — presumably a reference to the space-transcending powers that’d be required to take part.
(This is why Cohen believes, as he said in the statement, “Brandi’s response clearly communicated she was in on the joke.”)
The third person in the room was Glanville’s best friend and longtime hair stylist, Mia Hasche.
“She thought it was cute,” Hasche tells The Post. But, she says that, “coming from a place of owning businesses and stuff and going through trainings,” Hasche felt the video was way, way over the line for a boss.
Hasche has also been with Glanville when she’s spent time with Cohen in person. “It’s always him wanting to know who she’s having sex with,” Hasche says, “Just inappropriate things to ask an employee.”
“She has been a puppy for Andy Cohen, in the sense that she wants him to like her so that she gets her next job – he holds the key to her livelihood,” she says, “She’s a single parent.”
“I’m like a trinket to Bravo.”
Brandi Glanville
She calls it an “unfair power dynamic.”
So — we arrive at the video once more.
“What people need to understand is that it wasn’t a friend sending me the video,” Glanville says now. “If a friend sent me that video, who wasn’t my boss, and didn’t have power over me, I probably would have reacted like, ‘No big deal’.”
She felt, in the end, it was all about power.
He felt free to send the video because, she believes, “[He thinks] I’m never going to get a lawyer and be like, ‘You f**ked me over.’ But I did,” she says.
“Enough is enough,” she said, “The last year and a half has shown me that Andy doesn’t care about me. I’m not special.”
But it went way beyond Cohen.
“Nobody [from Bravo or Shed] coming and stepping in and having my back,” Glanville says.
In the past, Glanville has described the producers and crew of “Real Housewives” as being like family.
“That was my wake up call,” she says, “I’m like a trinket for them.”
“He wants me to beg, and I have in the past. I’ve groveled to that man and its disgusting.”
Brandi Glanville on Andy Cohen
According to Leah McSweeney’s suit, this wasn’t a chance – Glanville, and the other cast members, were supposed to have felt as if Cohen and the producers cared about her.
“Producers individually exchange personal texts and phone calls with [cast members], stay as guests in [their] homes, and take personal vacations with [them],” reads McSweeney’s suit, “[until] they have developed a ‘friendship.’”
“The goal: to weaponize vulnerabilities, insecurities, dark secrets, and confidences,” it says.
Glanville became unwell. Her face began to swell alarmingly, which her doctor has diagnosed as “stress-induced angeodema”. (Angioedema is a swelling of the deepest layers of the skin). Another doctor believes it may be caused by a parasite. She’s still struggling with it, and says it makes it difficult to leave the house because – perhaps because of a form of agoraphobia – it flares up if she makes plans to go out in public, further limiting her employment opportunities.
“I had to get help, on all levels,” she says.
“[I started] talking to a therapist and telling them about the relationship – the non-relationship – that I had with this man, over a decade, was really, really abusive,” she says.
With help from her therapist, she concluded that “I should completely separate myself from him and all others around.” (It should be noted that it was pretty clear by this point that Bravo had no plans to work with her either, making this decision, perhaps, easier for Glanville).
“And through that I realized I was involved in a very abusive, manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen,” she says.
“He wants me to beg, and I have in the past – ‘I really need a job. You said last year you were going to hire me back.’ I’ve groveled to that f**ing man and its disgusting,” she says.
“Leah [McSweeney] and I have talked about this a ton,” she says, “We almost love him, but then he would treat us horribly, and then we would still want validation from him.”
Glanville today is in the throes of a severe financial crisis. “I joke with my kids that we have four months left until we’re homeless,” she begins, though here – for the first time in our three long interviews, she breaks into tears, clearly panicked – “but that’s sort of true, and it scares me, and it stresses me the f**k out. I’m not ever going to be homeless, because I have friends. But I haven’t had income for two years. I just paid my taxes with my credit card. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
To offer some kind of context for the differing consequences of the sexual harassment allegations against she and him, Cohen’s West Village apartment was recently figured to be worth $14million.
“We almost love him, but then he would treat us horribly, and then we would still want validation from him.”
Brandi Glanville on the Housewives’ relationship with Andy Cohen
Why did Cohen survive so entirely unscathed?
There are many differences in the allegations made against Cohen and Glanville that might affect how they were handled. For example, in Cohen’s case, there was no alleged physical contact, but in Glanville’s case, there was; Cohen is in a position of enormous responsibility as an executive producer; nobody asked Cohen to send the video, but Glanville was being overseen, and arguably guided, by a producer; there are many other variables.
Still, their different fates are so stark that the cases warrant some comparison. (Anyway, other on-air talent for Bravo – which is, at least technically, what Cohen is – have been fired for transgressions that involved no physical contact. “Vanderpump Rules” star Stassi Schroeder, plus lesser cast members Kristen Doute, Max Boyens and Brett Caprioni, for example, were all fired for racist tweets and other non-violent behavior in 2020.)
“As we’ve said,” a Bravo spokesperson told The Post, “an outside investigation was conducted into allegations against Andy Cohen, and the claims were found to be unsubstantiated.” (Bravo declined to provide any further information about the investigation, and representative for Cohen didn’t respond to our request to interview him for this story).
Sources familiar with the investigation say that, in essence, it found that the tone of the video was consistent with the tone of Cohen and Glanville’s text exchanges in general – the video was about sex, but they talked about sex.
But this, puzzlingly, appears to ignore what Mia Hasche called their “unfair power dynamic” entirely. So what of Glanville’s claim that she and Cohen only talked about sex in the first place because that’s what Cohen wanted to talk about, and she felt she couldn’t say no if she wanted to keep that relationship going? If Cohen set the tone of their exchange, what does it matter that the video was consistent? Doesn’t that mean the video was simply more of — and, indeed, and escalation of — something she says she didn’t want in the first place?
The answer may lie in this: there’s an emerging (perhaps convenient, given the trickle of allegations against him) orthodoxy among Bravo executives that Cohen really isn’t that powerful. In particular, they point to the moment in 2014 when he stepped down as a Bravo executive to become on-air “talent,” as it’s called in the biz, as the host of “WWHL,” among other shows. In that sense, the argument goes, he and Glanville are really peers.
Glanville calls the suggestion “ridiculous.”
Whether he has an office or just a dressing room at NBC Universal’s 30 Rock headquarters, Cohen is the only person listed as an executive producer – the most senior figure on the production team – on every episode of the “Real Housewives” ever broadcast. But the thinking goes that he’s just one of several EPs on the “Housewives” shows, and he doesn’t have – at least on paper – unilateral power to hire or fire anyone.
The biggest reason that Cohen survived without a scratch is, perhaps, that NBC Universal had the luxury of deciding what to do about the allegations against him amid little, if any, public outrage.
He has some real advantages in the court of public opinion.
First, his own work has made his accusers terrible witnesses for the prosecution. His “Housewives” shows frame the cast as volatile, unreasonable and, perhaps more than anything else, prone to wildly overreact. So when cast members accuse him, viewers already have reason to believe that they’re probably being volatile, unreasonable and picking a fight over nothing. It is, after all, what they do best.
Second, the man is irresistible. Cohen has said his idol Oprah Winfrey “is someone whom everybody wants as her or his best friend.” He has the same gift, so any expression of intimacy on his part, it seems, is considered desirable. Anyone would want to get, as Glanville did, a personal video from Andy Cohen! And if it’s full of his trademark cheek, all the more envy-inducing!
“NBC has mistakenly given Andy too much power across their network. NBC has clearly decided that he is too big to fail.”
Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman
Third, he’s gay. Cohen has said of his early days on the air, “I was… talking to women about boob sizes and plastic surgery and their love lives. These were topics I probably couldn’t get away talking about if I were straight.” But wasn’t it an axiom of #MeToo that sexual harassment, often, is about power not lust: that using sex — from catcalling to rape — is a reliable way to make someone feel vulnerable and powerless? Why, then, does it matter if the accused are sexually attracted to their accusers?
Fourth, #MeToo is, perhaps, simply over – it was an era, not an awakening.
But fifth — maybe Cohen’s ace in the hole – is that the accusations made against him are kinda boring. Or, at least, when compared to the “Housewives’” ever-more visceral, endorphin-igniting drama. In Glanville’s case in particular, the heroes and villains are hazy, if they really exist; it’s unrewarding on a synaptic level, there’s no screaming, and what crying that there is is not the fun kind of crying — it’s the sad kind, and it happens in private. More than anything, the video he sent is tame, its consequences subtle and inscrutable, its alleged harm, quiet — at least when compared to the high-schizodrama of the shows.
Either way, there were few calls for his head from “Housewives” fans.
Glanville’s attorneys instead offered a simpler interpretation of why Cohen didn’t get canned. “NBC has mistakenly given Andy too much power across their network,” Freedman and Geragos wrote, “NBC has clearly decided that he is too big to fail.”
And what of the “friendship” between Cohen and Glanville?
Glanville says now that he was never really her friend. But if not her friend, then what was Cohen all that time? In some ways, the answer may be obvious: a producer. Was he just producing her, always? Backstage at “WWHL,” when he talked about her sex life, was he curious, or having fun? Or was he giving Glanville her script? Was he, as Hasche put it, silently telling her: “‘You’re a slut and I’m going to talk to you like you’re a slut.”
Then again, if he was just being a good producer and Glanville was getting paid to be produced, perhaps there’s no harm in any of this.
But there’s another way to see it: maybe they were simply in business together, but in business there are assets and liabilities. A car, to a taxi driver, is an asset — a source of income. But it’s also a liability — an unwieldy expense when the engine blows up. Glanville’s no-filter, impulse-indulging way has been an asset for Bravo and Glanville both – but when those things have become a liability, when the engine has
gone haywire, the consequences have been on Glanville’s shoulders alone. It’s a little like a cab driver wanting a magic cab that pulls out its own credit card and pays for its own parts and labor bill when the engine blows. How did Bravo strike such a magic deal with Glanville?
And when Cohen introduced conversations about sex to this uneasy mixture of friendship and money, was it for fun – as his defenders say, “just a joke”? Is it possible that Glanville’s right – that it was about power: to punish her for telling him to “f**k off” that time on a “Housewives” reunion, or that other time on Twitter, or to test her loyalty or show how weak she was next to him?
In the end, are they just pals who fell out, or are the curveballs — their respective sexuality, the fact that it was in a video not in person, his charm — simply hiding a pretty standard, boring noxious workplace relationship of exactly the kind we were supposed to have learned to fear and watch out for?
These questions may simply be too hard to answer. And even if they were possible to answer, what, honestly, could even be done about it? Ban people from being friends with their boss?!
Glanville, certainly, does Cohen and Bravo favor after favor by making herself next-to-impossible to root for. For example, a couple of months ago, she let loose that money-making, ruinous impulsive streak, inexplicably tweeting — clearly in reference to Manzo — “Happy Sunday funday! It’s been almost 2 yrs now since a lying, short red haired closeted old lesbian ruined my life. Girl lean into the [rainbow]. it’s a beautiful space. When you come out ur family will be able to finally speak their own obvious
truths.”
In October 2024, Glanville’s lawyers, Geragos and Freedman, withdrew from her case. It had been a high-profile matter that generated a lot of headlines — and would no doubt have generated many more if Cohen had been fired, and they’d have been heralded as the attorneys who’d slain the reality giant — and they had been representing her pro bono.
A source familiar with the case told the Post that the Manzo suit “complicated” Glanville’s own complaint against the network. They have declined to serve Cohen with the summons they had so menacingly promised. She currently doesn’t have a lawyer. She’s looking for new legal representation.
A judge in McSweeney’s case heard oral arguments late last year. The court will rule soon on whether it will proceed to trial.
NBC Universal plans not to air Glanville and Manzo’s season of “RHUGT.”
Since McSweeney and Glanville made their claims, Bravo has renewed Cohen’s “WWHL” through the end of 2025. CNN also hired him to host its 2025 New Year’s Eve show. (CNN didn’t respond to our request for comment).
