Carole Radziwill was an award-winning journalist when she joined Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City in Season 5. Now almost five years after leaving the reality series, Radziwill is looking back and talking about the one regret she had.
“My one little regret is I did make myself smaller to be on the show,” she told The Mountains in an interview. “I never thought I was above anyone, for sure. I didn’t want to come across like I was above any of the women because everyone had their own different life experience, you know, and so I didn’t want to come across that way at all. And I didn’t feel that way and never did.
Radziwill continued, “But there were a lot of times during a lot of conversations where I could have said, ‘Well, you know, I was in Afghanistan during the war’…‘I was in the Gulf War’…‘I used to spend a lot of time in refugee camps in Cambodia.’ I’d been there, I’d seen that. But I never talked about any of that. So my only regret was making myself smaller to fit in with the women. I think I would’ve been considered much more formidable and maybe even more of a target in some ways. But, in the end, I didn’t want to show off.”
The former ABC News journalist and producer said she had initially joined the show thinking it “would be fun to do” but hadn’t watched the show before. For Radziwill, that meant being on RHONY for six seasons and leaving after the conclusion of Season 10.
Radziwill also said that her mistake was thinking she could “join the circus and that you could leave the circus any time” realizing later that “once you join the circus, and you become a circus performer, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
With Peacock bringing together past and present stars of The Real Housewives franchises with The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, Radziwill pondered on the idea of being recruited for one of these spinoffs.
“Oh, dear…,” she said. “I’d go on a girls trip with the coolest, most fun chick from each city, but I don’t know who that is because I don’t watch Housewives.”
