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Venita Aspen and Salley Carson reflected on their season 11 tension after last week’s episode of Southern Charm.
After Craig Conover, 36, was seen informing Salley, 30, that he wasn’t interested in dating, despite the signs he seemed to be displaying, Venita, 32, explained why she felt that Salley wasn’t being a “girl’s girl” as Salley targeted Venita’s hypocrisy, as well as her overbearing and “controlling” ways in their friendship.
“Salley’s not not a girl’s girl. She was not a girl’s girl to me in the moment that I called it out,” Venita clarified on the January 14 episode of the Southern Charm: After Show. “It’s not that you aren’t that 363 days, but the 365, all the sudden I lost you, and I felt like in those moments you weren’t being a girl’s girl and I called it out.”
According to Venita, she felt that because she and Salley were so close, it was important for the two of them to have “hard conversations.”
“She is someone I considered to be a good friend, so that means the conversations aren’t going to be easy, happy, and go lucky. They’re gonna be hard,” she explained.
Meanwhile, Salley said she didn’t really understand the idea that she was breaking girl code by pursuing Craig, even though Venita, who previously feuded with Craig, warned her against it.
“How many guys have we dated that our friends don’t necessarily agree with?” she wondered. “I know that they had beef, but she never dated him … Also, who stuck by her with the [Jarrett “JT” Thomas] thing? Venita wanted to still date him, and I’m like … ‘If you like this guy, I will try to like him for you,’ and then, since the Craig thing happened, I’m like, ‘Did you forget all of that last summer because I stuck by you the entire time.’”
“I think that is maybe slightly hypocritical on her part,” Molly O’Connell, 37, replied, adding that Venita may have been acting “from a place of hurt.”
Venita then recalled her past fling with JT, admitting that everyone was saying, “Don’t do it.”
“I was like, ‘Guys, I see such a different version of him,’ down to Salley,” she shared. “Salley was like, ‘But if you like him, whatever,’ so that’s why I always kind of like, ‘One, he just got out of a relationship, two, he’s bad mouthing your best friend, three, are you sure this is the person you want to rush into? The stove is hot. Don’t touch it.’”
Because Venita went against her friends’ advice but shamed her for doing the same, Salley said, “I do think she was a little bit hypocritical.”
As for the curfew Venita gave her with Craig, Salley felt it was “insane.”
“I would be at Craig’s house, not doing anything … and she’s like texting me like she sees my location,” Salley explained. “She’s gotten better, but she, for a good bit of the summer in our friendship, was very overbearing and a little bit controlling. It was a lot.”
In her defense, Venita said she wanted Salley to “be safe” and not “do anything” she’d regret.
Still, Salley noted that her “controlling” antics didn’t stop with Craig.
“When me and [Charley Manley] started hanging out a lot, she got a little jealous,” she shared.
Looking back, Venita said it was heartbreaking to suffer a falling out with Salley.
“I love that girl,” she stated. “Salley and I became friends so instantly, and when you’re an adult, that is not an easy thing to do … to make a friend so quick as an adult and then a year later to basically lose that friendship, it was kind of like, oh, cuz it happened so easily. So it pulls on the heartstrings.”
During another segment of the After Show, Venita and Salley reflected on their spat at Madison LeCroy‘s sleepover, which resulted in Venita making an early exit.
“It just very felt like [an] ‘I told you so’ moment,” Salley alleged of the moment in which she and Venita came face-to-face after she was friend-zoned by Craig. “I am the kind of girlfriend that will say, ‘I don’t like your boyfriend, but if sh*t does hit the fan and you do see what’s going on or you do see him for his true colors, I’m going to be right f*cking there.’ And when she saw the true colors of JT, I never once went to her house and said, ‘I told you. I told you so.’”
While Venita admitted that part of her was happy to be vindicated when it came to her concerns about Craig, she said she was also sad to see Salley hurt.
“I was like equal parts happy and sad because it was almost like, ‘Yeah, I won.’ But then it was like, ‘Damn, like my best friend liked him, and like here he goes doing exactly what I thought he would do,’” she recalled.
According to Venita, she wanted to protect Salley, so she didn’t have to go through unnecessary “B.S.” But as Salley explained, it felt more like Venita was abandoning her when she told her she wouldn’t be there for her when Craig tossed her aside.
“I know she’ll always be there, but it’s something that you never want your best friend to say to you,” she noted. “My biggest thing is I expect friends to treat me the way that I treat them. And then I get disappointed, because I don’t get it back. And I feel like that’s what was happening with Venita.”
“I’m just here wanting to have my best friend be by my side and through it all with me. Instead, she’s just kind of leaving me,” she added.
Southern Charm season 11 airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on Bravo.