Kyle Richards is having a hard time with Erika Jayne.
As Erika remains in the midst of a messy legal scandal, with millions of dollars owed to her estranged husband Thomas Girardi‘s former clients and creditors, Kyle admitted that she simply cannot understand why Erika has refused to acknowledge the victims on recent episodes of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“I just don’t understand not being able to say, ‘Yes, there are victims. I feel terrible about the victims. They should all be paid and taken care of. I haven’t personally done anything, but I acknowledge that these victims exist,’” Kyle admitted on the September 7 episode of the RHOBH: After Show. “That’s the part that I struggle with, not understanding why she can’t say that.”
Although Kyle pointed out that Erika, who was on medication and had been drinking, “was not in the place to have a calm conversation” and instead became “aggressive,” she also said she believes Erika was triggered by the cast not having her back.
“She feels like she’s in the fight of her life, and she doesn’t like to feel like these women that she spends all this time with are not backing her. But it’s just hard sometimes,” Kyle explained. “It’s very hard because it’s all very confusing, and as much as we want to, there are just certain things you’re like, ‘This just doesn’t make any sense.’”
And Garcelle Beauvais and Sutton Stracke were just as baffled by Erika’s commentary, with Garcelle stating that her co-star likely “said some things” that “she regretted.”
“At one point she said, I don’t even know if they’re really, if they’re victims,” Garcelle noted. “I get maybe her lawyer said that you can’t… My thing is, you can still show compassion, whether you think your ex-husband did it or not, you can say, ‘You know what? What he did is messed up, but I can feel for these people.”
“She cannot use the word victim,” Sutton replied. “He won the court cases, but they didn’t get the money. They were already victims. He won the court case. He did his job. It’s so simple.”
But according to Erika, she wanted her castmates to allow her cases to play out in the court system, rather than cast judgment ahead of time.
“I did keep saying, ‘Let it go in the court. Let the legal process work,'” she shared.
“She said, ’This is not a new thing. This is a process. Please, let them make the decisions. This is the country that we live in. There’s due process. Leave it to the people that it belongs with. It doesn’t have to be here.’ And that wasn’t good enough,” Dorit recalled. “And so the conversation continued, and Erika, you know, she was getting more and more agitated.”
In her own RHOBH: After Show segment, Crystal, who was the target of much of Erika’s wrath during Wednesday’s episode, took a stand for Erika, saying, “I know she has empathy.”
“She shows it to me. She texts me when people are going after me. She’ll text me the nicest stuff. She has shown me such empathy. We’re not talking about innocence, guilt, we’re not talking about any of that. You know that there’s people that were not paid,“ Crystal revealed.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 12 airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.