RHONY Star Eboni K. Williams Talks Working at Fox News and Pushing Boundaries as the First Black ‘Housewife’

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Eboni K. Williams is not going to remain quiet, no matter how many times the word “preachy” gets thrown at her.

As the first Black cast member of The Real Housewives of New York City, she has gotten used to making people uncomfortable (her fellow castmates and sometimes even the audience). Her confrontational approach is what makes the latest season of the show interesting, and has spawned both admirers and critics.

Her presence on the show has been a disruption since the season premiere, when she informed former countess Luann de Lesseps, a Sag Harbor homeowner, that the neighborhood was one of the first Long Island communities to allow Black people to purchase property. A series of uncomfortable conversations have followed: she called out Ramona Singer for referring to her domestic workers as “the help,” and criticized her castmates for equating class with education.

I called Williams earlier this month to chat about her first season on RHONY, the skirmishes she’s had with some of the Housewives, and her self-proclaimed mission to “move a status quo that normalizes an absence of a Black lens.”

Challenging expectations has been on Williams’ agenda throughout her career, which took her from a job as a political commentator on Fox News to her current roles on RHONY and as a host and producer for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ REVOLT TV.

That disposition is what prompted her, as a host on Fox News, to condemn then-President Donald Trump in 2017 following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. On Fox News Specialists, the show she co-hosted, Williams decried his response as “cowardly and dangerous.” It would not be the last time she denounced Trump on his favorite network.

Her criticism of Trump drew death threats from Fox News viewers, and Williams eventually left the network after more than four years in 2018. She would later describe the founding mission of Fox News as “the demonizing of the other” in a 2019 interview with The Breakfast Club.

“I went there because I felt I was going to be a savior of sorts, and talk to the people in the middle, that still watch that network because whether we like it or not, Fox is number one for a reason,” she told the host Charlamagne tha God.

“I did not walk into Fox News to be comfortable,” she said in another interview with Her Agenda. “I walked in there to disrupt.”

That same compulsion to disrupt — in addition to an urge to bring long-overdue representation to the series — is what pushed Williams to take the role as RHONY’s first Black Housewife.

“I think representation, particularly as it relates to women and women of color — in all [American] states — is really important. Not just the ones we’re expected to be in,” Williams said of the stark lack of diversity in several of the franchise’s series. “When I was invited to join and represent women and represent hard-working professional women in our age group — that felt really, really compelling to me, and it felt like an opportunity to really show up in the space.”

Since her debut on the show — in which she sported a “Black Lives Matter” mask and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the names of the now-exonerated Central Park Five — Williams has been pushing her fellow castmates out of their Manhattan bubble, often through confronting them on issues of race and politics.

Conversing with those who hold different political ideologies is something Williams has experience with. She said she often broke bread with Sean Hannity at Del Frisco’s in New York City while working at Fox News.

Hannity, a fervent Trump supporter, actually supported his “dear friend” Williams when she criticized the former president on the air at Fox News.

But it’s “not all about politics” for Williams, who was “expecting that support” from her colleague. “When you work that closely for that long with colleagues, there is an actual relationship that’s beyond just the newsroom,” she said.

“I have friends of all stripes. I probably have as many Republicans in my phone as I do Democrats and Libertarians and Independents. I myself, am a registered Independent. I’m not a partisan hack,” she said, later adding that if someone voted for Trump due to economic reasons, that’s “totally cool.”

She brought up the season’s 10th episode, in which Williams asked if any of the women were aligned with “white supremacy” due to some of their more Trumpian political views.

“While I understand these things may feel triggering, part of defeating white supremacy as a nation and as a society is being able to articulate it, identify it, call it out every single time it shows up,” Williams said, clarifying that she would “never, ever in my life call anybody a white supremacist or an anti-Semite or anything like that, just carte blanche without compounding corroborating evidence to support that claim.”

“But, yeah, those basic questions are still very problematic to some,” she added. “And I would suggest that people ask themselves why those questions feel so triggering for them.”

In the season’s 8th episode, Williams sat down with Ramona Singer after she fled from a dinner party in Harlem — a neighborhood most of the women viewed as a foreign country despite being a 10 minute Uber ride from the Upper East Side.

Williams found the conversation so “toxic” that it prompted her to call an emergency meeting with high-level executives, as she wanted “clarity on what kind of show they wanted to have.”

Williams described the incident with Singer as “so much more bizarre and dramatic than it even appeared on television,” revealing that it’s “re-traumatizing” every time she watches the scene.

The conversation with Singer, which occurred after election night but prior to the decision, reached a boiling point when Singer requested “to escape for 24 hours” by avoiding the topics of race and politics.

“Am I supposed to take this off and hang it up?” Williams asked on the show, gesturing to her skin. “Do you have a coat closet for my Blackness, Ramona?”

Williams’ dedication to challenging her castmates and moving the series’ “central focus away from whiteness” prompted not only clashes with fellow Housewives, but also a backlash from viewers. Enough of a backlash that Bravo recently issued a statement in support of her.

But despite that tension — which has included castmates pronouncing her “preachy” — Williams says she is committed to contributing to the “moment.”

“I mean, sometimes people need a good preaching to,” she reasoned. “ I think that this moment is as close as our nation has ever been to being prepared to have an honest dialog, an honest reckoning with its own self as it relates to the truth and reconciliation of race in America and stomping out anti-Black sentiment, anti-Semitic sentiment, anti-Islamic sentiment, homophobic — this is it.”

“If we don’t step up to the plate as a collective nation in this moment, we fucked up,” Williams continued. “I see myself as a woman meeting a moment right now, and I’m quite proud of it. And I can tell you, despite a lot of vitriol online, I’m also getting — the past three weeks I would say — post Harlem night, an incredible amount of love and support in my DMs, on my comments from various people all across the world, from Middle America, Kansas to Tennessee to Brazil, Australia, South Africa.”

So the response hasn’t all been negative. Williams said some of her fans have picked up their first James Baldwin novels.

“That’s great,” she reflected. “If only five people get that from this season from me — I am so proud of the work that this show is doing.”