As a party planner to the stars, Jennifer Gilbert has thrown elaborate bashes for Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, planning every last detail. But the self-confessed “control freak” admits in an exclusive interview with HollyBaby.com that she’s had a hard time coping with feeling so helpless when her 2-year-old son was diagnosed with alopecia.
On season three of The Real Housewives of New York, Jennifer Gilbert didn’t actually get a lot of screen time. Mainly because the 41-year-old is the most career-focused (at 29 she was named one of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year for her event-planning company Save the Date) and sanest one in the bunch, but also partly because she didn’t want to include her kids — Blaise, 5, and twins Grey and Saxton, 2 — in the filming of the often-catty reality show. In the midst of all the show’s glitz and glamour, Jennifer was going through her darkest hour with Grey being diagnosed with alopecia, an autoimmune skin disease resulting in hair loss. She tells HollyBaby.com how she took the news, why she chose to tell the world about her son’s condition via Twitter, and whether or not she’s really friends with any of her outspoken co-stars.