I love a good Real Housewives scandal, and sweet angel Bobby Berk has come through with the goods, revealing that an unnamed star of the franchise once stole goods from his store, after he refused to work for her for free.
The interior designer spoke about the incident in an interview with Jenny McCarthy, saying:
“Celebrities can be a pain in the ass sometimes. A lot of times there can be some that expect everything for free.”
Berk has branches his Bobby Berk Home store in SoHo and Manhattan, and he didn’t say when the incident took place, but it was before he was on Queer Eye. He explained:
“I had a New York Housewife come into my store years ago in New York, and [she] was like, ‘Oh, I’m buying this new place.’ Turns out, of course, she wasn’t buying it. She didn’t even own the last one she had on the show that she said she owned,” he said. “She’s like, ‘I want you to come in and design it all. I’m gonna put you on the show.’ And I wasn’t on TV yet. I still kind of liked the Housewives, so I was like, ‘Oh, OK, but just so you know, I’m not doing it for free. I don’t need to do it for free. I don’t necessarily know if the Housewives is really the exposure I want anyways, so I’ll do it for you at cost.’ And she’s like, ‘OK, OK, that works.’”
Berk said that the woman’s husband called him a short time later to try and pressure him into working for free, but he refused and instead turned down the job altogether.
This did not deter the mystery housewife, and Bobby Berk went on to say:
“She came into my store the next week when I wasn’t there and told my staff that I had said she could take anything out of the store that she wanted to design her house for the shoot and here was her credit card and ‘If I don’t bring anything back, if I like something, you can just charge the credit card.‘”
He said that the housewife “cleaned the store out”, and that he didn’t discover it until months later when he was doing inventory and noticed many items missing.
When he asked the staff what had happened, they said they had been calling for housewife for months and not getting a response, and that her card was declined when they attempted to charge it.
“They knew they had fucked up,” he said. “They knew they had been scammed.”
Bobby Berk says that he later confronted the housewife, who threatened to take the matter to court rater than pay up. Based on this experience, the designer is now “picky” about who he chooses to work with.
