HILLING JOURNEY

How This TV Star Survives Her Life Blowing Up

I talked to “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Whitney Rose about her marriage ending, her messiness, and “hilling.”

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

A hilling journey is not linear.

As Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Whitney Rose knows, it has peaks and valleys. It can unexpectedly careen left and right until it spirals into a curlicue that can make you dizzy to navigate. But the hilling still happens.

Rose has been a good sport about the teasing she gets for calling her “healing” journey one of “hilling,” owed to her particular Utah accent. Bravo viewers became so fascinated by it that a journalist sought out a linguist to discuss it.

“I can’t hear it,” she told me, as we had brunch in Salt Lake City, just before the new season of the series she stars in was going to premiere.”I think I’m saying healing,” she said, before giving it another take: “Heeeeeling,” she laughed. “I know people poke fun at it, but it’s kinda my thing now.”

Hilling, or healing, is the biggest narrative of Rose’s time on the massive hit reality show. She and her castmates aren’t just reality TV personalities; they’ve become mainstream celebrities. That makes seasons like this one particularly difficult. Just as cameras went up for Season 7, Mary Cosby’s son, Robert Jr., died.

“We found out the first day of filming,” Rose said. “I was in the glam chair getting ready to go to a scene.”

But that wasn’t the only emotional thing Rose was experiencing.

In the current season, Rose confides that she and her husband, Justin, are separating. It’s a bombshell. Of all the Real Housewives relationships that exude the noxious stench of toxicity, theirs always seemed healthy. Justin was supportive, and they always had good chemistry, at least on camera.

On October 6, about six weeks after we had brunch in Salt Lake City, Rose officially filed for divorce after nearly 17 years of marriage.

When we talked, Rose explained to me that she and Justin were “nesting,” which meant that they got an apartment that one of them would stay in when they weren’t at their house with the kids, and then they’d swap, so that the children weren’t disrupted. She confirmed on a recent episode of Watch Happens Live that, after the divorce filing, that’s still the living situation.

“It’s scary to live your real life and go through a separation when you have kids in high school and middle school,” she told me. “I have to make sure that everything I do protects them first. Especially being a public person, and kids at school pull things up, and it’s a lot. It’s a lot of pressure on my kids, and I’m just trying to make sure that I do it the best, healthiest way for them.”

Things are so heavy at the moment, between Robert Jr.’s death and the end of her marriage, that it’s easy to forget that, even outside of those extremely dramatic things, Rose is an excellent Real Housewife. That’s because she is so honest, a true open book. She is breezily funny, to the extent that I even missed how hilarious some of her jokes were until I read them in our interview transcript. And she is gloriously, unapologetically—actually, perhaps, exhaustingly apologetically—messy.

Taking the emotional circumstances surrounding Cosby aside—not to mention the separation—Rose was walking into this season having to navigate landmines. Well, not so much walking into it as sauntering in doing an Irish jig, around landmines that she, as has become her unfortunate habit, planted herself.

In February, Rose appeared at a drag brunch, not an uncommon gig for a Real Housewife. During the event, she imbibed generously in the libations provided and felt not just at home with the crowd, but adulated. Again, not uncommon for a Real Housewife at a drag brunch.

Things got messier, however, when, during a Q&A, she was asked about her relationships with Lisa Barlow and Meredith Marks, her two most frequent adversaries on the show.

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With liquid courage and the powerful glow of gay adoration, she sloppily spilled the tea, calling both women liars, in reference to an infamous incident on a plane where Marks was accused of harassing co-star Britani Bateman. Her insults escalated from there, concluding with the declaration that she “hates” Marks.

The crowd went wild. Filming for the new season, however, instantly got incredibly uncomfortable.

“The crowd was egging me on, and I kept going and going and going and going until I took it too far,” Rose said. “And honestly, in the moment, I didn’t really realize that I had taken it too far. I gave the audience what they wanted. We had a great time.”

If you’re a Bravo fan, you might understand how complicated this situation is. At events like that drag brunch, these women are expected to be entertainment, to transform into the court jester version of a Real Housewife, delivering shady comments to raucous applause, no matter how genuine the opinions may or may not be. All of the women do this; it’s an exaggerated persona. As Erika Jayne famously once said, “I’m a showman.”

But this is 2026. A showman’s act is no longer confined to a room. It is filmed, posted on TikTok, dissected on Reddit, and then blasted in headlines on gossip blogs. And the people at the receiving end of it—in this case, Marks and Barlow—get hurt.

“It can be hard to navigate because I was at a drag brunch where they paid me to be there to, like, entertain and be cunty,” she said. “And trust me, the crowd loved it.” But she understands the impact, and the reach. “I mean, you have to constantly be aware of what you’re saying, who you’re saying it to, because everyone has cameras on their phone.”

She entered the season knowing this was going to become, for lack of a better phrase, “a thing.” And she told me that, in the hungover aftermath, she felt terrible about what she had said and how it might have made Marks and Barlow feel.

There was awkwardness in bringing it up, as the first group filming was to mourn the death of Robert Cosby, Jr. But she did quickly tell Marks and Barlow that she had things to apologize for, and when the timing was right, she would do it properly.

“I went in absolutely ready to take accountability and apologize for my behavior at the drag brunch,” she said. “There’s no excuses. I took it too far, and I felt bad. That’s not who I am, and I know that. I was ready to apologize, take accountability, and show where I could step up and be a better friend, and I was very hopeful that they would do the same.”

Whether they were…well, that’s what’s currently playing out on the series.

There is, however, Rose’s reputation as the messy one who is also, one might say, a cleaning enthusiast. She is quick to say something devastating, and even more swift to apologize. It’s a quality to admire: She is the rare Real Housewife to own her mistakes and genuinely say she’s sorry. It’s also a quality to question: How many times can people forgive one person’s behavior?

The thing is, though, all Real Housewives are messy. It’s in their job description; Andy Cohen would lose their numbers if they weren’t. But there does seem to be heightened scrutiny on Rose when she missteps. When RHOSLC premiered, she was one of the youngest Housewives ever in the franchise. The incessant scolding of her does give “chastising the little sister” vibes. In fact, one of the series’ most iconic moments was when Cosby, while aggravated at Rose, dismissed her as “little girl.”

“I don’t know if it’s because I am so open, honest, and nice, and accountable, vulnerable, if it’s an age thing,” she said. “I don’t know what it is, but it does feel like a massive double standard. And so going into this season, I had to put that aside. I had to put my ego aside and say, ‘They do this to me every year on Twitter, social media, all their shows.’ I get tagged in all of the horrible things they say about me. I could argue there’s been worse things said about me, but the principle is that I feel bad about what I said.”

It seemed like I had struck a chord asking Rose about this.

“These same women have come for my business, come for my marriage, come for my character, how I look, how I dress, like, everything about me,” she continued. “So you could argue that I could be defensive and say, ‘You do it, so I can do it too.’ Out of principle, I would love an apology from them. I would love for them to take accountability once. Like, I would love for Meredith to actually accept an apology, take accountability, change, show up as a friend.”

Optimism is a new color on a Real Housewife.

“I think it’s time that, as a group, we start just saying, ‘It’s okay to mess up. We’re humans,’” she said. “You can be mad about a bath bomb. You can accuse me of selling Alibaba. I can say I don’t like you and rant on a drag brunch stage, but you can apologize and change your behavior.”

In the [redacted] years that I’ve been covering TV and movies, I’ve always said that the mark of a truly likable, down-to-Earth celebrity is that, in whatever short amount of time I’m lucky enough to have with them, they come off as someone you’d want to have brunch with.

That’s what I’m literally doing with Rose, and, maybe it’s because we’re close in age or have the same perspective on what she’s doing on her show—being messy is a job requirement, folks!—the having brunch of it all feels incredibly natural.

Rose is easy to talk to, extremely funny, and, unsurprisingly, a huge gossip. Our conversation about what’s going on in her life, especially the breakup with her husband, isn’t just her dictating careful soundbites, but an actual conversation about what it means to separate from a person you deeply love, who you appreciate as a father, and the difficulty of doing it with kids involved. Sure, she may be wearing a sequined silver minidress and full glam at a sandwich shop on a weekday afternoon, but she does come off as a Real Housewife who is, well, real. (Trust, I’ve spoken to enough to tell the difference.)

She gave me the lay of the land in Salt Lake City, and fantasized about taking me to her favorite bar if I were in town longer. We took the quintessential elder millennial side journey, going deep on real estate and home renovations. She purchased her current house, the one she’s on her “nesting” journey with Justin and her family in, from a gay couple she was friends with because she knew she wouldn’t have to change a thing. When I leave, I am armed with tips on a new hairstyle and, more profoundly, what to expect as I approach a milestone birthday that I won’t say, because my scary age is none of your business.

She even helped me understand something that mystified me from the moment I landed in Utah: Everyone’s appearance was unfathomably perfect.

“It’s truly an interesting place. It’s very competitive and built on perfectionism,” she said. “There’s a lot of pressure on women here. It was just ranked one of the worst states for women to live because there’s a pressure to be perfect here, and it comes from the culture of the patriarchy, keeping up appearances. But because of that pressure, everyone is beautiful. Everyone looks amazing. Everyone drives the same car. Everyone has the same bag. Everyone looks the same here. Have you seen that?”

I have.

I have also seen the noticeable impact of Rose’s “hilling journey.”

She started the show at age 33. She was unafraid to make mistakes. She was open about her hard relationship with her father, who was an addict and often disappeared. She excavated past trauma and abuse, and put it all on camera. She left the Mormon church and, with it, a foundational part of her entire identity. Now, she is realizing it’s time to end a marriage that she fought for, which caused drama in its own right, and is hopeful about what might be on the other side.

That’s the thing I’ve learned about Whitney Rose. She is always hopeful. Some castmates might say that’s to a fault. I found it infectious.

“It’s not just about healing. It’s about living a life of purpose with meaning, and, like, giving back to the earth, and giving back to the universe, to the source,” she said. “I’m a mother, so I’m leading by example for my children, and I am at a very great place in my life. I love where I am. I am so strong, and I’m grounded, and I have a new sense of clarity that I haven’t had before.”

“It doesn’t matter what any of these bitches say about me,” she added. “I know who I am.”

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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