NeNe Leakes is setting things straight when it comes to her relationship, or lack thereof, with Shereé Whitfield’s boyfriend Tyrone Gilliams.
On Sunday’s episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the 50-year-old Bravo star addressed rumors she had once had been in a relationship with Gilliams.
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“I’m going to be very clear with you guys so you can never ask me again,” Leakes told her castmates during their trip to Barcelona, Spain. “I have been married for over 20 years. I’m very much in love with my husband. Shereé and Tyrone, I’m happy for them. But I’ve never been out with Tyrone.”
“That’s Shereé’s man. … He’s not my man, he’s not my friend, he’s not my cousin, he’s not my neighbor. So whenever you bring up the name Tyrone, direct it to Shereé Whitfield,” she added. “You want to talk to me about a man? Talk to me about Gregg Leakes. ‘Cause I am Mrs. Gregg Leakes and have been for over 20 years.”
The statement was met mostly with confusion from her fellow Housewives, because despite her assertion that questions about their relationship “keep coming up,” no one had ever said anything of the sort.
“I didn’t even say you dated Tyrone,” Kandi Burruss said in a confessional. “Now you telling on yourself. Whatchu do, girl?”
The only person to possibly say something of the sort was Gilliams himself, who is currently in prison for wire fraud, during a call with Whitfield during a recent episode of RHOA.
“Let’s just say this, NeNe would never want to speak anything negatively about me,” he told Whitfield, asking how long NeNe had been married. “She don’t want to go down that road.”
The two certainly have an interesting past, meeting in Miami sometime between 2011 and 2013, when NeNe was divorced from husband Gregg.
“Tyrone admitted to me that NeNe had a thing for him back in the day,” Whitfield said, insisting that nothing romantic had happened between them. “She may not know that I know, but I’ve never brought it up. The way she responded to Kandi, it just confirms it.”
But NeNe insisted on the RHOA After Show “there was no attraction at all” between her and Whitfield’s man, saying she went out on a date with him to get a free dinner.
“Me and this man never held hands, we ain’t kissed, we did nothing like that,” she said on RHOA. “Hell, I don’t know nothing about this fool, okay? I only know a couple of things about the man.”
They also sparked one of the biggest fights in RHOA history.
Last time Gilliams was on the show, he became a massive point of contention when Leakes and Whitfield clashed over booking rates for paid appearances Gilliams was setting up.
“I met Tyrone [when] he was putting together an event in Philly,” Whitfield said, recalling how the deal went down among her, NeNe, Kim Zolciak Biermann and Gilliams. “Low and behold, she starts calling Tyrone where she says Shereé and Kim shouldn’t make the same amount of money as her. Trying to lower my value. You can’t tell him what I’m supposed to make!”
Whitfield confronted Leakes about the problem in season four, when Leakes famously yelled, “I am very rich, b—.”
“It was a huge huge blow up,” Whitfield continued. “It wasn’t resolved.”
Regardless of where Leakes and Whitfield stand now, Leakes has made it clear she wants nothing to do with Gilliams. “As far as me, Shereé and Tyrone is concerned, I have no desire to speak on anything seven years, 10 years, five years ago,” she said. “I think it’s disrespectful to be asking me about Shereé’s man.”
But Whitfield and Gilliams remain strong, with her even calling him her “soul mate” earlier this season.
The Real Housewives of Atlanta airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on Bravo.
Photo credit: Bravo
