Exclusive | Inside the Bravo reality machine: Brandi Glanville reveals manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen
God knows, it wasn’t her only problem.But as Brandi Glanville stood amid the wreckage of her life for a third time, she finally recognized at least one of her problems.It was a friendship.Or, better put, what she had thought of for nearly a decade as a friendship.“I realized I was involved in a very abusive, manipulative relationship with Andy Cohen,” she tells The Post.At one time, Glanville had been one of the standout stars of Cohen’s “Real Housewives” reality franchise on Bravo, on the cusp of making $500,000 for a season with adoring viewers hooked on her trademark “truth bombs.”Today, she’s a couple of months from not being able to pay rent, blighted by a perplexing, disfiguring illness, all but unemployable, desperate and panicking.The path to her ruin led also to her epiphany about Cohen.Their strange bond dissolved in an even stranger confluence: they were both accused of sexual misconduct at almost exactly the same time.They both denied wrongdoing.But Bravo soon announced that an investigation had found the claims against Cohen to be unsubstantiated, and that he would continue to work there.Meanwhile, Glanville hasn’t worked since, for Bravo or anyone else.Their different fates, Glanville says, revealed everything she needed to know to finally understand the truth about their relationship.Sitting in a makeup chair about two years earlier, she felt a flush of joy.Glanville, a former star of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” was in a studio in Manhattan in June of 2022.
She’d just got a video message from Cohen, a former senior executive at Bravo who, by then, was the executive producer of Bravo’s entire “Real Housewives” franchise and the host of the network’s late night show “Watch What Happens Live,” among other shows.In the video, Cohen was goofing around with a mutual friend, Kate Chastain of Bravo’s “Below Deck,” at a work event in the South of France, a few time zones ahead.They were clearly hammered...