If season 12 of The Real Housewives of New York City has taught us anything so far, it's that Ramona Singer has a lot of friends and that she'd kinda rather hang out with them over her cast mates. But, one of those friends has been infiltrating the Housewives group. Elyse Slaine has been popping up on RHONY regularly, and we're only going to get more of her as the season goes on.
We've seen Elyse a few times already. In the premiere episode, she was the one Ramona cried to about being lonely and scared she won't find a new partner. She showed up again when Ramona took the gang to that weird mansion party, where she said Sonja Morgan was her ex-husband's "accessory." Then, Elyse was in the fourth episode, when most of the women got super drunk and trashed Ramona's house. Her comment on that one was, "If this group went into group therapy, the therapist would commit suicide."
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So, who is this Elyse? Well, we know she's friends with Ramona, but it turns out she's been a part of this circle for a very long time. During a recent interview on the Behind the Velvet Rope podcast, Elyse said that she's known Bethenny Frankel and Jill Zarin for ages and that she was the one who introduced them. That means she's part of a big piece of Housewives history. She added that her own ups and downs with Jill were brought up while the current season of RHONY was filming. Elyse has also known Dorinda Medley for years.
On the podcast, Elyse touched on her career, too. She said she previously worked as a financial journalist and then traded mortgage backed securities. Now, she trades cryptocurrency. As for her personal life, Elyse has a 24-year-old daughter and is married. She's also made her share of headlines, including her ex-husband becoming an FBI informant after pleading guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud, and a legal situation involving a former nanny. It's a lot to take in, to put it simply.
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It seems at this point that Elyse is not officially a Friend of the Housewives. There wasn't an announcement about her joining, she doesn't have a bio on the Bravo site, and she hasn't had her own confessional — at least not yet. She could get a mid-season promotion. Back in October 2019, Us Weekly reported that a source said Elyse would have a "prominent" role on the show. "Elyse isn’t a full-fledged Housewife yet; they’re always testing new women," the source said.
And it's true that Elyse is prominently featured in the trailer for this season. She's there when Luann de Lesseps yells at Sonja about her cabaret show. She's there when Luann takes a sip of vodka. She's there at a dinner where half the women are inexplicably in costumes. She also goes on the trip to a pumpkin patch where Sonja pees in the middle of a corn field, but it doesn't look like she goes on the cast vacation to Mexico.
Elyse seems like she's just always sort of off to the side, so it remains to be seen how much she actually gets in the mix. As we've seen, keeping up with these women can sometimes mean throwing lit tiki torches while naked, so it's not the easiest group to step into.
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