Gina Kirschenheiter broke her silence on Shannon Beador’s recent DUI arrest — after Shannon repeatedly brought up Gina’s own DUI during season 17 of The Real Housewives of Orange County.
“I think that we’re just gonna address the elephant in the room, right?” Gina, 39, began during the Wednesday, September 27, episode of her “Orange Country” podcast. “The irony of it is major. But honestly, really, at the end of the day I’ve been thinking a lot about this and Shannon in general, and I just don’t have it in me. I’m not gonna kick someone when they’re down and I’ve been down. And I know where she’s at right now. It’s not a good place to be mentally, emotionally.”
Shannon, 59, was arrested on September 16 after driving her car onto a residential property in Newport Beach, California, and clipping the house. The Newport Beach Police Department confirmed to Us Weekly that Shannon was cited and released without bond.
“She is extremely apologetic and remorseful,” Shannon’s attorney Michael Fell told Us in a statement after the incident. “We will be awaiting the official information on this case as it becomes available, and Shannon is prepared to accept full responsibility for her actions.”
Shannon’s arrest came weeks after she discussed Gina’s 2019 DUI on RHOC. At one point, Shannon told Jennifer Pedranti that Gina was in danger of having her kids taken away by the authorities after her arrest. Shannon denied ever saying anything about Gina’s kids even though the conversation was caught on camera — and Gina was not pleased.
“It is not true!” Gina told Shannon. “Nobody gets a DUI and then their kids are taken from them! Let’s let this go!”
Despite Shannon’s comments, Gina told “Orange Country” cohost Shane McAnally that she is not taking pleasure in Shannon’s woes.
“I’m not gonna lie to everybody and say I didn’t wake up and be like, ‘Oh, s–t, this is karma,’ but then very quickly I moved past that,” Gina said. “Then I got angry about a lot of it for a minute, and then I really now have settled into appropriate sympathy for the situation and for her. I don’t want to see anybody down. I never have. I just didn’t want to be put down.”
Gina went on to say she thinks some of the tension with Shannon this season was caused by the fact that Shannon was dealing with her own issues. “Her putting all of that on me the last couple years and stuff, I truly see now — especially in this moment — that that was all a product of her struggle and her hurt,” Gina explained. “And it is hard when you’re struggling to watch someone else coming out of their struggle.”
Days before Shannon’s DUI made headlines, Gina exclusively told Us that she was “very angry” at Shannon for bringing up her past legal drama.
“I don’t know why I’m the target of it and I don’t even think she gets it,” Gina said. “Plus, this is not the first time or the first year that I’ve asked her to please stop talking about this. And she has apologized and said she’s not going to do that moving forward. And then she does it and then adds in new false tidbits for extra flare, I guess. It only seems to be getting worse. I feel that at this point, what is that apology worth? It’s like her stock has crashed.”
Even with all their past baggage, however, Gina hopes that Shannon gets the chance to take accountability for her actions. “I believe in people and the ability to change,” Gina said on her podcast. “If we have this expectation that we are going to change as a society overall for the better, we have to accept and allow people to be wrong to mess up and to recover and to support them to pull themselves up.”
