The Salahis Will Be On Real Housewives; White House Crashing Will Be Part Of Series
Confirming what many believed was an inevitable outcome, Bravo will announce today the first season of Real Housewives of D.C. will debut August 5, and Michaele Salahi is part of the cast (and her husband Tareq Salahi is part of the show too).
What may surprise some, but not the cynics, is the Salahi’s White House crashing was filmed for an episode, and will be part of the show too.
Lisa de Moraes of The Washington Post confirmed the news, and has the full breakdown of the upcoming Housewives – although the real stars will be The Salahis.
From the initial incident in November through their PR push in December, Bravo denied Michaele Salahi was guaranteed to be part of the Housewives cast, just that the couple was being filmed as potential cast members. But Andy Cohen, Senior Vice President at Bravo and host of all Housewives specials and a late-night show on the network, writes in detail on The Huffington Post about the decision to include the couple, and the crashing. And it appears their involvement in the finished product was practically a given.
We learned the following day — as did everyone else, including the other D.C. Housewives — of the alleged “gate crashing” incident. At the core of the reaction was the question of whether or not the Salahis had been invited. But one of the by-products of the aftermath was continued false reporting that somehow the Salahis had used the State Dinner as a ‘stunt’ to be cast on the show. The fact is that by November we had been shooting the series with Michaele and the other women for months. In fact, we were a few weeks away from wrapping photography on the series. Any idea that attending the State Dinner was an audition to cement participation in the show is preposterous.
In other words, they were already cast members of Bravo. Were they still cast members when they were stopped by Secret Service last month near the state dinner? Will that be part of a future episode?
It also means they were already cast members of Bravo when they chose to avoid CNN and conducted their first interview with the Today show, keeping up the charade throughout. What’s most embarrassing however, is the charade seeped into the NBC News world. No disclosure was made during that December 1 interview, and yet these interviewees were not just party crashers – they were cast members on an NBCU TV show. Maybe Matt Lauer will get to be part of the Real Housewives episode too.
