D’Andra Simmons discusses the unexpected backlash she received amid her COVID-19 diagnosis, reveals her biggest regret from the show, gets candid about receiving hate on social media, and also talks business and fame.
D’Andra is dishing on a wide array of topics in a new interview, but she first addresses the notion that she faked her battle with COVID-19, which some fans apparently accused her of since her diagnosis coincided with The Real Housewives of Dallas season five premiere.
“People that were like, ‘Oh, she planned this,’ I’m like, yeah. So a hospital admits somebody that’s not really sick because they really have the, you know, the room to do that,” she said on the Behind the Velvet Rope with David Yontef podcast.
After beating the horrible virus, D’Andra only wants to look toward the future, but she was asked to share her biggest regret from her time on the show thus far, and she says it involves former co-star LeeAnne Locken in season two.
“When I got really upset with LeeAnne for disclosing my personal financial situation because I was trying to make my business go,” she explained. “Instead of having such a wild reaction to her, I’d probably just have sat her down and said, ‘LeeAnne, I’m really disappointed that you would do that to me. I thought we had a closer friendship.'”
D’Andra added, “Instead of just [screaming], ‘Why’d you do that,’ I think that would have been, that would have set my next two years after that on a different trajectory. So now people are having to kind of, they’re looking back at that and now they’re getting to know the other side of me, knowing that I should have done things a little bit differently, and hopefully I will.”
The Hard Night Good Morning CEO says many fans still view her as “angry,” with some even referring to her as “D’Anger” on social media, but she claims it’s a huge misconception. Nevertheless, she admits that reading the hateful comments had a traumatic effect on her for several years.
“Oh, I was in a puddle of tears for the first, almost three years of the show,” she recalled. “As soon as I started fighting with LeeAnne, I was getting castigated, and chastised, and criticized, and bashed online. And it really got to me. And I just, at one point, I thought I was gonna have a breakdown because it was so much, but then I learned how to not worry about that stuff.”
“My mother said – she gave me a good compliment the other day,” she continued. “She said, you’ve gotten to where you don’t care anymore. Now, I care if there’s a reason to care. So if somebody gives me a good criticism and you think, ‘Hmm, you know, that’s probably right. I should have done that.'”
As for the fans who call her a “poor little rich girl,” the Dallas native says they don’t have their facts straight. Though she admits her mother, Dee Simmons, has helped her from time to time, D’Andra claims she’s put $700,000 of her own hard-earned money into her struggling business. She also claims that Dee is finally owning up to the poor business decisions she herself made that contributed to the company’s financial issues.
“[They] don’t know the history of the business for 25 years, and when my father passed away, how it was going down, down, down, down. And I didn’t know, because I wasn’t allowed to see the books. Now, the only reason my mother gave me $100,000, was because I came to her with proof that she had made some bad business decisions. And therefore that is why, not only COVID, but because of her bad business decisions, that is why I am in the [spot] I’m in now.”
Just for fun, D’Andra was also asked to name a RHOD cast member who has allowed fame to go to their head, and though she shades some of her former co-stars, she says the current cast is pretty down to earth.
“I don’t really think we’re, at this point, a group of fame whores,” she stated. “I think we’ve had, like, we have a nice balance on our cast and people who enjoy being in the spotlight that maybe don’t take themselves too seriously. So I’m just going to say that as you know, previous years we had some people that really enjoyed the fame, and they let it get to them and think they were bigger than life. And we don’t really have that anymore.”
The Real Housewives of Dallas airs Tuesday nights on Bravo at 9/8c.
Photo Credit: Charles Sykes/Bravo