Lisa Rinna has gone from Melrose Place to a full-blown reality TV villain. According to Page Six, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star has been stirring plenty of controversies recently. And when she arrived on stage at BravoCon this weekend, she quickly realized it had paid off.
Her appearance was a surprise and the audience at BravoCon welcomed her with a chorus of boos, though plenty of cheers mixed in with them. So in response, Rinna, dressed in Jim Carrey’s suit from Dumb and Dumber, flipped the bird at the audience before taking her seat. It’s like professional wrestling but the tables are doing the flipping instead of the performers.
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The response is likely two-fold for Rinna. On the one hand, she’s coming off what Page Six calls an “explosive season” of RHOBH where a feud with Kathy Hilton elevated beyond allegations about Hilton having a “psychotic break” in Aspen. On the other hand, there is a real backlash from outside the RHOBH world with the American Institute for Cancer Research slamming Rinna and the show for using “the specter of cancer as emotional blackmail to justify airing her grievances” on the show. They also noted that “no strong evidence to support stress being the cause of cander” is out there, adding Rinna had “taken a popular (but likely false) concept” and plopped it out for the viewers of her reality show.
This also stems from her ongoing rift with Hilton, with Rinna making a claim that she might “get sick and get cancer” if she didn’t unburden the gossip about Aspen off her chest. That wasn’t the only ailment she claimed to be experiencing. “But it’s hard to get past what I had just been through with Kathy. I am very, very in shock still. And I am putting on a brave face because I feel PTSD,” Rinna said, adding more later in the episode. “I’m still really upset after what happened in Aspen. I can’t sit here any longer…I am really trying, but I feel like I have seen the devil. And her name is Kathy Hilton.”
Hilton was not at the BravoCon panel, but Rinna did join Crystal Kung Minkoff, Dorit Kemsley, Sutton Stracke, Kyle Richards, Garcelle Beauvais and Erika Jayne, with Jayne offering up a reaction to Rinna’s appearance and the drama on the show.
“There’s no consoling Rinna. We are here in a live audience, and people do that. You get cheers, you get boos,” Jayne said. “And that’s part of being a performer. She’s a performer. She knows what it is. We all know what this is, so the audience is allowed to feel whatever way they want to. Clap and boo. That’s part of a live audience.”
Rinna did not seem too upset at the boos. They actually seemed to wash over her as she joined the panel.
