Bethenny Frankel Spills on Jill Zarin Plane Run-In

Jill Zarin.

Getty Jill Zarin, Ramona Singer, & Bethenny Frankel.

Bethenny Frankel is mentioning it all.

During a Dec. 7 appearance on “Watch What Happens Live,” Frankel spoke more about what it was like to run into her ex-BFF and former “Real Housewives of New York” costar, Jill Zarin, while on a plane to Florida earlier this year.

When it happened, the two posted an Instagram together but didn’t share much more than that. However, Frankel is now calling their interaction “pleasant.”

“It was really interesting,” Frankel said during the show. “It was actually a pleasant conversation. There was a guy who I knew from college sitting next to me, so at least there was somebody I could look over and try to like, quickly be like, ‘This is the cliff notes of what happened, oh my God.’

Frankel continued about Zarin, “She was with her boyfriend, and we ended up having a nice conversation.”

“Did you hash things out?” Andy Cohen asked.

“She wanted to go there, and then you know me, if you’re gonna say it, I’m gonna say it,” Frankel said.

During their time on the first two seasons of “The Real Housewives of New York,” Zarin and Frankel were extremely close and considered each other best friends. However, the pair fell out during season three, after Zarin claimed that Frankel wasn’t being supportive of her and her husband, Bobby Zarin, when he was diagnosed with cancer the summer before filming. Frankel also suggested that Zarin was jealous of her newfound success over her Skinnygirl cocktail brand.

For a few years after the show, the two were not on speaking terms, but when Zarin’s husband died in 2018, Frankel attended his funeral.


Jill Zarin Said That the Pair ‘Reconnected’ While Running Into Each Other on the Plane

During a June 2022 interview with Yahoo’s “In The Know” series, Zarin revealed that she thinks she was really able to “reconnect” with Frankel during their run-in.

“We totally reconnected,” Zarin said. “And it was really nice. It was really nice.”

The former RHONY star continued, “I’ve seen her over the years at various different things for a quick hello, or whatever, and never been antagonistic or anything. You know, regardless of what you see or read, it’s never been physically antagonistic, where it’s like she’ll give me a miss or I’ll give her miss or anything like that. But I have to say that it was honestly with open arms, I think, on both ends– that we were literally sitting 35,000 feet above it all. You know? I’m up here. That we were both above it all and reconnected, it was great. It was great. It was really nice.”


Jill Zarin Could Be Returning to Bravo Soon

Even though Zarin hasn’t been on the network in a number of years, it’s possible that she could be making a return for the new “Real Housewives of New York” legacy spinoff. In March 2022, Andy Cohen announced to Variety that the “Real Housewives of New York” will be rebooting into two separate shows: one featuring an entirely new group of women, and one featuring the “Legacy” cast members of the franchise, like Luann de Lesseps and Zarin.

No official casting announcement for the “legacy” spinoff has been made yet, but during an interview with People at BravoCon 2022, Zarin revealed who she would like to see back on the show.

“I would love to be on with Luann [de Lesseps],” Zarin told the outlet. “I would love to be on with Ramona [Singer]. I would love to be on the Sonja. I would love to be on with Alex [McCord]. And I even think Bethenny [Frankel] would be great. I think those are the OGs. I think Kelly would be great.”

Zarin continued, “Those seven or whatever, to me, is the legacy cast. One or two missing I think is okay. I think that if you don’t have enough of that group, it’s not legacy. It’s something else, and that’s okay, too. You can have an iconic, you can have a million different iterations, but to me, legacy means legacy.”

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