‘RHONY’: Luann de Lesseps Says She Still Hasn’t Been Drinking
After a booze-fueled season, Luann de Lesseps from The Real Housewives of New York City shared she still hasn’t been drinking during the pandemic.
Although de Lesseps was not one of the cast members who got overly inebriated this season, she was free to drink alcohol after being on probation following her 2017 arrest. She was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and abstain from drinking alcohol while she was on probation.
De Lesseps began the season with a celebration that she was off probation. She ended up having cocktails with the cast throughout the season, but recently shared she hasn’t been interested in drinking. “I haven’t been drinking during the pandemic,” she told Page Six. “I think if I was drinking, I’d be drinking a lot.”
She simply doesn’t feel like drinking
“At this moment right now, and I’m so grateful, I’m not drinking,” she said on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Bravo’s The Daily Dish reports.
“I just don’t feel like drinking,” she continued. “My daughter’s not drinking, so we’re kind of not drinking together. It’s been really good. Every once and a while I’ll be like, ‘You know what? I feel like a drink.’ And [then] I’m just like, I feel like crap the next day. So I just have decided it’s going to be the dry corona time for me.”
De Lesseps recently discussed drinking again and doing it on television. “On the show, there’s a lot of drinking going on,” she told ET. “It’s about vacations and parties. So it’s really hard to avoid and I don’t wanna make it a thing. I don’t want it to define who I am.”
“For two years I spent on probation, not being able to drink,” she continued. “There’s nothing worse than having some say to you, ‘You cannot have one drink. Otherwise, you’re going to jail.’ That’s a very difficult way to live.” She added that she takes her approach to alcohol day by day.
Alcohol has taken center stage this season
Cast members have accused each other of having a drinking problem. Both Sonja Morgan and Dorinda Medley have been central to the cast’s conversations about overindulging. But also new cast member Leah McSweeney shared that her mother has an issue when she drinks too.
Executive producer Andy Cohen admitted the season of RHONY went off the rails when it came to alcohol. “You know, I gotta tell you, Jackie, there’s a lot of booze this season,” Cohen said on Australian show, Kyle & Jackie O. “The good news is that it becomes a big topic of discussion as the season goes on because they’re all kind of in various stages of being off the rails.”
In addition to de Lesseps, McSweeney shared she too isn’t drinking. She shared a photo of her 90-day sobriety chip on Instagram in June. “It’s been a trippy 90 days,” she posted.
Cohen recently hosted the first in-person reunion with the RHONY cast since the pandemic began. He told the Kyle & Jackie O hosts he’d been running into various RHONY cast members in the Hamptons throughout the summer.
