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Luann de Lesseps Once Reached Out to Dennis Shields for $6 Million
The RHONY cabaret singer reflected on her history with Bethenny Frankel's late on-off boyfriend.
We're only two episodes into Season 11 of The Real Housewives of New York City, but we're learning a lot about the period right before Luann de Lesseps went back to rehab for the second time last summer. In the time before she went into treatment again, Luann shared in this week's episode of RHONY that she was "fixed" on buying a home in upstate New York and needed some help to make that dream happen.
“I had to have it, I was manic. Believe me, I called everybody I knew for $6 million. There weren’t many on the list, and Dennis was one of them," Luann recalled, revealing that she asked Bethenny Frankel's on-off boyfriend, Dennis Shields, to try and help her out. Luann eventually went to rehab in July, just weeks before he unexpectedly passed away in August.
Luann added, “I wanted that house more than anything. I would have sold my soul at that point. That’s how bad it was.”
Bethenny was among the small circle of friends who stepped in around that time and staged an intervention to get Luann and her sobriety back on track. Bethenny also addressed the Dennis situation in the episode, revealing, “That night on intervention weekend, there was an emergency. Luann had been making a lot of irrational financial decisions... She got mad at me and was telling everyone, ‘Bethenny is a bad person because she won’t give me $6 million for this house.' I was like, ‘OK...’"
Eventually, Luann did purchase a home upstate, in addition to keeping her home in the Hamptons, a situation that had caused some drama between the cabaret singer and her children. Luann recently opened up about her love for upstate New York in an interview with Home & Design, sharing, “I enjoy my homes out of the city because I like being out of the city. I’m a country girl at heart. I love sports, I love being on my boat on the water, I happen to live – in those places out of the city – on the water, one on the Hudson River and one on the Cove, the Upper Cove of the Hamptons. I tend to love water, obviously, and search for homes on the water because it’s just therapeutic for me to see water, and calming and zen for me.”
You can follow Luann and Bethenny's journeys back from difficult times this season on RHONY. Preview, below.