The rumors are… not true! Summer House star Paige DeSorbo is shutting down speculation that she and fellow Bravo-lebrity Craig Conover (of Southern Charm fame) are an item after filming their new spinoff/mash-up series, Winter House. Bravo’s best internet detectives were sure something was happening between the two after Paige popped up in Craig’s city, Charleston, South Carolina, just after shooting the Summer House season 5 reunion a couple weeks back. Now, Paige says meeting up with Craig was nothing but a coincidence.
“Craig and I are a thousand percent not dating,” Paige tells Amanda Hirsch on the latest episode of Dear Media’s Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast. “I planned this trip actually, because my brother and his girlfriend were going away for her birthday and they were going to go to Miami and then they were like, ‘You know what? Let’s go to Charleston. Like, everything’s fully open.’ And it just happened to land on the weekend of our reunion.”
Paige’s Summer House/Winter House co-star Ciara Miller tagged along for the getaway, which added fuel to the rumors that she is dating Craig’s pal/fellow Winter House-r Austen Kroll (rumors she shut down with ET around the time of the trip).
“Ciara was in New York and I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to get on a flight with me, like, Saturday morning and go to Charleston?’ And she was like, um, yes,” she explains. “So Austen wasn’t even there Saturday night, and … of course Craig is like very accommodating. And when he found out we were coming, he was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m planning the whole weekend.’ And we hung out with him the whole time.”
“Craig and I have known each other for years because he came to the house like two, two years ago,” Paige continues. “So we’ve always gotten along. We’ve always been friends. We have, like, very similar personalities, but we are not romantically involved or anything, but we are very good friends.”
When Amanda brings up anonymous tips sent to Instagram gossip accounts like DeuxMoi (and even Amanda’s own page) about Paige and Craig’s flirty nature, Paige says people are reading too much into what they may or may not have seen.
“We were drunk the whole time,” Paige admits. “People saw whatever they saw, but like, it wasn’t — it was blown way out of proportion. And like, a lot of people were coming up to us, ’cause they think it was just the fact that the four of us were all together that it looked like, ‘Oh my God! They’re, like, dating.’ But there were so many other friends around us and we just happened to be blackout drunk every single night.”
Paige also notes that, as far as she knows, Craig is still with his girlfriend of nearly a year, Natalie Hegnauer.
“His relationship status is like none of my business, but I would never like disrespect a girlfriend or anything,” she says. “And I don’t know her, but I don’t need to know her too. Disrespect that, so it, nothing like that happened at all.”
“Craig is very respectful,” Paige adds. “He would never cheat on a girlfriend, and like, he certainly would never cheat on a girlfriend with me. And, and so none of that happened.”
Paige recently got out of her own longterm relationship with restauranteur Perry Rahbar. The end of their romance is playing out in the final episodes of Summer House’s fifth season.
“I’m excited for people to see, really, my real feelings documented through six weeks, ’cause there were a lot of times I was like, I’m crazy. This man is perfect and I am the one that’s messed up, which is true,” Paige shared with ET ahead of the season. “A break up is never easy [and] there were times I was like, this is insane. There were times I was like, maybe I’ll move to Bali and change my name.”
“When we broke up, I think we took the appropriate amount of time to be apart — and he lives in Miami and I live in New York, so we’re not running into each other — but we always knew we were gonna be in each other’s lives forever,” she added. “We text now. He’ll call and check in. We’re still very good friends, we still have that love and respect, but I think we’re both very happy with our current situations. He will be in my life forever… unless I f*** it up. You never know! Season 6?”
