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Credit: Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock.com, Randy Shropshire/USA Network
Slade Smiley lashed out at Tamra Judge while appearing alongside his fiancée, Gretchen Rossi, on Heather McDonald‘s podcast.
As he opened up about his disappointment in Matt Ginella and admitted to being warned about him and his wife, Katie Ginella, 41, the longtime Real Housewives of Orange County personality mentioned claims of cheating against Tamra, 57, spoke of her oldest daughter’s past comments about her, and pulled her baptism into question as Gretchen, 46, reflected on their longstanding romance.
“[Tamra] thinks she’s so clever … show’s all her, ‘They’re all talking about me.’ Yes, because you’re doing the most stupid, egregious things on the show. Of course, we’re talking about you,” Slade, 51, began on the recent episode of Juicy Scoop.
When it comes to Tamra, Slade has noticed a pattern.
“We see that your first husband called you out for cheating on him. You got caught cheating on [Simon Barney]. Then you’re with [Eddie Judge]. Then there’s articles coming out about you having a fling while you’re with Eddie. But you’re gonna point your finger at [Jennifer Pedranti] and go, ‘Oh, you’re the cheater, you’re the cheater.’ ‘Oh, you’re the deadbeat dad.’ Well, your kids are the ones that came out and said you’re the monster mom. Not mine,” he noted. “There’s this deflection. Every time she points her finger, it’s because she’s doing something behind the scenes.”
Slade even signaled to Tamra’s baptism, which she highlighted on RHOC season 10.
“The pattern to me is reputation management. The minute she gets called out for her behavior, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get baptized today,’” he recalled. “We’ve had people in that circle say that she did it because no one would challenge her faith, and that today, all the sudden, she’s renewed and she’s a new person.”
Also speaking to the matter, Gretchen said she was told by one of Tamra’s close friends that Tamra wanted to get baptized because Christians “are sheep” and will “believe anything.”
Moving on to Matt, Slade recalled a phone call between them in which he advised his co-star against speaking to bloggers and other media outlets, explaining that it wasn’t a “good look” and goes “against [his] contract.”
“So when I get the phone call from [Gretchen] and I’m being told that Katie has done this, I call Matt, I go, ‘Matt, not cool. Is your wife actually out there doing this? We just had this talk,’” Slade shared, adding that Matt swore Katie hadn’t spoken to any blogs.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to hear a month from today that she actually did it because that’s been her track record where she denies, denies, denies, and then all of the sudden she flips and there’s an admission, and that’s exactly what’s happened,” he continued.
Still, when it came to the end of his and Gretchen’s friendships with Matt and Katie, Slade admitted to feeling like he was “suffering a bit of a loss” since he “really enjoyed” the couple.
“It’s just something that we never expected, even though the rest of the cast was trying to warn us,” he explained.
Also on Heather’s podcast, Gretchen detailed how her romance with Slade began, revealing that they had known one another for 10 years when her late fiancé, Jeff Beitzel, became really sick and ultimately died of cancer.
“When Jeff passed away, he was one of the only people in my life that called and checked on me all the time because he was going through it with his own son. So he just knew what it was like to always be in a hospital and be drained,” she shared.
As Slade supported her amid Jeff’s passing, Gretchen became a sounding board for Slade as he struggled to find “The One.”
“We would talk about this, and then he would call me and be like, ‘Can my girlfriend come down and stay at your house?’ I’m like, ’Sure.’ That’s the relationship we had,” Gretchen stated.
But eventually, after Slade showed up to one of her meetings as the “male presence” alongside her amid a sea of businessmen, Gretchen began to look at him in a different way.
“I remember literally going, ‘Huh? I don’t remember him being this cute.’ It was this really weird ah-ha moment,” she recalled. “And then in the meeting, the guys that were in the meeting were like, ‘Is something going on between you two?’ Because it was so obvious, we were giddy and flirting with each other.”
After the meeting, Gretchen and Slade went to dinner. And four days later, they went to Las Vegas.
“On that drive to Vegas, we literally said we felt like we could tell each other we loved each other. It was so weird. And then we didn’t tell each other we loved each other until like a month later, but we both said, in that moment, when we were driving, we knew we were gonna be together for the rest of our lives. We knew in that moment,” she gushed.
The Real Housewives of Orange County season 19 airs Thursdays at 8/7c on Bravo.
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