Former Bravo Producer Said Heather Gay’s Black Eye Lie Is the Most ‘Reckless’ Thing a Housewife Has Ever Done
One of the most infamous moments on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City came when Heather Gay lied about her black eye. After denying that she knew how it happened for nearly a year, Gay admitted that former castmate Jen Shah gave it to her. A former producer on the show said Gay should have lost her job for the fib.
Heather Gay lied about her black eye on ‘RHOSLC’
On a group trip to San Diego, Gay stunned her castmates when she greeted them with a black eye in the morning. For the entirety of the season, Gay denied that she knew how she got the injury.
“I don’t know how I got the black eye,” she said at the season three reunion, adding, “I blacked out. I don’t know what happened. … I cannot speak to anything other than I walked to my room and I blacked out, and I woke up with a black eye.”
At the next season’s reunion, she admitted she lied about the black eye. Shah hit her.
“I had been covering for her for three years, I wasn’t going to stop at the black eye,” she said. “I was that in, and I was too scared to say anything.”
She apologized for lying about it.
“I’m sorry to you, I’m sorry to you guys, I’m sorry to the network, I’m sorry to the audience,” she said, adding, “I didn’t know how to navigate it myself. I knew that it was becoming bigger and more than I could handle. It was a horrible situation.”
A former Bravo producer said Heather Gay should have lost her job over her black eye lie
Former Bravo producer Patrick McDonald slammed Gay for not telling the truth immediately. He said it completely changed his opinion of her.
“That is one of the most reckless things that any housewife has ever done,” he said on the Bravo While Black podcast. “And I lost so much respect for her in that moment, and I would never gain it back. I am very, very surprised they kept her around after that.”
He added that it could have gotten people in trouble.
“God, it’s so reckless, so potentially damaging to all of these people that work really hard on these shows,” he said. “Especially when it wasn’t true, to put that out into the universe, into the world, was so inappropriate and horrible.”
He noted that he would have pressured her to tell the truth if he worked on the show.
“If I was one of those producers on that show, I would be so guarded around her,” he said. “And I would never want to be in a room alone with her. I feel like that was a very, very problematic thing that she did that has been swept under the rug. And I don’t think that it should have been. … I think that she should have been forced to have addressed that in a much more direct and head-on way than she did. … She lost me in that moment forever.”
McDonald also said that he would have fired Gay for the lie.
“I’d be like, ‘Look, I don’t trust you. And you are putting this crew at risk by insinuating stuff like that,’” he said. “So I think that should have … cost her her snowflake.”
Meredith Marks also criticized her for the lie
Her castmate, Meredith Marks, felt similarly.
“Heather’s whole bone to pick with me this season was I said that she lied, which I actually … I said in the scene, ‘It was a mistake, I didn’t mean to say that,’ because I didn’t mean to call Heather a liar in that moment,” she told Tamra Judge on the Two T’s in a Pod podcast. “Now in retrospect, having seen everything, maybe things have changed a bit, but the big issue was her, me saying ‘you lied,’ when we know she lied about a black eye for years.”
She added that people who worked on the show could have faced serious repercussions because of this.
“A lot of people were, you know, looked into because of it,” she said. “She got a lot of people in a lot of trouble because of it.”
She said she regretted not accusing Gay of lying.
