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Bethenny Frankel is clapping back at Carole Radziwill after her former friend and Real Housewives of New York City castmate suggested former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was behind the infamous photo of Tom D’Agostino Jr. kissing another woman while engaged to Luann de Lesseps.
Years after Bethenny debuted the photo during a season eight cast trip to Miami, Carole appeared on Heather McDonald‘s podcast, where she suggested it was Michael, a friend of Bethenny’s late-fiancé, Dennis Shields, who forwarded the image of Tom to the Skinnygirl mogul.
“We were all suspicious. … At the time, I was like, ‘There’s just no way Bethenny happened to have a friend — she doesn’t have a lot of friends — and one just happened to be at The Regency, like, on a random Tuesday night, and Tom would walk in with an ex-girlfriend and kiss at the bar,’” Carole said on the August 10 episode of Juicy Scoop, via Us Weekly. “It just seems so implausible and unbelievable. But it’s, like, a storyline. And there’s a photo.”
Looking back, Carole said Bethenny told her Luann and Tom’s engagement was “fake” — but that she couldn’t share why until the RHONY trip.
“A friend of hers knew the girl and was told that they still kind of see each other and hook up and on and on and on,” Carole explained. “So she said, ‘Next time that, you know, that it’s gonna happen, let me know.’ So she was told that Tom was gonna be there on that Tuesday night at 10 o’clock with the ex-girlfriend and they were gonna [do] whatever. … I could never figure out the piece of, like, who took the photo.”
Then, months ago, Carole had dinner with a friend, who invited Michael to their outing.
“He’s like, ‘I know you.’ and I’m like, ‘You don’t know me.’ He goes, ‘I know you. I met you 10 years ago with Aviva Drescher. … I know all those effing Housewives.’ … He gets Harry Dubin on the phone,” Carole recalled. “Then we started talking about Tom or the wedding. And he’s like, ‘Oh, please. … Of course, I know Tom, who do you think took the picture?’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what do you say?’ And he goes, ‘Who do you think took the picture [at] The Regency?’ Michael Cohen!”
“He said, ‘I took the picture.’ … [He said] Tom eventually knew that Michael Cohen had taken the photo that ended up being forwarded to Bethenny and ended up being on the show,” she continued, adding “allegedly” to the account. “This is what he was telling me. … I thought, actually, production had set something up, but in a million years, I would not have thought that Michael Cohen was gonna sit down at dinner and, like, tell this whole story about how he took the picture.”
As RHONY fans will recall, Bethenny was accused of a “set up” before Luann ultimately chose to forgive her then-fiancé, who she married on New Year’s Eve 2016 — before splitting from seven months later.
While Carole claimed it was Michael who took the photo of Tom, Bethenny said otherwise in a clip shared to her TikTok account.
“Only because I love you and because many of you have asked me in the comments will I comment on something so insignificant and so stupid, and it is that no, Michael Cohen did not take the photo at the Regency of Tom,” she stated. “The woman who did take the photo at the Regency is texting me right now on this very phone, just sent me our original text and the photo, and it was the photo, and underneath it, it said, ‘Maybe you should make different New Year’s Eve plans.’”
“People should not quit their day jobs, and you need to trust and check your choices because it’s dangerous to listen to just anybody spew their mouth off about something they know nothing about,” she added.
The Real Housewives of New York City season 14 airs Sundays at 9/8c on Bravo.