What’s with the Becky Minkoff rumor?

Photo: Ardiel Jiminez/Bravo

As I watched this very Becky Minkoff-centric episode, I thought to myself: Now we finally play Housewives. There’s a scandalous secret, it’s spreading through the group like chlamydia at Coachella, they’re tripping over each other to find out the truth, and it looks like Becky Minkoff is finally not going to be boring. I thought about all the possibilities for the rest of the season, how a secret like this and how it got out would adjust the group and rearrange their dynamic. I got so excited. RHONY is back baby!

That is until the last seconds of the episode. Erin Mew Mew Lichy and Becky get into a tiff at the group dodgeball game and walk off the court (court? Playground? Pitch? What the hell do you play dodgeball on?) and Erin smiles at Becky and says, “That was good” , and then Becky laughs.

Guys, it’s a trap. This whole damn thing is a trap and the two of them made it up as a joke and I’ve never been madder at Housewives in my life. I was a blogger in the earlier days of the internet where we always had to write, “If this is true, it’s crazy” because people would perpetuate scams all the time, and I fell for more than one of them, including . Becky’s April fool’s prank where she said she was in the cast RHONY but she wasn’t. I’m not falling for this one.

Almost the entire episode hinges on something Becky told Mew Mew when the two were having lunch together. The next day, Erin has lunch with Jessel and Brynn and tells them that Rebecca told her she’s pregnant again. She adds that she heard a rumor, but doesn’t say where, that Rebecca and her husband Gavin are swingers and that Becky was beaten up by another man. It’s a story so wild that it’s titillating, but also not so unbelievable that it’s absolutely false.

As the ladies start filing into Sai’s dodgeball event in various athletic attire, Brynn decides to spill the beans and tells Sai… and Jenna… and Racquel… and Ubah. Oh no. Wait, said Sai to Ubah. But the bottom line is that everyone found out, loved the scoop, and everyone was worried about Becky playing dodgeball because they didn’t want to punch her stomach. Brynn went so far as to tell everyone that she used to work with Gavin and she called a mutual friend and that person at least confirmed that they have some sort of non-exclusivity arrangement. As Brynn says, it’s 2024, baby.

Jenna was the only one upset to hear the news which made all the other girls laugh. She says partners and children are off limits, so this unfounded gossip hit her the wrong way. At the end of the game (Match? Set? Distraction? What do you call a dodgeball device?), Jenna tells Becky that everyone is talking about her and she needs to be very careful. Jenna doesn’t want to repeat the gossip, so Becky tells Jenna to tell her with her eyes. Jenna looks at Erin and that’s when their tiff starts.

I was so excited for a moment, but here’s the proof that it’s not true. First, Becky Minkoff hasn’t been pregnant or had a child since the show aired, at least that’s what I could tell from an extensive Google and a cursory look at her Insta. She could have had an abortion, she could have had an abortion (are they still legal in America?), she could have given it up for adoption, but there is no baby. Also, we never see Becky tell Erin she’s pregnant and we know the lunch was filmed. Don’t you think they would have at least dusted off the footage of Becky telling Erin she’s expecting?

There are plenty of other circumstantial and character evidences. We know Becky likes bad April Fools and that she tried to get Jenna to have a fake fight with heran offer Jenna turned down because she’s a thinking person and seems to know how to play reality TV better than we originally gave her credit for. We also know that Erin doesn’t know how to pull a prank and has a sense of humor as bad as Jessel’s shopping addiction. Her first prank ended in a hot tub fight with Ubah. Her second prank ended with Ubah throwing up Jenna Lyon’s perfect pavlova (not a euphemism). This is the kind of unfunny bullshit that she would totally believe is a riot.

The only complicating factor is what Brynn heard from her source close to Gavin, who People magazine would say. There are two possibilities. One is that Brynn knew about this gag and went along with it, which makes her a much better actress than I would have guessed. The other is that she called someone, they said that Gavin and Rebecca are coming up with some funky stuff, and she embellished the rest of it. Just look at how she got caught twisting things that Jenna said about Jessel. At lunch, she tells Jessel that Jenna didn’t say Jessel was basic…but wouldn’t say she wasn’t basic. When we see footage of the actual conversation, Jenna in no way said or implied that, Brynn is the one who started it all and then told Jessel to get a rise out of her. Jessel, being an adult, brings it to Jenna, who tells her the truth, and Jessel just says, “Yeah, it’s Brynn.” (Jessel also gets episode MVP at the end when Becky is “mad” at Erin for “telling” “people” “about” “her” “pregnancy” and Jessel says “Congratulations?” in a tone that interprets both confusion, sadness and irritation all at once.)

Becky’s swinger pregnancy (which would never have happened with “gently swinging”) can be true or partially true. We might wake up from the “To Be Continued” coma that starts at the end of this episode and find out that Becky is a swinger and all her kids have different dads. I don’t know. It could happen. But right now I’m operating from a place where it’s all faker than Kim Zolciak’s 19th face.

Honestly, I’m getting mad about it. It would be one thing if Kyle Richards and Lisa Vanderpump did a story about RHOBH where Lisa found Kyle in bed with a woman. (It would have been a good foreshadowing for sure.) But in this hypothetical case, it would have been quite an episode and they would have told the girls and they would have all laughed. After all, the Diamond Holders always brought enough drama that a fake story, especially if we were in on the joke, would have been cute.

The problem here is that RHONY currently gives us nothing. It didn’t let us in on the joke, because if we were, it wouldn’t have mattered. Even worse than Erin and Becky deciding to play this trick are the producers, editors and executives who went along with it and based an entire episode around it because the only good drama we’ve had all season is this bullshit fakery , which looks like a Gooci bag that Sai bought on Canal Street as a teenager. Pranks are one thing and games are another, but making storylines for kicks and then having the entire network go along with it is, sorry, a fireable offense.

Now, neither woman can ever return for ideological reasons, like I was a little warm to both of them. I loved that Mel and Abe decided that their partners should go on a double date together to a “dive bar”. Mel has even taken to calling him Gabe because he’s like Gay Abe. He even admits that he thought about kissing other guys in college, and if he wants to try now, I know he’s never kissed a mustache as luscious (and close) as mine. Erin showed up to this, was game and seemed to be having a great time. This is an Erin I wouldn’t completely despise.

The real star of this scene, however, was Racquel. We find out that she didn’t really know she liked women until she was living in Italy in a model house and working her way through the hot young ladies who were her roommates. What is Racquel’s life? Every time she tells us a story, it’s the most honest, funny, outrageous story ever told. Where are her memories? The Housewives Institute is busy, but we’re volunteering to ghostwrite this book for free, just so we can hear the rest of Racquel’s stories.

Then there’s the amazing scene where Sai takes his daughter London to Becky’s studio to look at the props from Evil that she used to design one shoe and bag collection inspired by the film. Yes, I know the movie opens in a few weeks and that’s totally chip con (and much smarter, I might add, than when Dorinda Medley and Sonja Tremont Morgan of Universal Pictures Morgans went to see The crowd in the middle of an episode), but it was nice to see Sai in a loving motherly mode, and Becky giving London a free purse is the only nice or interesting thing she’s done since she’s been haunting our TV screens for these long months.

This isn’t just about me hating Erin and Becky. This behavior threatens the entire company. Yes, part of the fun of Housewives is figuring out who’s lying, who’s telling the truth, and who we’ll root for. But in these matches – like the Katie Ginella vs. Heather Dubrow skirmish on RHOC — one or both of these parties really believe their side of the story. Erin and Becky made this up because they thought it was funny and now we can never believe anything else they ever say.

As the women filtered out of Chelsea Piers after their match, a black Escalade was parked on the side of the West Side Highway. The redhead in the backseat watched as Jessel strolled by in his padded pants. She clocked Jenna Lyons and her bulbous sunglasses rushing for an Uber. She watched Sai’s curls bounce as she began to slip back to Brooklyn trying to raise a family in this economy. Finally, her target appeared. “Gary, pull up next to her,” the redhead said. As the car rolled past Becky Minkoff, the door opened and the woman behind scooped her inside and closed the door. Becky freaked out a little when she heard the doors lock behind her. “Listen, missy. I didn’t make up the whole damn show for you to go and ruin it. You’re going to knock this fucking fake history crap off right now or you’re all going to pay.” The doors unlocked, and as if there was an eject button, Becky was back on her ass on the curb before she could belt out the opening notes of “Defying Gravity.” The car sped away, and Jill Zarin was never happier to intervene.