RHOBH’s Kyle Richards Explains Why She’s Closer to Teddi Mellencamp Than She is to Dorit Kemsley
Kyle Richards is once again defending her close friendship with Teddi Mellencamp and revealing why it has seemingly taken priority
Lindsay Cronin
Kyle Richards is once again defending her close friendship with Teddi Mellencamp and revealing why it has seemingly taken priority over her relationship with Dorit Kemsley.
After a number of her Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast mates accused her and Teddi of having a “weird” friendship with one another, Kyle appeared alongside Teddi, via video chat, to discuss their friendship and explain why they are so tight.
“I adore Dorit and we have a lot of fun together. We laugh. But you have different friends for different reasons,” Kyle explained on the September 9 episode of the RHOBH: After Show. “Every friend fulfills a different need you have in your life and for me, she’s just like always fun and makes me laugh and have fun. But it’s just a different relationship that I have with Teddi.”
After being joined by Dorit in 2016 for the seventh season of the Bravo reality series, Kyle established a friendship with her. Then, the following year, Kyle established a friendship with Teddi, the daughter of rocker John Mellencamp.
Kyle is Friends With Several Members of the ‘RHOBH’ Cast
While Kyle also shares a number of other friendships with her cast mates, her relationship with Teddi has continued to be a hot topic amongst the women due to the fact that Kyle is so obviously closer to her.
As fans may have seen, Kyle and Teddi have spent a lot of time with one another off-screen in recent years and are currently enjoying a getaway in the Northwest with their children. Meanwhile, although Kyle is also seen off-camera with other members of the show, including Dorit, who she recently vacationed with in Mexico, she doesn’t appear to share the same dynamic with them.
During one particular moment amid The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 10, Kyle was forced to defend her friendship with Teddi to Erika Jayne, who said their relationship was “weird,” and to Dorit, who joked that the two of them had attended couples counseling with one another.
Looking back at the dinner party, Kyle recalled one specific moment in which Dorit was seemingly trying to fuel the feud brewing between her and Garcelle Beauvais.
“Sitting at that dinner party at Erika’s with the astrologer, when Garcelle said, ‘You’ve glazed over me,’ everybody knew that that wasn’t true. And then I said, ‘I think your beautiful and I thought you were great and I thought everything was fine,’ and then Dorit said, ‘Well why do you glaze over her Kyle?’” Kyle shared.
“And now you want to know why I’m closer to Teddi? Like, what friend does that when you know that’s not even true?” Kyle wondered. “And that’s why I turned around and said, ‘Why do you have to be an a**hole?’ You know that’s not true.
“So I love her but I know she’ll do that stuff to me,” she added.
Teddi Finds Dorit’s Behavior to Be ‘Very High School’
In her own segment of the RHOBH: After Show, Teddi weighed in on the ongoing controversy surrounding her friendship with Kyle and accused Dorit of acting in an immature manner.
“To me, it was definitely like, why wouldn’t you want your friends to be close or why do you need to know… It’s very high school to need to know who is the closest, and why. That’s not something that I’ve ever cared about,” she noted.
According to Teddi, she has relationships with plenty of different people and doesn’t concern herself with what those men and women are doing with others. Instead, she realizes that each relationship she has with someone is between her and that person, not that person and their other friends.
“If Kyle was like, ‘Hey, I’m going on this trip with Dorit,’ I wouldn’t be upset. I’d be like, ‘Great, have fun,’ because what does that have to do with my friendship with Kyle?” Teddi asked.
Teddi then said that when it comes to Dorit, she’s chosen to focus closely on her relationship with Kyle and constantly wonder why the two of them are so close, which makes her want to “pull away” from Dorit completely.
Richards Believes Her Friendship With Mellencamp is ‘Rare’
Despite the backlash they’ve received, Kyle said that she’s grateful to have Teddi as a friend and believes they have a “very rare” friendship.
“I think it’s very rare to meet someone and become as close as Teddi and I became. Certain people you meet in life, it takes a long time. There’s people that have been on the show for many, many years that you can’t really get down to the next level with them. And with Teddi, it was very much like a sister relationship,” she gushed. “I would tell her anything. I don’t ever feel she would stab me in the back. I could say anything to her and vice versa. She knows that.”
Although a close friendship shouldn’t be that big of a deal, Kyle said that a lot of her cast mates on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills have found her relationship with Teddi to be strange.
“I didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings because the five of us are so close. But then I was like, ‘What do you care though?’” Kyle said of her cast mates’ accusations and inquiries. “They thought it was weird and then I was like, ‘That’s weird that you think that’s weird.’ I mean, I’m very grateful to have Teddi as my friend.”
As the RHOBH: After Show continued, a flashback moment from season 10 featured Dorit saying during a cast confessional that she is “never going to be Kyle’s favorite.”
In response, Kyle told the cameras, “Maybe she doesn’t understand why we’re closer but it just honestly is [because] Teddi and I have more in common.”
Teddi Mellencamp Has Defended Her Friendship With Kyle Richards on Social Media
During a recent Q&A with her fans and followers on her Instagram Stories, one troll asked Teddi, “Why is your head up Kyle’s a**? Is there anything original about you?”
In response, Teddi offered a snarky clap-back.
“Thank you, troll for joining us and coming up with such an original question. Wow.”
She then said, via Us Weekly, that she was “so far up her a** I could barely make this Insta Story, but somehow I did it.”
During another session with her online audience, Teddi told another fan that she didn’t understand why she was constantly being forced to explain her closeness to Kyle.
“I think that Kyle and I have a real and authentic friendship and I don’t really know why I need to justify that. It is what it is.”
In addition to being friends themselves, Kyle and Teddi’s family members have also bonded, including their respective husbands, Mauricio Umansky and Edwin Arroyave, and their kids, including Kyle’s 12-year-old daughter Portia, who is just five years older than Teddi’s eldest daughter, Slate.
For more of Kyle, Teddi, and their cast mates, don’t miss the third installment of the three-part Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion special, which airs next Wednesday, September 16, at 9 p.m. on Bravo.
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