After much speculation that Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member Mary Cosby had either quit or been terminated from the show after skipping this season’s reunion taping last week, the reality star and pastor has spoken out about her absence, as well as the controversy surrounding her this season.
Most viewers expected Jen Shah’s legal troubles—she currently faces a maximum sentence of 50 years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering charges—and the question of “who tipped off the FBI?” to be the extent of season two’s chaos. But allegations about Cosby running her church like a cult, as well as racist remarks she’s made toward Vietnamese-American castmate Jennie Nguyen, have consumed Housewives discourse over the past three weeks, with many viewers and Bravo fan accounts demanding she be fired.
Likewise, viewers read her absence at the reunion as confirmation that Bravo had cut ties with Cosby, as the network has been more eager to give (some of) its controversial stars the ax following the racial reckoning spurred by George Floyd’s death in 2020. Neither the network nor executive producer Andy Cohen have formally announced her termination. But the Watch What Happens Live host confirmed on his Sirius XM show that Cosby was invited to the reunion, where she could “have [her] say.”
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Of course, in our current times, celebrities embroiled in scandals don’t have to go on national television and sit down for a formal interview to have their say. Instead, they can go on virtually any social media platform—including, as of late, audio apps like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces—where they’re met with the protection of fans and little to no pushback from objective sources. Hence, Cosby made a three-hour appearance on Twitter Spaces hosted by fans earlier this week, with Shah also in attendance, where she claimed she hasn’t quit the show and insisted the negative portrayal of her this season was due to editing.
“The only thing I have to say about the reunion is, I didn’t go because it was one-sided,” Cosby said during the Twitter Spaces chat on Monday night. “Everyone heard one side of what they felt. They told lies. I was not going to get on the reunion for a four-part reunion and talk about this guy that has passed.”
The man she’s referring to is community leader Cameron Williams, who passed away last June and was brought on the show by cast member Lisa Barlow this season. Williams claimed he suffered “extreme religious trauma” as a member of Cosby’s Faith Temple Pentecostal Church, where he gave the pastor $300,000 and was encouraged to mortgage his home. In one episode, he called her church a “cult” and claimed that she called herself God.
According to participants on Twitter, Cosby’s Spaces session also touched on her relationship with her castmates, going to therapy, and her marriage to her husband, who’s also her step-grandfather, Robert Cosby Sr.
A large number of Salt Lake City viewers are still defending Cosby on social media. Many of them claim she’s being unfairly targeted by white viewers and the show’s producers, despite the cult allegations from Black church members and a slew of racist remarks she made this season, including comparing Shah to “Mexican thugs,” commenting on Nguyen’s “slanted eyes,” and mimicking her accent. Several Twitter users even claimed that Cosby slipped into the accent again when she discussed Nguyen in the Twitter Space before stopping herself.
In an attempt to counter accusations of racism against Cosby, fans have also begun circulating Nguyen’s anti-Black Facebook posts from 2020, including a meme she shared that reads, “If you follow officer’s orders, you won’t get shot.” The freshman housewife’s Facebook page has since been deleted, and fan accounts are now demanding for her to be fired.
As for Cosby, flaking on the most important date of a Real Housewives season—unless you’re in rehab—has proven to be grounds for termination for certain cast members. And Cohen seemed to imply that she was not returning on his radio show, referring to her absence as a “last gesture.”
Despite the growing success and recent expansion of the Real Housewives universe with added franchises and a spin-off, Bravo has seemingly never had more inflammatory personalities and back-to-back controversies to juggle. Salt Lake City was originally praised for its immediate explosiveness when it premiered in the early days of the pandemic, but it seems like the show’s transgressive flare has come back to bite the network in the ass in the short span of just two seasons.
On the flipside, these women might have made their producers’ jobs easier by being so unequivocally terrible.
