Jim Bellino, the ex-husband of Alexis Bellino and former Real Housewives of the OC star, recently sued current RHOC stars, Tamra Judge and Shannon Beador, in a million dollar lawsuit. He sued for damages, both physical and emotional, because of what the two allegedly said during an interview on an episode of Heather McDonald’s Juicy Scoop podcast.
Beador has now filed a legal response to the lawsuit, according to The Blast , asking the charges to be dropped and the case to be dismissed immediately. She also demands that Bellino foot the bill and pay for the lawyers she had to hire to handle the whole mess. This comes a few days after Judge legally filed her response to the suit, also demanding the case be thrown out.
Why do the two think the lawsuit should be dropped?
Judge claimed that she never defamed Bellino or made a false statement because she was only giving her opinion on things that had actually happened. She also says that her words did not cause Bellino any damage, that his own actions caused any damages he suffered, and that because he is a public figure, anything she said about him falls under public interest.
Beador made many of the same claims as Judge, but she took her own comments a bit further. Aside from denying that Bellino suffered any damage from her comments, she alleges that everything she said was completely true and that her words were humor or satire and should have been construed as such. She finished by claiming that there was no way she could have harmed Bellino’s reputation because it was already so destroyed, she could not have brought it any lower than it already was.
“I have been forced to seek professional help for physical and psychological ailments I’ve been experiencing since being dragged through the mud by Tamra and Shannon. The repercussions of this behavior from them and the coverage that it gets are literally harming every part of me,” Bellino wrote on his personal website after first sending cease and desist letters to Judge and Beador after being alerted to what the pair had said on the podcast, which included trashing of his SkyZone trampoline parks and his request for spousal support from his ex-wife, Alexis.
Though the podcast edited out some of Beador and Judge’s comments after Bellino threatened them with legal action, many comments Bellino found offensive were still included, leading to the lawsuit.