Katie Ginella is embracing the shade.
The Real Housewives of Orange County season 18 rookie’s debut season kicked off with a headline-making label from co-star Heather Dubrow, who dubbed Katie “Noella 1.5” while speaking with ET. That’s a reference to Noella Bergener, who exited the show after just one outing as a ‘Wife — season 16 — following her feud with Heather over authenticity. Neither woman thought the other was being her real self on camera.Â
“I actually didn’t really know Noella, I only knew some of the things the women told me about Noella and so, when she said that, I had to kind of Google it,” Katie confesses to ET. “I think it was meant to be a dig, but I took it as, I don’t know? A compliment. Noella’s gorgeous, she’s funny, she’s smart. She owns her business, so I loved it. I embraced it. I called myself ‘Noella 1.5’ in a post.”
Yes, Katie used the comment as the caption for her premiere party pics, thanking fans for the outpouring of love so far.
“That ‘1.5’ was good,” she laughs, teasing another name-calling moment to come on the show.
“I love it, and Noella’s hot,” she reiterates. “There’s one name that I get called in the season, but I kind of think its funny. You’ll hear it. It kind of goes on for a couple of weeks, and I kind of love that. But, yeah, so far that Noella 1.5 … and Noella and I have a mutual friend right now trying to get us together for lunch. So we can get a ‘Noella 1 and 1.5’ photo, it’ll be great.”
The reason Heather put Katie in a Noella-shaped box is due to a little drama Katie drummed up just weeks into filming, drama Katie is adamant she thought would be silly and fun, not friendship-ending. As fans will recall, the ladies discussed Heather potentially calling the paparazzi on herself between seasons 16 and 17 while out at Disneyland with her family. Pictures surfaced of Heather and her husband, Dr. Terry Dubrow, looking quite loved-up just after gossip reports popped up claiming the couple was headed for a split. Heather and Terry denied both the relationship rumors and the paparazzi claims, but speculation persisted online.Â
“Before I even knew any of these women, I was scrolling TikTok, as one does at night with no kids, and a TikTok came up from GeorgioSays,” Katie recalls, referencing a clip posted in October of 2022 — more than a year before she joined this circle — of a Bravo fan/content creator who was poking fun at the pictures.
“He was talking about how Heather allegedly called the paparazzi, so I thought it was funny,” she continues. “I screenshot it, sent it to a friend of mine who is in charge of a lot of the paparazzi operations and … I said, ‘Is this true?’ Like, ‘Settle this for me.’ I thought it was funny, because him and I have such a deep relationship — we’re really good friends, we talk about a lot of celebrities that call him — so it’s just banter, and he responded, ‘Yes,’ and then called me and was like, ‘Why do you want to know this?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know, I thought it was funny,’ ’cause we talk about this a lot.”
Months later, when Katie met Housewife Gina Kirschenheiter, she remembered the text exchange with her friend and shared it with her soon-to-be co-star.
“It wasn’t like I was trying to dig up [stuff on] Heather,” she makes clear. “It literally came across my For You Page.”
“I wasn’t looking for something, I didn’t come in with ill intent to hurt Heather or look for information on Heather,” she says. “I’m not jealous of her. I’m not obsessed with her. I’m not coming for her. it all just happened, and it was confusing to me all these things that were domino-ing.”
The dominoes come crashing down on Thursday’s episode, as Katie hosts the ladies for a golf outing gone wrong. Before she has the chance to connect with Heather about the pictures, the women connect the dots for Heather.
“I regret how it was brought up,” Katie admits. “I wanted to have a conversation with her like, ‘Look, I found out this information. I’m so sorry, but heads up, I kinda told a couple of people…’ and instead it did not go that way.”
What happens instead is a heated chat between Heather and Katie, during which Katie presses Heather on lying about staging the photoshoot. Heather stands firm that she did not call the paparazzi.Â
“I was hoping we would both laugh it off, ’cause it’s silly!” Katie laments. “I mean, a lot of celebrities call paparazzi, tell them where they’re gonna be, what they’re wearing or whatever it is, and not knowing Heather I thought it was gonna be a silly, funny thing. Gina and I discussed it ahead of time and we both thought it was silly and funny. so I thought that’s how she would take it… but I don’t know Heather very well. She did not take it to be silly and funny.”
“From what I hear, from the other women, she doesn’t like to be caught off-guard, so I think that me catching her in this lie was more than she could handle,” Katie surmises. “Let me just say, if you’re not guilty of something, why are you making it such a big deal? If it’s not a big deal and it’s not … valid, you would just brush it off and be like, ‘That’s just not true. I’m not gonna talk about it with you.'”
Katie “more than 100 percent” believes the information her friend gave her and stands firm that Heather is lying.Â
“I try my best to resolve with Heather and move forward,” she previews. “I guess you’ll see how that works out for me.”
Heather has painted the paparazzi saga as Katie coming in with a pre-thought-out, calculated agenda to go after her to secure story for the show. She’s made mention of Katie cozying up to Real Housewives stars including Sutton Stracke and Cynthia Bailey ahead of signing onto the series as proof that Katie wanted to be in this world at (possibly) any cost. Using Gina, a new realtor in Orange County, to help facilitate a move from San Diego up the coast serves as another piece of Heather’s puzzle.Â
“This was not calculated, this was not something I tried to think of to be on the show,” Katie hits back. “Sutton and I have been friends for a couple of years, that’s long before I even considered doing Housewives. Â I moved to Orange County for my business that started, [TeeShots]. My office address is in Huntington Beach, and my two business partners are Huntington and Newport Beach. So, I was driving from San Diego back and forth. I also didn’t super love living in San Diego. So, when I wanted to move up to Orange County for my business, my husband was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it, that sounds like a great new adventure…’ So we were already moving up when I was talking to Housewives about joining.”
Katie notes that Sutton (whom she met through the golf world) is the one who introduced her to all the other Bravo-lebs she’s now friendly with, including Phaedra Parks, Denise Richards and Camille Grammer. She didn’t go out seeking those friendships, and she didn’t use Gina to secure a spot on the show. She was seemingly already in talks.Â
“Sutton introduced us,” Katie explains. “Gina took me looking for a few houses in her area, and we talked for five hours the first day we met. She was so much fun. There’s never a lack of conversation with Gina, she’s so great and so, I told her, ‘Hey, listen, I might be talking about joining Housewives and she was like, ‘That’s amazing!’ And so, I told her, ‘Even if I don’t do this Housewife thing, I would still love to be friends,’ and she said the same thing. So we went through it like, we’re just building a friendship organically.”
She, obviously, can’t say the same for Heather.
“I don’t think Heather and I can care for each other, but we respect on another in a group setting,” Katie muses. “She was kind enough for Mother’s Day to invite us all to a Mother’s Day brunch, all of us — the whole cast, really — and I went and, although it can be a little tense, we co-exist OK.”
“I’m not sure if I [want a friendship],”she adds. “There’s a lot of things said, names called. I don’t know if we ever will have a friendship. I mean, hopefully, down the line we would.”
A comical kink is this saga is Heather accidentally tagging Katie in a photo, a social media snafu of which Katie still hasn’t gotten to the bottom. Heather claims the woman who helps run her account must’ve been trying to tag Givenchy, the designer of the dress she was wearing in the post, and somehow accidentally clicked another account with “Gi” in the name, Katie Ginella.
“This is the craziest part: she posted the photo on her birthday, I liked it,” Katie notes. “She looked beautiful in the photo, and I woke up the next day and the tag, the timestamp, was 12 hours after she posted the photo. Why’d you tag me? What? … To do that, you have to be following somebody or you had to have looked them up.”
Heather’s shot down Katie’s assumption that she was somehow sizing her up ahead of starting filming, after Katie felt snubbed by Heather at a Sutton-hosted event they both attended. Sutton also warned Katie not to go up against Heather.
“Well, Sutton gave me that advice kinda after it was too late,” she quips.
While she and Heather never quite found their footing, Katie did find the rest of the ensemble more than welcoming. She namechecks Jenn Pedranti, Shannon Beador and Alexis Bellino as being especially warm.Â
Her favorite moments to film, though, came with her family. Katie is married to golf broadcaster Matt Ginella. Together they have a son, Bandon. Katie is also mom to three other kids — daughter Kalli and sons Gavin and Maxon — whom she shares with her ex-husband.Â
“You’ll see [the show’s] really cathartic for my daughter,” Katie shares. “She had a pretty tumultuous past with my ex-husband, and now considering Matt as her dad, it’s good for her to get it out in a way that feels good for her. We only talk about it if she wants to, but this show got her to bring up a lot of things, and you’ll see more of that.”
“My husband’s been on TV for a really long time, so it’s pretty easy for him,” she continues. “And then my youngest has done a couple of commercials. He loves being on camera, so he thought it was really fun.”
Viewers will meet Katie’s older son, Gavin, later this season; her other son, Maxon, won’t make any appearances, as he lives in Georgia with his father, who opted not to sign off on the minor filming. Kalli and Gavin are both of age and didn’t need parental permission to film.
In addition to sharing her children’s journey, Katie is, of course, also sharing her own. Adopted from Korea by a white family, viewers will watch Katie explore more of her heritage as she brings some much-needed representation to the franchise.
“Being the first Korean, I just I take a lot of pride in that,” she says. “I remember being a little girl and watching the winter Olympics, and seeing the figure skaters like Kristi Yamaguchi and I was like, ‘I want to be a figure skater!’ And to see that made me felt good. Seeing someone that looks like you is just so– it makes you feel like, oh wow! This is so cool. So, that part is awesome for me. I’ve gotten so many DMs from Asian adoptees and Korean-Americans saying how much it means to them to see Asian representation on the screen. That’s huge.”
“That’s the payment for those times when I’m called a name,” she adds. “I’ll take the good and the bad.”
There’s good and bad still to come this season; Katie is bracing for impact until the cast’s trip to London airs near the end of the season.
“There’s a lot of fun… and then there’s a lot of not fun,” she reveals. “That was a really tough thing. That was a really tough thing.”
The Real Housewives of Orange County airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo. Episodes stream next day on Peacock.
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