How ‘RHOA’s’ Nene Leakes Moved Past Feeling Betrayed By Wendy Williams and Her Ex-Husband, Kevin Hunter
Wendy Williams and Real Housewives of Atlanta star Nene Leakes may be BFF’s now, but the two were once embattled in a longstanding public feud. Williams often discussed Leakes on her daytime talk show while Leakes would take shots at Williams on Instagram.
Leakes says she believes her former nemesis and her ex-husband, Kevin Hunter, contributed to a talk show deal being pulled from under her during their feud.
Luckily, neither are holding onto what occurred in the past and Leakes now views Williams as one of her dearest friends.
Nene Leakes and Wendy Williams were friends before their feud – what went wrong?
While interviewing with The Breakfast Club, Williams’s former co-host, Charlamagne Tha God, questioned Leakes on her renewed friendship with Williams. Leakes noted that she’s known Williams for 13 years.
The two women got off to a good start but their relationship turned sour when Leakes felt Williams was too critical of her behavior on RHOA during her popular “Hot Topics” segment of the show.
Things came to a head in 2014 after Williams called out Leakes for defacing her $10,000 Hermes Birkin bag. It started after Leakes posted an Instagram photo of her bag customized with her famous sayings, including “I’m a very rich b****” and “So nasty and so rude.”
Williams was less than pleased with Leakes’s graffiti-inked bag and tweeted to her followers: “Hot Question: What do think about @NeNeLeakes defacing her Birkin bag?” She deleted the tweet but not before Leakes saw it and responded in a blog post on her official website. She accused Williams of jealousy over her booming career in acting, hosting and fashion.
Nene Leakes says she believes Kevin Hunter played a role in having her talk show halted and other career opportunities
Charlamagne baited Leakes into revealing more information about how bad things got between Williams and Leakes during their rift. He accused Williams and Hunter of “blocking” Leakes’s potential talk show a few years ago.
Leakes would have been under contract with the same production company as The Wendy Williams Show and despite shooting a pilot for the series, the show never aired. When asked if she believed Hunter and Williams had a hand in the ordeal, Leakes answered yes.
Leakes says that she and Williams have never spoken about the show incident since rekindling their friendship and she’s not interested in rehashing it at all. She also admitted that she believes Hunter was more of the instigator in having her show canceled than Williams was.
“He [Hunter] was never nice to me. She’s not with Kev anymore. I thought he was toxic for her. I’m sure he was the person to go and get it stopped,” Leakes explained, “It was either [him] or Wendy, and they already had money and Wendy’s show was already on..they [the production company] made the right choice, in my eyes I would’ve done the same thing. If I know that this show is already successful, I would just stick with the show that’s already successful.”
Their feud made news not long after the talk show fiasco when Hunter and Williams ran into Leakes at a women’s expo in Atlanta. Love B Scott reported that Hunter demanded organizers of the event relocate Leakes’s dressing room when he discovered it was adjacent to Williams’s.
When Leakes to the stage and made a comment about not following rules aimed at Hunter, he reportedly threw a fit backstage and threatened that if Leakes was not removed from the program, he and Williams would walk.
Nene Leakes and Wendy Williams are now friends despite their past issues
Overall, Leakes says that the experience taught her how backstabbing the entertainment business can get – but she holds no grudges over the situation.
“Sometimes people are intimidated. They think you’re gonna come up and do more than they do. I’m not sure,” Leakes told The Breakfast Club. “But I know that it was scrapped, that’s true. I just… never tried to have a conversation with her.”
After Williams filed for divorce from Hunter, she and Leakes hashed out their old issues. Leakes has since praised Williams for being a good friend to her. On a recent episode of RHOA, Williams gives Leakes words of encouragement on how to handle conflict with her co-stars.
The two spent a lot of time together during the summer of 2019 when Williams was on hiatus from her show. They traveled together often and were photographed by paparazzi often hitting the town in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.
Williams hasn’t said anything about Leakes’s interview with The Breakfast Club – but if there is anything fans know about Williams is that she’ll be sure to discuss it on tomorrow’s segment of “Hot Topics!”
