Tami Roman spent several years on Basketball Wives, but by season 8, she’d had enough.
Tami opened up about her experiences on the hit VH1 franchise during a recent interview on Carlos King’s “Reality With The King” podcast.
The actress, businesswoman and reality star described the atmosphere behind the scenes of BBW as toxic and said she felt “betrayed” by the producers, Evelyn Lozada and Shaunie O’Neal, who’s an executive producer on the series.
“It always had to be ‘Tami started it,’ because Shaunie and Evelyn started this franchise together, so the loyalty from the production company and the executive producers was to them. A lot of things were shown out of order, if you understand what I am saying,” Tami told host Carlos King.
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Tami was known for having a hot temper on the show. But in the interview, she accused Shaunie of sitting in the edit booth with the producers and selectively choosing scenes that made her look bad.
She pointed to a 2012 dispute she had with Kesha Nichols during a cast trip, as evidence. Some media reports said Kesha was bullied by Tami on the trip, but Tami insisted portions of their dispute never made it into the episode.
“I absolutely felt betrayed by that,” Tami said. “As soon as we touched down for that cast trip, Shaunie showed me all the BTS [behind the scenes] footage of Kesha just ripping me to shreds, so like you say ‘little docile Kesha.’ No, that’s not the case. What happened was, f–k it now, at the time Kesha was involved with one of our show’s producers. So, instead of airing the footage the way it really happened, so that you could tell a real story, they cut out everything that made Kesha look like the bad guy and only left all the stuff that Tami did, which is why I felt betrayed by Shaunie.”
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Tami said Kesha knew the truth, but never said anything as stories about the episode went viral.
“That girl knew what happened in the scene,” Tami said about Kesha. “She let people run with that narrative and it was difficult for me.”
Tami also alleged that producers asked her to go off on Kesha because they felt like there hadn’t been enough tension on the trip to make for good TV.
“The producers said, ‘We don’t have anything guys. You gotta do something,'” she said. Tami added that she later apologized to Kesha. Urban Hollywood 411 requested a comment from VH1 on Tami’s claims, but did not immediately hear back.
In another part of the interview, she confirmed having problems with Evelyn, who admitted on the show to sleeping with Tami’s ex-husband, Kenny Anderson.
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While most people assumed Tami and Evelyn didn’t get along because of Kenny, Tami said she was more bothered by Evelyn not disclosing the relationship, even after they spent several months filming Basketball Wives together.
“It’s like, ‘Damn. So you really weren’t my friend, because you knew this and you didn’t tell me.’ But the fact that she slept with him was nothing to me, because f–k it, everybody had slept with Kenny,” Tami said.
She also talked about the early days of her career and the process of landing a role on MTV’s The Real World: Los Angeles in the 1990s.
Tami currently hosts the VH1 reality series Caught in the Act: Unfaithful, which shows her helping jilted lovers confront their cheating partners.
