Katie Ginella is embracing the shade.
The Actual Housewives of Orange County season 18 rookie’s debut season kicked off with a headline-making label from co-star Heather Dubrow, who dubbed Katie “Noella 1.5” whereas talking with ET. That is a reference to Noella Bergener, who exited the present after only one outing as a ‘Spouse — season 16 — following her feud with Heather over authenticity. Neither girl thought the opposite was being her actual self on digital camera.
“I actually didn’t really know Noella, I only knew some of the things the women told me about Noella and so, when she said that, I had to kind of Google it,” Katie confesses to ET. “I think it was meant to be a dig, but I took it as, I don’t know? A compliment. Noella’s gorgeous, she’s funny, she’s smart. She owns her business, so I loved it. I embraced it. I called myself ‘Noella 1.5’ in a post.”
Sure, Katie used the remark because the caption for her premiere get together pics, thanking followers for the outpouring of affection up to now.
“That ‘1.5’ was good,” she laughs, teasing one other name-calling second to come back on the present.
“I love it, and Noella’s hot,” she reiterates. “There’s one name that I get called in the season, but I kind of think its funny. You’ll hear it. It kind of goes on for a couple of weeks, and I kind of love that. But, yeah, so far that Noella 1.5 … and Noella and I have a mutual friend right now trying to get us together for lunch. So we can get a ‘Noella 1 and 1.5’ photo, it’ll be great.”
The rationale Heather put Katie in a Noella-shaped field is because of just a little drama Katie drummed up simply weeks into filming, drama Katie is adamant she thought can be foolish and enjoyable, not friendship-ending. As followers will recall, the women mentioned Heather probably calling the paparazzi on herself between seasons 16 and 17 whereas out at Disneyland together with her household. Footage surfaced of Heather and her husband, Dr. Terry Dubrow, trying fairly loved-up simply after gossip studies popped up claiming the couple was headed for a break up. Heather and Terry denied each the connection rumors and the paparazzi claims, however hypothesis persevered on-line.
“Before I even knew any of these women, I was scrolling TikTok, as one does at night with no kids, and a TikTok came up from GeorgioSays,” Katie remembers, referencing a clip posted in October of 2022 — greater than a yr earlier than she joined this circle — of a Bravo fan/content material creator who was poking enjoyable on the footage.
“He was talking about how Heather allegedly called the paparazzi, so I thought it was funny,” she continues. “I screenshot it, sent it to a friend of mine who is in charge of a lot of the paparazzi operations and … I said, ‘Is this true?’ Like, ‘Settle this for me.’ I thought it was funny, because him and I have such a deep relationship — we’re really good friends, we talk about a lot of celebrities that call him — so it’s just banter, and he responded, ‘Yes,’ and then called me and was like, ‘Why do you want to know this?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, I thought it was funny,’ ’cause we talk about this a lot.”
Months later, when Katie met Housewife Gina Kirschenheiter, she remembered the textual content alternate together with her good friend and shared it together with her soon-to-be co-star.
“It wasn’t like I was trying to dig up [stuff on] Heather,” she makes clear. “It literally came across my For You Page.”
“I wasn’t looking for something, I didn’t come in with ill intent to hurt Heather or look for information on Heather,” she says. “I’m not jealous of her. I’m not obsessed with her. I’m not coming for her. it all just happened, and it was confusing to me all these things that were domino-ing.”
The dominoes come crashing down on Thursday’s episode, as Katie hosts the women for a golf outing gone flawed. Earlier than she has the possibility to attach with Heather concerning the footage, the ladies join the dots for Heather.
“I regret how it was brought up,” Katie admits. “I wanted to have a conversation with her like, ‘Look, I found out this information. I’m so sorry, but heads up, I kinda told a couple of people…’ and instead it did not go that way.”
What occurs as an alternative is a heated chat between Heather and Katie, throughout which Katie presses Heather on mendacity about staging the photoshoot. Heather stands agency that she didn’t name the paparazzi.
“I was hoping we would both laugh it off, ’cause it’s silly!” Katie laments. “I mean, a lot of celebrities call paparazzi, tell them where they’re gonna be, what they’re wearing or whatever it is, and not knowing Heather I thought it was gonna be a silly, funny thing. Gina and I discussed it ahead of time and we both thought it was silly and funny. so I thought that’s how she would take it… but I don’t know Heather very well. She did not take it to be silly and funny.”
“From what I hear, from the other women, she doesn’t like to be caught off-guard, so I think that me catching her in this lie was more than she could handle,” Katie surmises. “Let me just say, if you’re not guilty of something, why are you making it such a big deal? If it’s not a big deal and it’s not … valid, you would just brush it off and be like, ‘That’s just not true. I’m not gonna talk about it with you.'”
Katie “more than 100 percent” believes the data her good friend gave her and stands agency that Heather is mendacity.
“I try my best to resolve with Heather and move forward,” she previews. “I guess you’ll see how that works out for me.”
Heather has painted the paparazzi saga as Katie coming in with a pre-thought-out, calculated agenda to go after her to safe story for the present. She’s made point out of Katie cozying as much as Actual Housewives stars together with Sutton Stracke and Cynthia Bailey forward of signing onto the sequence as proof that Katie needed to be on this world at (presumably) any price. Utilizing Gina, a brand new realtor in Orange County, to assist facilitate a transfer from San Diego up the coast serves as one other piece of Heather’s puzzle.
“This was not calculated, this was not something I tried to think of to be on the show,” Katie hits again. “Sutton and I have been friends for a couple of years, that’s long before I even considered doing Housewives. I moved to Orange County for my business that started, [TeeShots]. My office address is in Huntington Beach, and my two business partners are Huntington and Newport Beach. So, I was driving from San Diego back and forth. I also didn’t super love living in San Diego. So, when I wanted to move up to Orange County for my business, my husband was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it, that sounds like a great new adventure…’ So we were already moving up when I was talking to Housewives about joining.”
Katie notes that Sutton (whom she met by the golf world) is the one who launched her to all the opposite Bravo-lebs she’s now pleasant with, together with Phaedra Parks, Denise Richards and Camille Grammer. She did not exit looking for these friendships, and she or he did not use Gina to safe a spot on the present. She was seemingly already in talks.
“Sutton introduced us,” Katie explains. “Gina took me looking for a few houses in her area, and we talked for five hours the first day we met. She was so much fun. There’s never a lack of conversation with Gina, she’s so great and so, I told her, ‘Hey, listen, I might be talking about joining Housewives and she was like, ‘That’s amazing!’ And so, I told her, ‘Even if I don’t do this Housewife thing, I would still love to be friends,’ and she said the same thing. So we went through it like, we’re just building a friendship organically.”
She, clearly, cannot say the identical for Heather.
“I don’t think Heather and I can care for each other, but we respect on another in a group setting,” Katie muses. “She was kind enough for Mother’s Day to invite us all to a Mother’s Day brunch, all of us — the whole cast, really — and I went and, although it can be a little tense, we co-exist OK.”
“I’m not sure if I [want a friendship],”she provides. “There’s a lot of things said, names called. I don’t know if we ever will have a friendship. I mean, hopefully, down the line we would.”
A comical kink is that this saga is Heather by chance tagging Katie in a photograph, a social media snafu of which Katie nonetheless hasn’t gotten to the underside. Heather claims the lady who helps run her account should’ve been attempting to tag Givenchy, the designer of the gown she was carrying within the put up, and by some means by chance clicked one other account with “Gi” within the title, Katie Ginella.
“This is the craziest part: she posted the photo on her birthday, I liked it,” Katie notes. “She looked beautiful in the photo, and I woke up the next day and the tag, the timestamp, was 12 hours after she posted the photo. Why’d you tag me? What? … To do that, you have to be following somebody or you had to have looked them up.”
Heather’s shot down Katie’s assumption that she was by some means sizing her up forward of beginning filming, after Katie felt snubbed by Heather at a Sutton-hosted occasion they each attended. Sutton additionally warned Katie to not go up towards Heather.
“Well, Sutton gave me that advice kinda after it was too late,” she quips.
Whereas she and Heather by no means fairly discovered their footing, Katie did discover the remainder of the ensemble greater than welcoming. She namechecks Jenn Pedranti, Shannon Beador and Alexis Bellino as being particularly heat.
Her favourite moments to movie, although, got here together with her household. Katie is married to golf broadcaster Matt Ginella. Collectively they’ve a son, Bandon. Katie can also be mother to 3 different children — daughter Kalli and sons Gavin and Maxon — whom she shares together with her ex-husband.
“You’ll see [the show’s] really cathartic for my daughter,” Katie shares. “She had a pretty tumultuous past with my ex-husband, and now considering Matt as her dad, it’s good for her to get it out in a way that feels good for her. We only talk about it if she wants to, but this show got her to bring up a lot of things, and you’ll see more of that.”
“My husband’s been on TV for a really long time, so it’s pretty easy for him,” she continues. “And then my youngest has done a couple of commercials. He loves being on camera, so he thought it was really fun.”
Viewers will meet Katie’s older son, Gavin, later this season; her different son, Maxon, will not make any appearances, as he lives in Georgia together with his father, who opted to not log out on the minor filming. Kalli and Gavin are each of age and did not want parental permission to movie.
Along with sharing her kids’s journey, Katie is, in fact, additionally sharing her personal. Adopted from Korea by a white household, viewers will watch Katie discover extra of her heritage as she brings some much-needed illustration to the franchise.
“Being the first Korean, I just I take a lot of pride in that,” she says. “I remember being a little girl and watching the winter Olympics, and seeing the figure skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi and I was like, ‘I want to be a figure skater!’ And to see that made me felt good. Seeing someone that looks like you is just so– it makes you feel like, oh wow! This is so cool. So, that part is awesome for me. I’ve gotten so many DMs from Asian adoptees and Korean-Americans saying how much it means to them to see Asian representation on the screen. That’s huge.”
“That’s the payment for those times when I’m called a name,” she provides. “I’ll take the good and the bad.”
There’s good and unhealthy nonetheless to come back this season; Katie is bracing for affect till the solid’s journey to London airs close to the top of the season.
“There’s a lot of fun… and then there’s a lot of not fun,” she reveals. “That was a really tough thing. That was a really tough thing.”
The Actual Housewives of Orange County airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo. Episodes stream subsequent day on Peacock.
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