Bad weather forever — or not. When The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City premiered in 2020, Heather Gay and Whitney Rose were the best of friends, but their relationship has since gotten rocky.
The Bad Mormon author and the Wild Rose Beauty founder are third cousins, but their connection runs deeper than a distant family relation. The duo have bonded through the years over motherhood, entrepreneurship and their upbringings in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
According to Heather, the pair first met when Whitney visited Beauty Lab + Laser for help with a chemical burn. Whitney later hired her future costar to photograph her for a boudoir shoot, and the rest is history.
“Within five minutes of arriving at Whitney’s shoot, I knew this was not going to be an ordinary session,” the aesthetician recalled in her 2023 memoir, Bad Mormon. “As soon as I arrived, she showed me the shopping bags she had brought, overflowing with thirst-trap thongs and thigh highs. She had enough stiletto heels to make a stripper pole jealous and just enough kink to make me feel like I might be in over my head.”
By the time cameras started rolling, the twosome were inseparable to the point that costar Lisa Barlow gave them the nickname “Bad Weather.” After a couple of years on reality TV, however, their friendship started to show cracks. The twosome hit a breaking point during season 3 when Heather refused to corroborate Whitney’s claim that costar Angie Harrington told them Lisa slept with someone for courtside tickets to the Utah Jazz.
Heather claimed she didn’t hear Angie say that, but Whitney wouldn’t back down — and the two nearly came to blows, with Heather pushing Whitney during a girls’ trip to Arizona. The pair seemingly made up while filming season 3 of Ultimate Girls Trip in July 2022, but the détente had ended by the time they attended BravoCon three months later.
“We were dear friends, and it seemed out of the blue just completely that you decided that you were gonna dump me as a friend. And that to me felt like that you were trying to create drama where there was none,” Heather said during the RHOSLC panel discussion in October 2022. “And that to me feels like a reach.”
Whitney, for her part, thought the duo were on better terms before they attended the fan event, but she soon realized that wasn’t the case. “I officially am never gonna try to heal with this group again,” she told the crowd. “But we need it.”
Keep scrolling for a look back at Heather and Whitney’s ups and downs over the years:
