When Kenya Moore first joined the cast of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” in season five, she and NeNe Leakes were friends.
Leakes was launching an acting career that included roles on “Glee” and “The New Normal,” and Moore had appeared on several TV shows as well as a handful of movies including “Waiting to Exhale.”
They also bonded over their shared disdain for former cast member Phaedra Parks, with whom both women had had a falling out.
But things between the women got rocky when Leakes invited Moore’s former boyfriend, Walter, to her second marriage to husband Gregg Leakes, causing Moore to skip the event entirely.
The quarrel escalated when a pregnant Moore attended an event hosted by cast member and former model Cynthia Bailey, and learned that Leakes said Moore appeared as if she were about to “give birth to a buffalo.”
The relationship between the two has gotten so contentious that on Sunday’s episode during the final days of a cast trip to Greece, Leakes came close to spitting on Moore, and neither woman seemed interested in spending any time together mending any fences despite efforts by both Bailey and Kandi Burress to help them reconcile.
When Moore finally admitted that the comment regarding baby Brooklyn was at the heart at her problems with Leakes, Leakes apologized.
“I would never say anything where her child is concerned. When you beef, you start saying all kinds of stuff to each other. I didn’t even realize I had said that,” she told Moore.
Leakes had also attempted to talk to Moore about her marriage troubles at the start of the trip, so after Leakes again tried to make amends for the comment regarding Brooklyn, Burress lost her patience when Moore refused to let go of her grievances and was quick to remind her friend that she’d faced much more serious accusations and gotten past them.
At the end of season nine, Burruss was accused by Porsha Williams that Burruss and her husband, Todd Tucker, had planned to drug her and date rape her at their home, a rumor that left Burruss stunned. When it was revealed that is was Burruss’s former friend Phaedra Parks who had started the rumor, Burruss was horrified.
“I was shocked, angry, disgusted… I could go on,” she told Bravotv.com in an interview following the explosive reunion revelation. “Even with everything that had happened between me and Phaedra, I still didn’t think Phaedra would go so low as to tell someone that I wanted to drug them. Being an attorney, you would think she wouldn’t intentionally spread defamatory false statements about someone. The sad thing was that she didn’t even seem sorry for what she had done. I was thinking, ‘Damn, was there a reason to hate me this much?'”
Did y’all watch #RHOA tonight? I thought it was a great episode. What did y’all think? I’ll post my #SpeakOnIt tomorrow. https://t.co/E2xePQ27Jn
— Kandi Burruss (@Kandi) March 23, 2020
As Moore struggled to let go of her anger toward Leakes, Burruss reminded her that she was able to forgive Williams for spreading the rape rumor instigated by Parks, who was fired from the show following the incident, and said that Leakes can’t continue to apologize again and again.
“If we’re trying to have a conversation where we are trying to clear the air, she can’t keep apologizing for the same thing,” Burruss told Moore. “If you said that’s the thing that made you so upset, are you going to accept the apology about Brooklyn or not?”
Both Leakes left the table, leaving the feud still unsettled.
