Meredith Marks showed up to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City's season 4 reunion with notes. Fourteen pages of notes.
"There are still a lot of unanswered questions for me," the OG snowflake-holder confesses to ET of the recently taped all-cast sit-down special. "There's a lot that goes on in these next several weeks that you'll see that unfold, and there were a lot of issues going into reunion, so I didn't really go in anticipating that I would come out covering the full 14 pages of typed notes that I had, so we still have stuff to address, which, you know, makes for a next year..."
Meredith says she could've shown up with "2,000 pages" of notes and still not have been prepared for everything that unfolded that day, as the majority of the cast came face to face with Monica Garcia for the first time since they wrapped filming earlier this year. The newcomer is at odds with nearly every woman on the cast for some to-be-revealed reason that plays out on the now-airing cast trip to Bermuda.
"There is a lot that goes down in Bermuda but overall, it would probably be Monica [who's most responsible]," Meredith teases. She won't confirm whether Heather Gay's season-opening phone call -- a flash-forward to the trip, during which the Beauty Lab + Laser owner says she's "trembling" after learning "devastating news" -- is about Monica, but she's not denying it either.
"That call was a big deal, I think, for all the other women -- probably beyond shocking," Meredith explains. "I had some inkling about some issues prior to that. There were certain things I found out actually, like, 10 days before I left to Bermuda, and then I learned a little bit more closer and closer, so I was shocked -- and I was probably the least surprised of anyone, because I did have some information going into it."
Meredith says there are "some pretty big issues" left unresolved that would make the season 4 ensemble returning intact for season 5 "difficult," but not impossible. The fact that Heather and Monica are now locked in a legal battle over supposed unpaid bills for services rendered at Heather's aesthetics spa doesn't help. Monica is countersuing, claiming she received botched work at the practice.
"She did choose to fight it, as opposed to saying, 'Hey, I screwed up. Here you go, let's end this,'" Meredith notes. "So, yeah, that has a significance to it for sure."
It's no secret Heather and Monica's issues start on that trip, and sneak peeks preview Meredith finding herself roped in. In one scene from the trailer, Heather laments about a "betrayal" to Meredith... and possibly by Meredith.
"It's not about me," Meredith is quick to correct, before adding, "When you think about a betrayal, like a real betrayal, you hope it's not from your inner circle; you hope it's from somewhere outside, but we have seen true betrayal within our inner circle."
Season 4's been a season of rebuilding trust within that inner circle for most of the women, as they found their new normal in a post-Jen Shah world. Meredith started with her one-time bestie, Lisa Barlow, with whom she fell out after season 2's infamous "hot mic moment," in which Lisa accused Meredith of "sleeping with half of New York" and labeled the jewelry designer a "garbage w***e." Expect some updates from these two at reunion, as Meredith admits watching back the episodes proved a bit enlightening. Season 4 was the first reunion she went into having screened every minute of the series.
"I pretty much knew what everyone else was saying, and I was not so sure with Lisa," she explains. "We had kind of agreed to come to each other if we had a problem or whatever, and so when I had heard little murmurings that were surrounding her, and I kept saying, 'No, no, no, we made this agreement, I'm gonna going to stick with what we agreed on, give benefit of the doubt here...' and so I did, and when I found out six, eight weeks later that this has been festering now for two months, and we never had a conversation about it, I was upset."
Meredith's referencing Lisa's reading of Meredith's issues with Angie Katsanevas, which sparked on the cast's trip to Palm Springs, which Meredith hosted. Angie showed up uninvited to that trip, and their disagreement over Angie's attendance led to one of the greater Real Housewives universe's most-memorable dinners: Meredith adopting a wandering, sometimes British accent, calling for security and telling Angie -- in a booming voice -- "You! Can! Leave!" The moment proved so outrageous, Sarah Paulson said on The View she was taking inspiration from the so-called "Palm Springs possession" for her new role on Broadway; Meredith sent her some Meredith Marks Caviar as good luck.
Then, Meredith broke down in tears with Lisa, before suggesting she could bring up "all the rumors" (but pronounced ruh-ooh-mers) and "the nastiness" she'd heard about Angie's husband (huzz-bund), Shawn Trujillo. When Lisa informed the other women of Meredith's comments, they took it as a threat. Meredith maintains she never meant it as one.
"Quite frankly, I was in a state where I was pretty angry and pretty upset, and it was something that I would never gone into anyway, because it was something that I heard that I didn't believe," she explains. "So, that was just a moment of anger, that was just a reaction to her bad behavior and, you know, that's all it was."
While Meredith never revealed -- and still won't reveal -- what she'd heard about Shawn, Monica did share gossip she'd heard around town: that he'd carried on secret, gay affairs, an allegation that both Angie and Shawn denied. Meredith says that's not what she was referencing.
"I don't feel responsible for that; I do feel badly that I had said anything at all," Meredith says. "I wish I had responded rather than reacted, but I'm a human being, you know? I have my moments, and if you keep poking and prodding, I can't promise you what's going to happen, you know? You want to keep coming at me, and I can try to stay calm, try to stay calm, try to stay calm, but I'm human just like everybody else; I have a tipping point, and I can't promise where that's going to land."
Reunion seemed to be positive for Meredith and Angie, though. She says they're "finding footing" after coming to the mutual realization that "there were a lot of people involved who were planting information inside her who were against me." Meredith says she and Lisa are also in a good space after talking through their issues -- including Lisa labeling Meredith "deceptive."
"I find it to be somewhat entertaining," she says of the moniker, which joins Whitney Rose's own term for Meredith: "manipulator."
"When you look at what all goes down, the one thing that I'm being held responsible for are these words in Palm Springs, which basically all I said was, there are rumors out there -- and there are rumors out there about every single one of us!" she points out. "Every single Housewife out there, every single Bravo-leb, let's be honest. Like, it's not that deep. It's not that significant. What I said was it's wrong, of course -- but it was a reaction to Angie's bad behavior towards me, and what’s really interesting is, I didn't get an apology for that. I didn't get accountability for that and yet, I was held to a standard of accountability, and I did apologize for that matter."
"To hold me accountable for my reaction to Angie’s bad behavior without holding her accountable and getting an apology from her is manipulation," she says. "So, go for it. I'm the manipulatee, not the manipulator."
Whitney accused Meredith of being manipulative when she's cornered, noting how Meredith often offers a vague excuse to get out of conflict. For instance, Meredith invoked an unidentified sick child on the trip to Palm Springs while explaining her state of mind and unwillingness to engage with Angie.
"It was something I didn't want to talk about, I didn't want to ruin our trip," she now shares. "I wanted to have fun, but the morning that I was leaving, I had found that I had some messages and some missed voicemails from a friend of mine who had been calling me for a few days. ... I didn't even like notice, and when I listened to her messages, I found out that her grandson had just been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy."
Muscular dystrophy is a group of diseases that cause progressive weakness and loss of muscle mass, with no known cure.
"Above and beyond the obvious sadness you have over hearing that somebody is ill, and especially a young child and all of that, I had terrible guilt within because I had been unavailable," she continues, tearing up. "So, I was really -- all day -- trying to kind of hold all of this in and ... I kept plowing ahead."
"When Angie just was relentless at that dinner, I finally just exploded," she says. "It was such nonsense, too, and I am thinking, I am dealing with something much bigger. Like, I don't even want to talk about this nonsense. That's all it was."
Meredith draws a parallel between that moment and Whitney's fight with Lisa at Meredith's jewelry event, which aired last week. Whitney attended the party just hours after learning her close friend died from cancer, and struggled to entertain Lisa wanting to vent about Meredith.
"I don't want to talk about that stuff the same way Whitney didn't want to hear when she lost her friend Lisa complaining about me to her," she says. "I didn't want to deal. It was the same thing."
Meredith says calling those moments "deflection" doesn't sit right with her.
"I think it is perfectly normal and natural that, if you have a bigger issue going on, that you may not be equipped to deal with the smaller issue at that moment and you can revisit it," she says. "It's not like you're saying, 'I never want to talk about this...' you're saying, 'I'm too heated right now. We're not gonna have a positive outcome, let's do it at another time when we can have a positive outcome.'"
As for where things go from here, fans will simply have to tune in for the final few episodes of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City's fourth season, airing Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo. They can also check out Meredith and her husband, Seth's, podcast, Hanging By a Thread, and -- if they need even more Meredith in their life -- try her new, eponymous caviar line.
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