More than seven months after Bethenny Frankel’s ex, Dennis Shields, passed away, the reality star has shared new details from that week. In a taped therapy session, the Real Housewives Of New York star admitted that she had been planning to break things off with her boyfriend before his sudden death, and has been living with guilt ever since. “He had such a powerful force in my life and [was] such a loving person and my daughter loved him that it was this whole thing that was hard to extricate myself from,” she explained in the episode. “But I had just said though that week, I haven’t told anybody this, I had just said the Saturday before [he died], ‘I have to exit this dynamic.’ So then it was a lot on my mind about him dying right after that. I could not get off the ride and I feel guilty that the only way I got off the ride is that he’s dead,” she told her therapist.
The Skinnydipping author struggled fight back tears through the confessional. “Dennis told me, [if] we didn’t work out, he was never going to be in a relationship again. He was going to be alone for the rest of his life,” the SkinnyGirl mogul recalled. “It was a tremendous pressure and it kept me in. I don’t know what happened that night and I will always have to live with that, for whatever that means,” she added.
However, Bethenny did admit that the therapy session was helpful to her. “Now I feel better, and I feel guilty that I feel better, but I feel like he would want me to feel better and I try to make decisions based on what he would want me to do,” she admitted. You can watch the tearful moment below.
Bethenny and Dennis began their on-again, off-again romantic relationship in 2016, but had actually known each other for 30 years. The reality star’s boyfriend reportedly suffered an overdose in his apartment in Trump Tower on Aug. 10, where he passed away. Apparently, he had asked his assistant to administer Narcan at 9 AM after fearing that he was overdosing on prescription pills (reportedly oxycodone, according to TMZ). However, the Medical Examiner later ruled the cause and manner of Dennis’ death as “undetermined.”