Bethenny Frankel recently spoke out about being a victim of the string of random punching incidents that have plagued women in New York City, saying she was too “embarrassed” to disclose the incident when it originally happened. Now, she’s opened up about the experience on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Superfly podcast, saying she’s convinced New York City has changed for the worse.
“I was in New York City, I think it was like 72nd and West End, which sounds kind of fancy to me, like West End,” the Real Housewives alum began, describing how she’d been taking in the area right before she was attacked. “It was a new area that I was gonna look at and the building was pre-war—super fancy,” she said.
“I walked in and it was this tiny place that had all these different kinds of desserts that I was interested in, and I took my phone out to take a picture of them,” she continued. “I turned around and a guy, just as I was walking out the door, just whacked me in the face.”
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The Bravo star said the experience colored her already wobbly opinion of the city. “It is a whole macro situation,” she explained on the podcast, “because if I go there and then I text the realtor, ‘Screw this, I don’t wanna live here, this place is nuts,’ because I identify the entire place with that experience.”
Frankel said she foresees the punching trend having big consequences for New York’s economy. “I go to a normal drug store and things are in cages,” she said, referring to items that are locked up behind clear cases in stores like Rite Aid or CVS—a common practice across the country in light of increasing retail theft. “It’s going to affect the real estate market and the economy, and then it’s really going to be a circular reference of ‘New York Doom,’” she continued.
She then referenced Jerry Seinfeld’s 2020 New York Times op-ed in which he fought back against a writer’s claim that New York is dead, as people fled the city en masse during the pandemic. Frankel said her recent experience taught her that Seinfeld was wrong.
“Some guy wrote an article during the pandemic about crime, Seinfeld pushed back on it,” she said on the podcast. “It’s been a discussion and there’s been a defensiveness about it, because New Yorkers wanna gaslight and pretend it’s not actually happening and close their eyes and pretend they’re not seeing it.”
“Jerry Seinfeld, I hate to say, ’cause I love him and I know you guys love him, but he was wrong,” she said, adding that New York has “kind of not been great” since 2020. “When I’m in a drug store, my shoulders are up—like any human that’s near me, I feel like they’re gonna do something to me in the city.”
