Successful model Cynthia Bailey has on-screen friction with her then-fiance-now-husband Peter Thomas over money on Season 3 of The Real Housewives of Atlanta.
First, Peter and Cynthia fight because he’s spending too much time at his Atlanta investment, The Uptown Supper Club, and when he comes home he wants Cynthia to drop everything to spend time with him. Later, they call in a relationship therapist, and it comes out that Cynthia harbors a some resentment because she invested 10s of thousands of her hard-earned modeling dollars into The Uptown Supper Club to prevent it from sinking.
Peter thinks that in their marriage that they shouldn’t worry about “who did what,” and dismisses her long-standing career as a model because she has managers, lawyers, and agents and works at the demand of the client. He explains, with a degree of bitterness, that any job he has, he has to create.
It now turns out that Cynthia’s contributions were never repaid to her, and Peter didn’t do a good job of creating his job (with the help of Cynthia’s money) because the Supper Club reportedly went bust eight months ago. Her funds simply delayed the inevitable disintegration (but the rumor is that Bravo hired people to stand around the club to film some scenes for the show.)
The restaurant never fully recovered from a 2009 lawsuit brought on by Novell Williams against Uptown Restaurant and Lounge, Inc. and Peter Thomas for “minimum wage or overtime compensation” under the Labor – Fair Labor Standards Act.
The final nail in the Supper Club’s coffin was $25,000 in unpaid expenses. Employees were allegedly not informed that the restaurant shut down, and still showed up ready to work! That’s gotta be a shock.
Going broke is no stranger to the Real Housewives: Joe and Teresa Giudice, Russell Armstrong, Sonja Morgan, Jim Bellino, Lynne and Frank Curtin, and scores more Bravolebrities of the Housewives genus have experience major financial stress.
Here’s a clip of Cynthia and Peter trying to sort through their money mess:
The money to pay for Cynthia and Peter’s wedding was supposed to be coming from income produced by the Uptown Supper Club, but in the clip below Peter breaks the news to Cynthia that Uptown had shut its doors that day:
