RHOA The origins of Shereé Whitfield’s iconic “Who Gonna Check Me, Boo?” catchphrase

During Episode 1 of Season 2 of Real Housewives of Atlanta, Shereé Whitfield is organizing an “Independence Party” to celebrate her divorce from Bob Whitfield, a former football player. At the time she and her kids were having to move out of their house because he had stopped paying the mortgage, and Shereé still had not received the “7-figure” divorce settlement she was hoping to get.

Shereé hired a party planner, Anthony Shorter, to prepare for the gala, but the party planning didn’t go smoothly at all.

At their initial meeting, a lot was promised to Shereé, but she got into an argument with Anthony later on the phone because he refused to answer her questions. He even hung up on her.

There were only four days until Shereé’s party, and she wanted to be involved in the details, so she met up with him for a scene of the show. When they first sit down, Anthony tells her that everything is going as scheduled for her “Queen of the Night” party. He explains that women are going to drop rosepetals while Shereé is carried into the party by her “beck-and-call” guys. Then, a poet is going to come in.

This is where Shereé interjects that she still hasn’t spoken with the poet. Anthony tells her that she should have gotten a message from her assistant, but Shereé says she hasn’t heard from them. Shereé then schools Anthony that he needs to fill her in on what’s going on, even if he thinks he already spoke to her about it.

Anthony gets very defensive with Shereé at this point. “I’m a top-level executive,” he says. “I expect you to respect my time.” They then start to argue about how Shereé canceled on going to check out a venue with him.

Anthony then starts to raise his voice with Shereé, who is fighting back but still keeping her cool better than he is. She pointed out that he promised her a helicopter at first, but it’s not happening now.

Shereé then asks to work with someone else on the party because she no longer wants to work with Anthony. He says she has to work with him for this party or no one at all.

“You need to watch yourself before you get checked,” he angrily tells her as their conversation escalates.

“Who gonna check me, Boo?” Shereé asks, calmly and confidently. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was cementing an iconic cast phrase for herself with her smooth delivery.

Soon enough, though, they both erupted into screaming and yelling. Over the next few episode, Shereé vented about the argument to her RHOA castmates, and when the episode aired

Shereé later wrote in her BravoTV blog about how shocked she was over this party-planning fiasco. “There are no words to express how I was feeling. I was in total shock and in complete disbelief that a so-called professional person can be so rude, tacky, unprofessional, unethical, violent, and incompetent.”

Instead of learning from the experience, Anthony doubled down in the press about his behavior and even tried to turn his moment with Shereé into an opportunity to launch his own reality show career with a pitch for a show called Anthony The Party Planner. The show never materialized. He also tried to ride on the coattails of Kim Zolciak’s “Don’t Be Tardy for the Party” success with a song called “Party Planner,” which also fizzled out.

Over the years he has posted videos of himself singing on YouTube, but has since taken them all down. Most recently, he’s used YouTube to announce a bid to run for Johns Creek City Council Post 3.