Queer Eye’s own Bobby Berk is explaining why he hesitates when it comes to celebrity clients, after having a horrible experience with a cast member of The Real Housewives of New York City . Bobby recently sat down with Jenny McCarthy for her SiriusXM show, which can be accessed via YouTube . He detailed his terrible experience with the RHONY star, whom he claims stole from him.
“I had a New York Housewife come into my store years ago in New York, and [she] was like, ‘Oh, I’m buying this new place.’ Turns out, of course, she wasn’t buying it. She didn’t even own the last one she had on the show that she said she owned,” he remembered.
While he didn’t name the Housewife, he did detail practically their entire encounter. Bobby remembered her asking him to come in and design her whole place, promising to have him on camera. At that point, Bobby wasn’t yet on television and hadn’t gained his Netflix notoriety, but he was still well-established in the interior design world.
Bobby told the Housewife he wouldn’t be doing anything for free but said he would at cost, noting he wasn’t sure if the Real Housewives was “really the exposure I wanted.” The RHONY star agreed to the terms, but things took a turn shortly after.
“Then her husband calls and her husband’s like, ‘No, you just really need to do this for free,’ and tried to bully me into doing it for free. Finally, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not only not doing it for free, I’m not doing it anymore. I don’t need this,’” Bobby told Jenny.
After speaking with the mystery husband, the designer remembered the Housewife coming into his store in New York when he wasn’t there. The woman told his staff that she was allowed to take anything she wanted out of the store. Bobby’s staff, who didn’t know he had cut ties with her, allowed the Housewife to take merchandise.
The woman also gave her credit card number in case she didn’t bring anything back. She took the items for a photo shoot and it appeared as if the items were just on loan, even though Bobby didn’t know about it. Months later, the Queer Eye star said he noticed he was missing some items and when he questioned his staff about it, they told him the Housewife in question took them and never returned anything. After trying to process her credit card, it declined.
Bobby wasn’t going to let this skate by, so he approached the reality television couple about what happened.
“They said, ‘You know what? Then let’s go to court. This’ll be good TV. It’s easier for us just to have our lawyer deal with it than it would be to actually pay you,’” he noted.
There have been more than a handful of women on RHONY over the years, so fans can only speculate and use clues from Bobby’s story to figure out who the potential client might have been.