It’s invaded TJ Maxx. It’s creeping through obscure farmers’ markets. It’s commenting on the presidential election. Bethenny Frankel’s TikTok has found its way into each crevice of the American experience.
Everywhere you look, there’s a new take no one asked for. Frankel is an inescapable parasite planted firmly inside our rotted minds. Was Blake Lively in the wrong on the set of It Ends With Us? Ask Bethenny! She’ll answer by reminding you that Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me…Now tour failed.
Sometimes she’ll spend four minutes telling you how Sia is obsessed with her, even though she doesn’t know who Sia is. A footnote of this TikTok—in which Frankel hugs a glass jar of gummy worms—is that Lady Gaga is a huge fan of Frankel too, apparently.
The Skinnygirl founder was once known as a business maven with a sharp mouth, having left The Real Housewives of New York City at the height of her run and landing a deal with MGM Television and Mark Burnett. After a rocky one-season run for The Big Shot With Bethenny and a terminated deal, followed by an unsuccessful anti-Bravo reckoning, Frankel has found herself a last-resort home on TikTok.
Her videos have veered far from her typical bread and butter, from a plethora of beauty product reviews to off-beat videos of Frankel munching down on a seafood boil in a random hotel room. The Frankel who once lauded herself a reality TV aficionado is now more of a jester, confusing even devout fans with her recent output. Long have we escaped ironic absurdity or tongue-in-cheek playfulness.
The TikTok rabbit hole will take you to places no one should ever go, whether that’s 29 videos covering Frankel’s harrowing experience with the Chicago Chanel store or her trying a body bronzer that veers dangerously on the edge of Blackfishing.
Controversy is the goal, and Frankel’s a magnet to it. Take Frankel’s Aug. 28 video captioned, “Let’s fight with some Italian Americans,” a TikTok where Frankel argues that she’s been gaslighted by Italians and only she knows the correct pronunciation of biscotti (bis-coat-tee). The comment section features many linguistic experts from the Roman empire who alert Frankel to the correct pronunciation, the one you might’ve assumed in your head (bis-caught-tee), even though it falls on the deaf ears of Ms. Frankel.
Facts don’t matter in the land of Frankel’s TikTok. It’s an echo chamber of the highest degree, one where she can say anything and everything without fear of pushback. It’s the logical resting place of a woman who utilized her time on The Real Housewives of New York City analyzing everyone around her while ignoring the avalanche of problems she faced.
It turns out, sometimes reality TV editors actually have your back. With Frankel in charge of the editorial decisions, her TikTok becomes nothing more than a horror show. It’s impossible to look away from, best summed up by this chilling Twitter edit.
Frankel often takes her circus act on the road, showing up to businesses she offhandedly mentioned in a previous TikTok. Camera crew in tow, Frankel arrived at the Round Swamp Farm Market in the Hamptons expecting a welcome parade for allegedly moving “tens of thousands of dollars of product” by saying their chicken salad is good.
Frankel doesn’t get a thank you, nary an acknowledgment, leaving in shambles. It’s disturbing in the most guttural way, made even worse by every single customer who walked up to Frankel and said she’s the sole reason they’re buying chicken salad—a claim that is not supported by the video itself despite the entire experience being documented. Surely that’s just a coincidence.
Off-screen, a Hamptons woman pipes in: “Maybe they don’t know who you are.”
Even Frankel’s former arch-enemy Kelly Bensimon poured salt on the wound, promoting the farmers’ market on her own TikTok, a surprisingly astute jab from a woman who was branded “Crazy Kelly” in the early 2010s. Maybe she really is up here and Frankel is down there.
You may think Frankel’s simply a witty genius poking fun at her own niche obscurity. And it’s possible she doubled down on her podcast as part of the bit. It’s likelier, though, that she’s so isolated from the bounds of reality that she sees the world only through the confines of her yellow wallpaper.
The scariest thing of all is that the more you spend time on her feed, the more Frankel’s jumbled word salad makes sense. Her myopic world of insular Hamptons parties and “come from a place of yes” business advice starts to seem inspirational. Frankel has found a level of self-debasing relevance that even Tori Spelling would consider gauche. She’s either the least perceptive person alive or the greatest grifter this world has ever seen.
After all, only a mastermind would enter a TJ Maxx with a bag of used makeup and try to pawn it off to a confused salesperson. She is a conversation starter, crucially filming her most embarrassing moments and presenting them without a wink to the audience. It’s nuanced, and even daring.
If something happens in the world, it happens to Frankel. Her web truly connects us all. When a man was on the loose in New York City, punching women unprovoked, Frankel wedged herself in the comments of a TikTok to claim it happened to her, too. The next day, she posted a detailed experience of this alleged assault. The zeitgeist exists simply to fuel the next Frankel TikTok. Wherever the wind blows, you’ll find her yapping.
So it’s only fitting Frankel has finally jumped outside department store lines to serve as a political pundit, now that the U.S. presidential election looms near. She hasn’t firmly endorsed a candidate, but she has offered her expertise.
“On both sides, they’re showing their kids, their families, you know, all of these things about each candidate. And I don’t really give a shit about all that,” she says.
“What I care about is who I think can do the best job for the country as a whole based on experience, policy, humanity. An executor,” she continued. “And also think about the people that person’s going to have around them. Because, like the charity example, it’s basically the team, too. It’s not the person. It’s one person. But who’s the team? Can they delegate? And can you trust who’s around them? So first, figure out what your list of pros and cons is, and what’s important to you personally. But are you a team player and are you thinking of the whole country and not just your personal issues, something that personally directly speaks to you. That’s how I think of it.”
She followed that with a four-minute ramble about how it’s good to be married to someone who you disagree with politically, while defending her friendship with a comedian who has spouted Nazi-esque “Great Replacement” rhetoric alongside Joe Rogan.
The original TikTok’s comment section is inundated with Trump 2024 sycophants agreeing with Frankel’s every word, a sociological insight into the minds who have stuck by her over the last few years.
But, when I sat down with a left-leaning focus group of my own, they found her words to be an endorsement of Kamala Harris. And this proves something crucial to the Bethenny Frankel experience. She is the reverse Manic Pixie Dream Girl, so indecipherably inconsistent that, in turn, she becomes a sounding board for whatever you need.
To the RHONY fans who loved her as a Greek chorus, she’s a resist lib who speaks power to girl bosses everywhere. To women who question the authenticity of vaccines and love that Frankel left woke Bravo before they inundated audiences with racially diverse casts, she’s a powerful anti-establishment neo-conservative.
Just like her best friend Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP, Bethenny Frankel’s TikTok could mean anything.
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