WHAT ABOUT ME?

How This TV Star Survived Her Castmates’ Chaos

“Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” fan favorite Britani Bateman gets real about her co-stars’ hazing and why she’s ready for full-time star treatment.

This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack. Subscribe here to read more like it!

One does not necessarily expect a Real Housewife to perform Stephen Sondheim, let alone do so exquisitely.

A Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member belting the forlorn ballad “Losing My Mind” from Follies on a cabaret tour sounds like an elaborate joke, making the reality star the punchline. So, color the audience stunned at Britani Bateman’s What About Me? performance in New York City, as the self-described “thorn in their shoe” menace of the RHOSLC delivered such a rich rendition of a song associated with musical theater greats like Bernadette Peters and Liza Minnelli.

Bateman, who serves a little-sister-like role as a “friend of” the main cast—lovable, if mildly irritating to them—is different from the slew of other Real Housewives who have dabbled in pop music and cabaret performance: She actually has chops.

She first heard “Losing My Mind” when, inexplicably, the woman in the room before her sang it at a Disney princess audition at Walt Disney World. Bateman booked the job as Belle and Ariel while the other woman did not. That wild song choice, however, has stuck with Bateman: “It’s what resonates with me still to this day,” she told me.

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Bateman later performed in the national tour of Miss Saigon as Ellen, as well as TV movies like ABC Family’s 2012 holiday film The Mistle-tones, opposite Tori Spelling. The Bravo spotlight brought back her love of performing; she hadn’t performed with her band since 2019, and before that, she hadn’t done theater in a decade.

Does touring now give her a bug to follow in other reality stars’ footsteps and play Roxie Hart on Broadway in Chicago? Proving her musical theater chops and knowing it’s the superior, more difficult role, she grinned and said, “I’d rather play Velma Kelly.”

I first chatted with Bateman when we sat next to each other at dinner in Salt Lake City, where I had traveled to interview the RHOSLC stars on their home turf, ahead of the airing of what is already the show’s most emotional season: several marriage breakups and the shocking death of cast member Mary Cosby’s son weigh heavily amid the typical explosive drama.

We gossiped with costar Angie Katsanevas, a former frenemy, one could say, of Bateman’s, responsible for the viral moment where, during an argument, Katsanevas insulted her “high-body-count hair,” implying she looked promiscuous.

The two were as surprised as I was that they were getting along so well; several cocktails and far greater issues to worry about than their petty grievances about the past will do that.

Bateman learned from Katsanevas that an impromptu TikTok they filmed together is responsible for Katsanevas’ current strife with former bestie Cosby. Unbelievably, it’s Bateman who now has a solid friendship with Cosby, who previously wouldn’t give her the time of day. “Knock on wood,” she said.

After Katsanevas announced she’d separated from her husband of 27 years, we traded breakup stories. Then, Bateman horrified Katsanevas, who owns a franchise of hair salons, with a story about moving into her new house earlier that day and, scrambling to get ready for this dinner, having no recourse but to wash her hair with hand soap.

The next time I saw Bateman, several days later in New York, she sultrily disheveled my hair while performing an endearingly coquettish version of “Let Me Entertain You” to open her What About Me? cabaret.

She named the show after her hilarious RHOSLC line, which she whined after the cast once again ignored her at a filming event. An alternate title for the project is the Ting Ting Ting tour, referencing her amusing (to audiences) and annoying (to cast) tendency to randomly announce personal news mid-meal by vocalizing the sound of a knife on a wine glass.

This season of RHOSLC finds Bateman on more solid ground with the veteran cast than her previous two seasons, when she was bullied over her on-again, off-again romance with Jared Osmond, Donny and Marie’s nephew. (Cast members cruelly threw a stuffed unicorn Osmond had given her off a yacht during a vacation.)

Her ting-ting-ting announcements routinely drew eye rolls. A sprinter-van trip in which she was accused of filming the cast—which she denies—was so explosive that Bravo fans compare it to cinema. And there’s the much-debated alleged flight altercation in which castmate Meredith Marks was accused of harassing Bateman to the point of tears.

There was a sense, watching the show, that Bateman was a lamb routinely offering herself up to slaughter, so desperate to be around the women and embraced by them that she became even more susceptible to their irked attacks. Yet, as it happens, Bateman is also hilarious, quickly becoming a fan favorite for a personality that, sure, can come off as quirky or ditzy, but is brimming with what I learned is a whole lot of emotional intelligence.

“When I first started, I was kind of shy and looking for validation from the women, from men, from my daughters, from my fans, from the viewership, and now I’m showing up as myself,” she told me. “I feel like I’m walking tall, and I can put my shoulders back and hold my own.”

“I’d spent two seasons asking, ‘What about me?’” she added. “This season, I feel like I get the chance to answer that question.”

She had been insecure, she said, and the other women in the cast could sense that. She was also going through a painful estrangement period from her daughters, which has since resolved.

“I had a lot of social anxiety around these really strong women, and it’s taken me two years to be in this sort of pressure cooker and to resolve my personal life with my girls, thankfully, thank God,” she said. “And to just sort of come into my own, and now they know who I am because I know who I am.”

However one might perceive any flightiness Bateman exhibits on RHOSLC, she’s not an oblivious person. She’s self-aware enough about her position in the friend group to refer to herself as a thorn in their shoe, and fully recognized—and was exasperated by—the pattern of bullying and hazing she endured.

“It never feels good. I think we’ve felt that at some point. It’s a very rare human that hasn’t felt on the outs in a friend group or sidelined or talked over,” she said.

So how was she able to weather all of that, to keep showing up where, at least to viewers of the show, it seemed she often was not wanted?

“That is a really excellent question. My answer has to be my tenacity,” she said. “There came a point in Season 5 for me where I had to make the decision, like, is this worth it? Is this worth the hazing, as you call it? Because this is so incredibly painful and embarrassing, just to show up where you feel you’re not wanted and do it anyway. To stand up for yourself when it takes every last breath of your body to do so.”

“I decided to stick it out and stay the course and stay in this pressure cooker knowing that the benefits would outweigh the pain,” she continued. “And they really have. It’s molded me into a person that I really admire and enjoy being with, myself.”

And things are much better with the cast, too. Katsanevas, Whitney Rose, Heather Gay, and Bronwyn Newport all made guest appearances at her What About Me? shows, the latter despite being somewhat at odds with Bateman during the season’s filming: “It’s hard to say where I am with the ladies because it’s so mercurial.”

Several months ago, Bateman ran into Osmond, and they reconnected after their most recent breakup. Every RHOSLC cast member—and likely every fan—would have told Bateman to run screaming after learning this. So she called Cosby, her former adversary, who had been the only cast member to support her relationship with Osmond in the past.

“She had some great advice, and then a couple of weeks later I found out through the grapevine that she was saying not-nice things about me. I’m like, oh, you just never know.” Cosby’s guidance was to talk to him if doing so would bring Bateman closure. “So I did, and it was actually really good.”

(Rest easy; Bateman and Osmond are not back together.)

There still, however, is no closure about the sprinter-van incident: “I was traumatized.” Bateman told me she was really sending a message to her daughter by showing her a video of where she was traveling as she congratulated her on getting a good grade on a math test. “I’ve never been in a situation like that in my entire life. It felt like I was getting beaten up by a gang.”

As for the alleged plane altercation, “I can’t speak to that,” she said. “Everyone wants to see the plane footage. I wish that there was some. I wish that I had taken some. But could you imagine if I got out my phone and started filming?”

Still, Bateman is nothing if not resilient. It’s important to her. She told me that medical studies say the key to happiness is how quickly you can rebound from a negative experience. I googled it, and there’s more nuance, but there’s definitely truth to that.

Joining the show, as hard as the experience may have sometimes been, was the right decision at the right time; she had originally gone through the casting process for Season 1, but her ex-husband barred her from saying yes as she neared the end. “Everything works out the way it’s supposed to be,” she said. “I might not have been ready for it.”

Now, there’s just one more step to solidify her rise as a Bravo fan favorite and cement her status as an important cast member of the show. To be “given a snowflake” and become a full-time Housewife on the show, not just a “friend of.”

No one should have to announce that they deserved a snowflake, she said, “though you do now that I love an announcement.”

“I show up like a Housewife,” she continued. “I bring my mess. I bring my kids, I bring my dad, I bring my life, and I bring my business. That’s really all that matters in the end.”

Though the sly grin returns: “OK, yes, it would feel amazing to hold a snowflake.”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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