As Heather Thomson posed for a Post photographer outside BondST restaurant, a young fan came up and said: “Oh my god, are you Heather? From ‘Housewives?’”
Thomson smiles and happily poses for a selfie with the fan. But, she made it clear to the Post, she “has reached the end of the road with ‘The Real Housewives of New York.’”
“I went to the show because [producers say they] want to empower women, but at the end of the day they actually do the total reverse of that,” she told The Post. “They’re showing women behaving badly, and at each other’s throats.”
In an exclusive interview, Thomson, 51, insists that she can no longer be part of a “machine” that rewards this — or of scenes she alleges are fake.
She also claimed that she watched as castmate Ramona Singer, 64, made an alleged racist comment that led Bravo to put a RHONY reunion on ice last month.
A production source previously told Page Six that Singer said, “This is why we shouldn’t have black people on the show” — in reference to Eboni K. Williams after Luann de Lesseps kicked Williams out of her home. Singer denied making the comment, calling it a “terrible lie.”
However, Thomson told The Post: “I was there and I heard Ramona say that and I freaked out.
“Bravo said there was an investigation. To my knowledge, they’ve never offered or required unconscious bias or sensitivity training to the cast or producers on the show ever. I was never asked. Do they know and care about the effects [the show] has? It’s nonsense. They are not interested in people, they are interested in money.”
A spokesperson for Bravo had no comment for this story.
Asked whether she believed that Singer has an issue with people of diversity, Thomson replied: “What do you think?”
Thomson started burning her bridges when she claimed in the new book “Not All Diamonds and Rosé: The Inside Story of the Real Housewives from the People Who Lived It,” by Dave Quinn, that co-star Sonja Morgan allowed men to “put lit cigarettes in her vagina” for fun.
Morgan then posted on social media “liar, liar pants on fire” while other housewives claimed they didn’t believe the story. Then a video surfaced with Morgan and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles” star Josh Flagg talking about a night out when Flagg “stuck a cigarette up her [Morgan’s] vagina.”
“I wasn’t telling a secret,” Thomson told The Post. “It was this thing they were into for a while. I was not dropping tea in that book. I was talking about something that was public knowledge.”
Flagg denied the story and recently told the Juicy Scoop podcast that it was all a joke and that “Heather [Thomson] is full of s–t.”
But Thomson is standing by her story, saying she had heard that Morgan was working on what Thomson calls a “dark cabaret” show in the book — and which another show insider compared to “the girlie shows in Bangkok.”
But, Thomson said, she was shocked when she and her husband, Jonathan Schindler, ran into Morgan and Flagg at the Boom Boom Room at Manhattan’s Standard Hotel in 2014.
“I saw them together and I saw that she had been drinking … and I was keeping an eye on her,” Thompson told The Post. Moments later, “I was like, ‘Wait, where is Sonja?’”
She found Morgan and Flagg on the roof deck
“They were about to show [another man] the trick that they do,” Thomson said of the illicit cigarette. When she asked what Morgan and Flagg were doing, she added, they told her: “Yeah, we’ll show you. We make it smoke.”
“This is not Moulin Rouge!” Thomson told them, persuading Morgan to leave with her. “This guy [Flagg] is not your friend. And I took her home. I did what I thought was right and that was [to] remove her from the situation.”
Thomson also noted that she had alerted RHONY producers to her worries about Morgan’s drinking, as other cast members have also said they’ve done.
“I absolutely talked to production when I had concerns that it was getting out of hand and it was dangerous,” Thomson said. “It was difficult to work with and witness, and I got no response, really.”
It was one of many times, she said, that she and producers didn’t see eye to eye.
A native New Yorker, Thomson worked for years as a fashion designer, creating clothing lines for Beyoncé, Sean Combs and Jennifer Lopez. But after her son, Jax, was born in 2004 with pneumonia and then needed a liver transplant at six months old, Thomson let herself go a little bit.
“I went to buy shapewear and I was a little bit disappointed at my choices,” said the mom of two (daughter Ella is 14). “So like any good designer would do, I took matters into my own hand.”
She had just launched her own line, when she got a call out of the blue from a RHONY casting director in 2011. A former employee had recommended her, but Thomson was clueless.
“I misunderstood what they were asking me at first. I thought that they wanted to put my brand on ‘The Apprentice’ … They were like, ‘No, no, no, no, ‘It’s “The Real Housewives of New York.”‘ And I went, ‘Oh gosh. Hell, no. I’m not a housewife,’” Thomson recalled. “And she said, ‘That’s exactly why we’re calling.’”
“I was like, ‘Ding, ding, ding! Marketing opportunity!’ I knew that the benefit of appearing on the show would be exposure for [the shapewear brand],” Thomson said.
But when she told people she was joining RHONY for season five, some were horrified. “I do have friends that were like, ‘Oh, don’t do that,’” Thomson recalled.
She added that producers also lured in her with a claim that they were bringing in a different caliber of women.
“They told me, ‘We really want true New Yorkers. People who are running businesses. Really, you know, moving and shaking. And we want to raise the bar,’” Thomson told The Post. “Who doesn’t want to get involved in raising a bar?”
But when she and fellow newbies Carole Radziwill and Aviva Drescher showed up to meet old-timers Sonja Morgan, Luann de Lesseps and Ramona Singer, they were quickly put in their place.
“We were the freshmen, they were the seniors,” Thomson recalled. “Sometimes the cast think they know better than [producers]. And they self-produce: ‘No, you come over here. You sit there.’ I mean, I got bossed around a bit. ‘You can’t talk about that. Don’t say that.’
“Definitely, there is competition for camera time. And who’s going to have the best storyline.”
Still, she said, “I believed in myself. I’m like, ‘I’m not going to embarrass myself on TV. I’m not going to do those things.’ But I didn’t think about the editing. I didn’t think further into: Why [does Bravo] want this show? Is it because they really want to show nurturing female relationships or do they want click bait and shock value?”
One of the most upsetting incidents for Thomson was what she calls Morgan’s “fake” engagement to Harry Dubin during Season 12. In the episode, Thomson is seen comforting de Lesseps, who was crying over a breakup with boyfriend Jacques Azoulay.
Seconds later, Dubin proposes to Morgan.
“It was completely staged and totally fake,” Thompson said. “It was a ring that Ramona was wearing. And she took it off and gave it to Harry to pretend that it was his … it was oneupmanship.
“That was more important to the show … [than de Lesseps’ heartbreak]. And I was incensed by it,” she added. “The authenticity is missing. The women were self-producing, and many storylines were forced and contrived. Fake storylines with a ring that was pulled off of somebody’s finger two seconds before. Borrowed to make this fake engagement.”
She was invited back as a “friend” of the show for season 13, which ended in September.
“I went back saying, ‘No judgment. I want to have a clean slate.’ But I’m the one that’s the fool,” Thomson said.
She lasted one weekend.
“There was some [camaraderie] when I [first joined the cast]. And when I came back … there was no camaraderie. It was …. everybody out for themselves,” Thomson said. “I only filmed for one weekend. It was at Ramona’s house in the Hamptons. They put me in the basement. I was by myself and I was ambushed … They held me in the car for two hours while the other women got dressed and ready for the party.”
She claims a storyline had been cooked up “about me and my [‘In My Heart’] podcast. That I had talked behind the women’s back or something like that, which was just completely untrue.”
Thomson hit the headlines in June for her own issues with Williams, the show’s first black cast member, when Williams stated Thomson did “more harm than good” by wading into a conversation between Williams and de Lesseps about race.
Williams accused Thomson of “whitesplaining” and attempting to be an unwanted “translator” for, adding that Thomson was guilty of a “micro-aggression” for patronizingly calling her “articulate.”
As the incident spilled over to social media, Thomson said, it “forced me to start asking myself the tough questions, owning up to my mistakes, privately and publicly apologizing … I know many people still do not have an understanding of what a micro-aggression is or how to handle the mistake of making one. Nevertheless, I had to be accountable for myself, and formulate a plan of action to take what I learned and be a part of uniting versus further dividing people.”
She adds that she also has empathy for the women of the various “Housewives” franchises.
“Generally speaking, the women that join the show are not self-absorbed, catty, horrible people. They’re birds in gilded cages. They go in there with the right intention, but then you get sucked into this system of what the viewers want,” Thomson said. “These women are part of a machine that has awarded them and fed them for outrageous behavior. It’s a career. It’s their check. And they don’t have other jobs outside of it. And so you become a product of the environment of what the fan is looking for.
“Let’s be honest: Watching women behaving well and doing great things for each other doesn’t make must-see TV.”
And to that end, she blames the audience as well as the cast.
“You can’t really talk about the people without talking about the system,” Thomson said. “Everybody has culpability in this … the viewers, the network, the women on the show. We’ll all complicit.”
These days Thomson, now a certified integrative health coach, is focused on her latest business, Beyond Fresh, a line of organic supplements.
She claims that. this will be her final interview about her time on RHONY.
“After this, I will never talk about ‘Housewives’ again, period,” Thomson said.
“That chapter is closed in my life — everybody knows what they need to know and I’m moving on. Good luck and goodbye.”
Photos: Stephen Yang; Makeup: Wei Lang; Hair: Debra A. Martinez; Location: BondST at 6 Bond St, NoHo.