Time stood still this Tuesday night when Heather Gay confronted Monica Garcia, season four newcomer to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, over her secret identity: the thumbs behind the Instagram RHOSLC troll account, Reality Von Tease.
If you’ve been watching season 4—or really, the franchise in its entirety—you know that everything has been very heavy-handedly building up to this moment. From the moment Jen Shah was arrested for fraud in season 2, she and her misdeeds have been the planetary body the rest of the Utah Housewives’ storylines have orbited around. With Shah in prison, what would the show even be?
Enter Monica Garcia. Shah’s former “assistant” who spoke to the FBI about the fraud case, was the perfect way to make sure Shah’s evil entertainment value still loomed. Garcia had anecdotes galore about her former employer/friend, and no shame at all in sharing them or exposing the rest of her messy life.
But the thing about Garcia that always made me suspicious as to her involvement in this show of vapid rich women, some of them Mormon, some of them very much not, was that she is not rich. Like, very not rich. Her whole thing was basically feeling like she didn’t fit in with the other women because they’re rich and she’s not. She came off as a fun enough chick, don’t get me wrong, but I wondered why she was the casting answer beyond just shaking things up a little bit. It didn’t seem like the way she was shaking things up (read: antagonizing Lisa Barlow, but then befriending her?) would be enough to save the show.
Until Bermuda, that is. The trip to Bermuda was billed as Garcia’s birthday trip, where she would reunite with her estranged family members there who, according to her, “built” the island. That was all fine and good and predictably chaotic, but it was in Bermuda that rumblings of Garcia’s online habits started, well, shaking things up.
At first, it looked like the blame was going to land heavily on Meredith Marks, who has a history of (allegedly) fishing for “rumors and nastiness” about her castmates, and using shady Instagram tactics—fake accounts, DMing herself from said fake accounts—to reveal them. Garcia attempted to accuse Marks of doing this again, claiming they’d both received DM’s from an unknown source, alleging that Housewife Angie Katsanevas’s family is part of the “Greek Mafia” of Utah.
Putting the ridiculousness of such a claim aside, Garcia’s pot-stirring didn’t quite land. Barlow, who’d been the victim of Marks’s schemes before, got mad at Marks for, like, five minutes, but then they were buddies again, and you could tell that bothered Garcia. It was in this sequence of events that I saw her for who she truly is: the girl who didn’t get invited to the sleepover. We’ve all been there (or maybe I’m speaking for myself). She felt left out, and I felt bad for her.
But what we witnessed when Gay outed Garcia in front of a national audience was a falling of a facade. I watched a previously pleasant, if pitiful, woman, turn into an insult-spitting, profanity-wielding monster. Par for the course on Housewives, you’re thinking—but, no. This was something else entirely. The only other Housewives fight I can think that would top it would be Teresa Guidice’s famous “prostitution whor*,” table-flipping fit. When Garcia called everyone at that triangle-shaped table a “DUMB BITCH” and a “PIECE OF sh*t,” she looked happy doing it. And since then, she’s been celebrating.
So, now the question is, did the producers know? Did they know of her involvement in the account, did they hire her for that reason, did they orchestrate this whole thing?
“The casting team and producers were unaware of Monica’s association with the Instagram account Reality Von Tease, and they had no knowledge of the account when she was cast,” a source told Entertainment Tonight. “While they were aware of her connection with Jen Shah, they were completely unaware of the information that Heather discovered in Bermuda. Heather’s revelation came as a surprise to the producers, much like the unexpected FBI visit at the Beauty Lab and Laser parking lot during season 2 involving Jen.”
Yeah, whatever. This was some of the best reality television I’ve seen maybe ever, and no one even had to cheat on anyone else to make it happen. And when so much of the drama on these shows now happens off-screen, it’s suspicious when it all takes place on-screen so perfectly. Some people think Garcia orchestrated the whole thing herself, but do you understand the kind of Machiavellian savant she would have to be for that to be true? This was White Lotus-level story building. They were all in on it. Obviously they can’t admit to it because that would ruin the whole “reality” thing. Not that I care, because they made something great. Isn’t that why we’re here?
