The Real Housewives of New York City star Dorinda Medley, 55, has hit back at Queer Eye interior designer Bobby Berk, 38, after he spoke out about an unpleasant run-in with one of Bravo’s finest. She called the Netflix icon “tacky” after he claimed a RHONY star “threatened him” when he refused to design her home for free. “Here’s the thing, say who it is or don’t say it all. I don’t do riddles,” Dorinda told Chanel Omari on the “Chanel in the City” podcast. “Just say who it is, or don’t say it all. Because then you’re painting the picture very wide on a lot of Housewives and I think it’s actually putting a negative tone on Housewives. … I don’t fire sideways, I fire straight.”
“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’,” he began explaining to Jenny. “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. She’s like, ‘I want you to come in and design it all. I’m gonna put you on the show.’ And I wasn’t on TV yet. I still kind of liked the Housewives, so I was like, ‘Oh, OK, but just so you know, I’m not doing it for free. I don’t need to do it for free. I don’t necessarily know if the Housewives is really the exposure I want anyways, so I’ll do it for you at cost.’ And she’s like, ‘OK, OK, that works.’”
And while everything seemed to be going well initially, Bobby was sorely mistaken. “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,’” he said. “She came into my store the next week when I wasn’t there and told my staff that I had said she could take anything out of the store that she wanted to design her house for the shoot and here was her credit card and ‘If I don’t bring anything back, if I like something, you can just charge the credit card.’”
Bobby never named anyone specifically during his interview, but thanks to a tweet he posted in 2014, fans have theorized that he may have been referring to former RHONY star Aviva Drescher. “Oh @AvivaDrescher, UR such a con-artist,” Bobby wrote via Twitter on September 15, 2014. “Guess I’m not the only one you F’ed over. So pathetic!”