![]() Part of what made Erika a fan-favorite housewife was how she unapologetically lived the life of a “trophy wife” to a man 33 years her senior. He co-founded the law firm Girardi & Keese in 1965. (Girardi has said he was depicted in the film by actor Peter Coyote.) Girardi also helped families of the victims of the October 2018 Boeing 737 Lion Air crash reach a settlement with Boeing. Tom Girardi was the trial lawyer in the 1993 case against Pacific Gas & Electric Company of California, a case that would go on to inspire the movie Erin Brockovich. I was in a wealthy coma and I wasn’t looking inward.” There are only so many dinners, so many things you can buy. “There are only so many material things you can have before it becomes boring. “I was living Tom’s life,” Girardi told People in 2018. The pair met when the future pop star was working as a cocktail waitress she was 27, he was 60. Her music career, Erika has said in interviews, was spurred by her marriage to the very wealthy and, until recently, very successful attorney Tom Girardi, whom she wed in 2000. Both her sold-out concerts and her famed $40,000-per-month hair and makeup team were featured on the show. A lot of Erika Jayne’s recent success - she appeared on Broadway as Roxie Hart in Chicago right before the pandemic shutdown began in 2020 - coincides with her immense popularity as a Housewife. Her songs “Pretty Mess,” “How Many F**ks,” “Xxpen$ive,” and their ilk have garnered top spots on Billboard’s Dance Club and Hot Dance charts. Like all Housewives, however, to get picked up by the Bravo network, Girardi has a larger-than-life story that warrants cameras following her around.Īway from Real Housewives, Erika is a part-time pop star who goes by the name Erika Jayne. Arturo Holmes/WireImageįor practical purposes, Erika Girardi is one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, a show that’s part of the Real Housewives franchise. Who is Erika Girardi, the woman also known as Erika Jayne? Erika Girardi in 2019, also ostensibly in very expensive hair and makeup. It’s reality, bursting through the layers of TV production and legal artifice. It’s likely why her behavior this season resembles a community theater’s enthusiastic revival of The Glass Menagerie. Her appearances this season have become peculiar, suddenly asking both cast mates and the audience to forget everything she’s shown us about her fabulous life over the past six years. While no one on the show says it out loud, Bravo experts and Housewives watchers alike posit that Erika has sought legal counsel as to what to say on the show to not do further damage. Her cast mates - who the show claims are her very best friends - appear to have been repeatedly blindsided on camera by these events. Instead of avoiding the cameras as she undergoes her divorce and other legal woes, Erika (also known by her stage name, Erika Jayne) filmed multiple episodes this season in which decisions, hearings, and news reports break in real time. The change in tone is the outcome of legal actions taken against Erika Girardi and her husband Tom - chief among them a lawsuit accusing the Real Housewife of using a phony divorce to hide millions of dollars that her ex-husband allegedly embezzled from his clients. Over the past two months, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has morphed from a plandid look at very rich women bickering about petty things - previous tiffs have included being late to a meetup and the adoption and return of a dog named Lucy Lucy Applejuicey - into a show centered more and more on one woman’s too-desperate performance to prove her innocence. Perhaps that’s why when actual reality intrudes on the world of these shows, it feels so alien. And I don’t mind that Bachelor contestants are in it more for growing their Instagram presences than they are at finding true love. I still enjoy the competition of Top Chef even though producers and the network have input on which contestants get eliminated. Like, I still watch House Hunters even though I’ve been informed that the house hunters have already chosen their homes prior to filming. ![]() ![]() To enjoy American reality television, you have to watch with the tacit understanding that the word reality is used. ![]()
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