Kenya Moore's Married BF is Mighty Fishy

Technically, I’m on vacation. I’ve rented a (cheap) car, and woe is me (insert sarcasm) that there’s no way to connect my iPhone to the stereo to listen to my playlists. I’m forced to listen to the radio, which I rarely do at home.

The talk of Miami’s Hot 105 this week has been the discovery by The Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Kenya Moore that she was unknowingly dating a married man, whom she met via Bravo’s TV show Millionaire Matchmaker. According to Moore, she discovered this after she’d been sharing pics of herself and her new man, James Freeman, on social media. Yikes!

“Unfortunately, I just learned today that the man I met and fell in love with from Millionaire Matchmaker was married a week after the show aired,” Moore posted on Instagram. “I am astounded and devastated to have learned of this news VIA social media as opposed to from him directly.”

A woman, especially a celebrity, being duped by a man is a juicy story, and the radio station’s hosts spun it into a “question of the day,” asking readers when it was appropriate to share pictures of your significant other on social media. (Most popular answer: when you’re engaged or married—and keep the pics and details to a minimum even then.) But I had a different, more pressing question running through my mind: Where was this man’s wife?

It wouldn’t work for me to have my betrothed on a dating show, but I do understand that many of the people who appear on these types of programs are actors or aspiring actors. Maybe the fiancee was cool with him adding a show to his résumé? Fair enough. Technically, you are single until you are married, I guess. But Moore and Freeman continued to date after the wedding, according to Moore. It seems that Moore wasn’t in an open relationship, but was Freeman in an open marriage?

Actually, no, says Jaimi Gregory, Freeman’s wife. She offered RadarOnline a different timeline than Moore’s, saying that her now-husband’s appearance on Millionaire Matchmaker was filmed in September, before Gregory met him in December. Gregory and Freeman became engaged in March and were married a month later. Gregory says that her husband “forgot” about having taped the show until commercials began airing.

So let me get this straight: He forgot about that time when—for at least three days, for multiple hours each of those days—he hung out with a celebrity woman on a show about a celebrity matchmaker. And he conveniently forgot about the multiple, big cameras that were in his face as well as the lights. Then this same forgetful man also met a woman online and married her within four months? I mean, some people do know when they know, but does a man this “forgetful” fall into that category?

Read more: HERE 

RHOA Reunion: So About That Bravo Brawl...

 

Hand me a late pass. I finally watched a clip of The Real Housewives of Atlanta reunion episode. (Sorry, since starring on reality TV, I stopped watching it.) Yes, the one where cast member Porsha Williams hit her co-star Kenya Moore over the head and dragged her across the floor by her hair like the wife of some cartoon caveman.

It—along with Williams’ post-fight reaction—was worse than any of the preshow rumors or even anything described on social media. Black women in ball gowns brawling—again. A similar scene played out in season 1 of Bravo’s Married to Medicine—it was beyond disturbing (as was Williams’ post-fight tantrum).

Civil rights group ColorOfChange.org thought so, too. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the organization released a statement calling on Bravo’s parent company, NBC Universal, to address the “troubling pattern of violent, stereotypical portrayals of black people across Bravo’s black reality franchises.”

As someone who’s been on reality TV and subjected to its editing—and who’s also been the target of an attempted attack by a cast mate—portrayals of black women and, more personally important to me, the safety of the cast are great concerns as I consider whether to participate in another season of reality TV. (In my case, a co-star tried to break down a door to assault me and another woman. We ran to avoid fighting on TV.)

But back to that RHOA fight that everybody’s still talking about, and the vigorous debate about whether Williams was wrong or Moore had it coming. There’s really no way around it: Williams was dead wrong for putting her hands on Moore in any way. And Moore was dead wrong on that stage, too, for antagonizing Williams.

Since joining the RHOA cast in the fifth season, Moore has based her entire character around menacing her cast mates, particularly Williams. She talks a lot of crap. But hitting, dragging or otherwise laying angry hands on someone who antagonizes you is one of those things that even the most upstanding folks daydream about—or so I heard. Everyone on that reunion stage, except maybe host Andy Cohen, had fantasized about dragging Moore at some point, but no one lost control enough to do it, except Williams.

As wrong as Williams was, she is a victim, too. The reunion set was what ColorOfChange.org called a “staged hostile environment.” Moore repeatedly flicked a scepter in Williams’ face and called her a “dumb ho” on a bullhorn while she sat just a few feet away. (To be fair, Williams also throws her fair share of jabs at Moore—Moore just knows how to take deeper digs.) The bullhorn set off Williams, who admittedly behaved out of character when she confronted Moore and assaulted her.

Read more at The Root.