NeNe Leakes is always there for a good feud. But with the Real Housewives of Atlanta reunion taped virtually from all of the cast members’ homes due to the coronavirus quarantine, she had the option of bailing with ease by just walking away from her computer. The 52-year-old was there for parts one and two of the taping, but skipped out on part three when her former friend Yovanna Momplaisir appeared to discuss the “snakegate” audiotape scandal from during season 12.
Cast mate Kandi Burruss, 44, tells HollywoodLife.com in an EXCLUSIVE interview why she thinks NeNe abruptly left the reunion. “She definitely left because of Yovanna. Let’s be clear — regardless of how me and her argue or she argues with anybody else. She definitely can handle herself in an argument, let’s be clear. She had already told the world she was planning on reading us that day, so it wasn’t because she was arguing with us. As a matter of fact in the moment that she got up to walk away, we weren’t even talking to her anymore,” Kandi explains.
“So it wasn’t like anything that happened in that moment to make her get up and walk away. What had happened was that Yovanna had posted a video on social media to kind of let people know that she was about to come on. And NeNe was told by whoever was on her team, or whatever or she saw or whatever, and that’s what made her get up and walk away. She didn’t want to deal with her,” Kandi continues.
“I don’t know. I’m not her. I cannot say why she didn’t want to deal with her. But she did not want to go back and forth with Yovanna, I guess, on the reunion so she got up and walked away. We were all kind of upset by that obviously. There were other things that were still left to discuss. There was still other things that they had to talk about that actually happened on the show, that didn’t happen off camera. So I just didn’t understand why she would get up because of Yovanna,” Kandi reveals.
When Yovanna came on during the reunion, she admitted her part in “snakegate” during season 12, in which Cynthia Bailey, 53, kept trying to determine who had allegedly recorded her saying unkind things about NeNe. Yovanna declared, “I’m here to clear my name,” and then openly implicated NeNe. “Not only did she ask me to record Ms. Cynthia Bailey, but she told me she wanted me to record every single body that’s sitting right here. She wanted proof that everybody else is equally talking s**t about her the way she talks s**t about everybody else.” Ouch!