“I called them up and I’m like, ‘What the f–k? I can’t believe you came in here and literally stole from my store.'”
Bobby Berk says he’s “very picky” about the celebrity clients he chooses to work with — and from the story he shared about a New York Housewife, he has every reason to be.
While appearing on “The Jenny McCarthy Show” Thursday, the “Queer Eye” star opened up about his hesitation with working with Hollywood clients, claiming a “Real Housewives of New York” star once “literally stole” from him.
“We have a few celebrity clients that we’re working with, friends of mine,” Berk, 38, told McCarthy. “Because of the show, I don’t really have a lot of time to take on individual clients since the one’s we’re working on are my friends, we’ve been doing it.”
“Celebrities can be a pain in the ass sometimes,” he continued, to which McCarthy laughed in agreement. “A lot of times there can be some that expect everything for free.”
Berk then recalled the negative experience he shared with a mystery “RHONY” star, who he never mentioned by name.
“I had a New York Housewife come into my store years ago in New York, and [she] was like, ‘Oh, I’m buying this new place.’ Turns out, of course, she wasn’t buying it. She didn’t even own the last one she had on the show that she said she owned,” he said. “She’s like, ‘I want you to come in and design it all. I’m gonna put you on the show.’ And I wasn’t on TV yet. I still kind of liked the Housewives, so I was like, ‘Oh, OK, but just so you know, I’m not doing it for free. I don’t need to do it for free. I don’t necessarily know if the Housewives is really the exposure I want anyways, so I’ll do it for you at cost.’ And she’s like, ‘OK, OK, that works.'”
“Then her husband calls and her husband’s like, ‘No, you just really need to do this for free,’ and tried to bully me into doing it for free,” Berk continued. “Finally I was like, ‘You know what? I’m not only not doing it for free, I’m not doing it anymore. I don’t need this.’ She came into my store the next week when I wasn’t there and told my staff that I had said she could take anything out of the store that she wanted to design her house for the shoot and here was her credit card and ‘If I don’t bring anything back, if I like something, you can just charge the credit card.’
The interior designer said his staff wasn’t informed about the “drama” with the reality star.
“They gave her whatever she wanted. She cleaned the store out,” Berk claimed. “Months and months later, there were certain things in inventory that I was looking for — I was like, ‘Hey, where is this?’ … They’re like, ‘Oh, they’re at blah-blah-blah’s house.’ And you could tell by the way they paused that they knew they had f–ked up. They knew they had been scammed. Because apparently, months went by and they called and they called and they called, and when they could not get any response, they tried to charge the card, and of course, it was declined.”
Berk then recalled confronting the Housewife on the phone, saying, “So I called them up and I’m like, ‘What the f–k? I can’t believe you came in here and literally stole from my store.'”
The Netflix star claimed the Housewife then threatened him.
Berk alleged, “They said, ‘You know what? Then let’s go to court. This’ll be good TV. It’s easier for us just to have our lawyer deal with it than it would be to actually pay you.'”
“If you’re somebody in this industry, I need to really know you,” Berk concluded. “Because when I first met this person, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s great.’ But I didn’t really know her. I’m very picky about the type of clients that we work with now — especially in Hollywood.”
Though it’s unclear which “RHONY” star Berk was referring to, a source told Us Weekly that the Housewife was Aviva Drescher, who starred on Season 5 and 6 of the Bravo series from 2012 to 2014.
In fact, back in 2014, Berk called Drescher a “con artist” on Twitter.
“Oh @AvivaDrescher, UR such a con-artist,” he tweeted in September 2014. “Guess I’m not the only one you F’ed over. So pathetic!”
