Real Housewives of New York City Finale Recap: Sisterhood of the Traveling Facts
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 is lying? Who remembers what? Did we really see what we saw? Can we believe the words of the women when the footage is minimal? And, of all the things that we’re here to discuss, of all the fights that have to be had on this silly little show, we have to discuss sexual assault?
I firmly contend that these shows aren’t built to tackle serious subjects. Yes, Erin did a great job earlier in the season opening up about her abortion (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 couple of Housewives getting 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 litigating whether Ubah knew that Brynn was sexually assaulted and, by extension, everything that Brynn is about to go through with people questioning whether that assault is true.
Before we get into it, let’s establish some ground rules. I firmly believe, as does everyone on the cast, that Brynn was sexually assaulted. I don’t think that should come into question even though, because of the story about whether Brynn can be believed, it surely will. Brynn’s been through enough already; let’s not engage in that kind of speculation. I always believe women. I believe women so much that I believe Selena Gomez when she says she can act, and I have watched every single murder in that building and Emilia Pérez twice. So, yes, we’re going 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 make a very good case that this is a pattern for Brynn. She takes things that happen off-camera and twists them the way she needs them so that she can benefit. The examples the show gives us were when she said that 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 that Erin told her she was in on Boring Becky’s Boring Baby Bump Prankapolooza.
This all makes total sense. All of the women know that Brynn has a tenuous relationship with the truth, and honestly, I think that’s a fine quality to have in a friend. I have a close friend who I know has been making shit up for years. It doesn’t make me think differently of them; it just makes me verify 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 most insane way possible, at least for Housewives fans. We have several fights breaking out all around the house. Then we get the big fight between Ubah and Brynn where Ubah refuses to apologize for saying Brynn slept with someone to get her job. Then Brynn tearfully tells the rest of the cast that Ubah kept saying that after she knew that Brynn had been raped. But the narrative is not linear; the ladies decide to go to bed, and the cameras go down. That is when Ubah freaks out about this news and starts shouting. We don’t get to see all of it, just one crappy affixed camera at the end of the hallway. I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but this is the exact same camera that was on the porch and 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 congregate in Jenna’s room to hear Brynn talk about her sexual assault. At the end of that conversation, she says, according to Erin, “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 reevaluated Brynn and everything she’s said over the two seasons. I get it. It totally makes sense. And it’s even stranger for them all in the morning when Brynn is acting like nothing happened.
The rest of the episode is about the shoot for the opening titles of the show, which I love because it brings the reality of being a reality show back to the very center. These are no longer a group of friends, they’re now co-workers who have to suck it up and bob for apples with a known liar. (Also, the way that the editors spliced together footage of each woman doing their little intro with the title cards that we customarily get to close out the season was chef’s-kiss amazing.) All we get is them being wary of Brynn, being afraid of her, and trying to hold her accountable.
She should be held accountable. Sure, I have a friend who is a liar, but it’s something else to have a liar on reality television, spinning false stories in public about everyone onscreen. It’s hard for producers to make a story line for anyone, particularly Brynn, when fans can never be entirely clear 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 is right and who is wrong, how can 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 is now drawing way more heat to her than Ubah is getting. Brynn did something so bad that anything bad Ubah did is totally erased. If she had just waited and let it come to Ubah, she would be in the clear.
That’s what sticks out to me. It shouldn’t matter whether Ubah knew about Brynn’s sexual assault before saying what she did and continuously defending it. What Ubah said was absolutely terrible, regardless. Ubah thinks it’s bad that Brynn lied about her knowing about her rape on-camera, but what about how bad it is to continuously insinuate that Brynn is a prostitute on-camera, which feeds into a false narrative that the fandom has already seized on?
All of the women tell Ubah that she needs to stop calling Brynn “a whore,” which is not something that your friends should tell you about another one of your friends. (For the record, everyone is allowed to call me a whore because it is entirely true.) When Ubah tries to apologize, Brynn asks her what she’s sorry for. When Brynn asks if she’s sorry for saying she “sucked dick for a job,” Ubah refuses to because she didn’t say that. As Jenna points out, this is a semantic argument. Yes, she didn’t say “suck dick,” she said “slept with,” but how is that any different? If the words aren’t correct, the spirit is. Ubah needs a verbatim quote back at her to apologize? Brynn isn’t wrong when she calls her a petulant, 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” into a quote like that does not absolve her of guilt. She’s basically saying she believes it, and if that quote alone wasn’t enough, everything she said after compounded it. Brynn says that Ubah said she had a dick in her mouth, but Ubah says Brynn said that first. Yes, because Brynn was repeating the essence of what Ubah was saying, something we know Ubah said because we saw it on-camera. To delete that “maybe” in Ubah’s accusation, when Brynn joked that she only flies private, Ubah says, “With someone else’s husband,” again insinuating that she is either an adulterer or a prostitute, neither of which is very nice. If she’s going to say that, then she doesn’t “maybe” think Brynn slept with someone to get a job; she definitely thinks she did.
What I’m saying is that Ubah was behaving abhorrently, but when Brynn went and blatantly lied about her for sympathy, it erased all of Ubah’s bad behavior. They’re both being awful. Yes, one was worse than the other, but that doesn’t mean absolving Ubah for everything she’s done all season. As the other women pointed out in the episode, whenever they try to talk to Ubah about something, she won’t let anyone speak, but when they’re having their own issues, Ubah is always the first one to pipe up 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 Ms. 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 children need polio vaccines. It’s 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 either or both of them because it just leaves every interaction between either of them and the other women at a complete 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 shouting over every discussion to the point of a standstill.
What does it mean for the show? Well, we finally got a good season of Housewives, but it all happened on the trip. We got resentments, we got petty feuds, we got silly rivalries, we got Jenna’s pubic merkins, we got a lovely synchronized-swimming number. It was fun, it was real, it was raw. It’s what we’ve come to expect from Housewives, and I am now more confident than ever that at least some of this group has what it takes to be great. And as the moon sails over the beaches of Puerto Rico, its light traveling in bows across the ocean waves, it feels a little bit like hope rising in our hearts, carrying us into the future, skipping us to a time when bad behavior will stop being unforgivable and will be just what we’re all looking forward to a little bit: drama.