Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills: Crystal Minkoff makes debut as first Asian-American cast member

Crystal Minkoff made her debut as the first Asian-American cast member on The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills on Wednesday during the season 11 premiere. 

The 35-year-old Los Angeles native has been a friend of Kathy Hilton, 62, who is the older sister of Kyle Richards, 52, who has been on RHOBH since its premiere in October 2010. 

Lisa Rinna, 57, first met Crystal along with Kyle when they dropped off toys for Children’s Hospital Los Angeles at her home.

They also were introduced to Rob Minkoff, Crystal’s much-older husband, whom she met when she was 20.

Rob, 58, directed The Lion King, and kept all the original casts of the characters in his library, which Crystal pointed out as she gave them a tour.

The ‘super-type A’ mom of two had a son, Max, eight, and a daughter, Zoe, five, with Rob.

She said she’d done all the Chinese things’ like ‘food and timing’ in order to have a son and managed to hold on until at 8 a.m., considered an auspicious hour, ; when she delivered Zoe.

Crystal was equally particular about her food: Every morning, she ate an avocado with a fried egg and a whole jalapeno on top.

She was a little taken aback by the cast when she met all of them at Dorit’s barbecue, eyeballing their outfits as they tried to pretend it was the Before Times.

Dorit, 44, wore a red sheath her son Jagger, six, called ‘a robe’ and daughter Phoenix, five, said showed her ‘boobies,’ while Lisa sported a lime-green pantsuit and neon heels.

‘I feel a little bit underdressed,’ Crystal said in the episode titled Dressed To The 90210s. ‘This group dresses very loudly.’

She said she dressed conservatively because her older friends’ outré looks made her ‘cringe.’

When Garcelle Beauvais, 54, showed up, new friend-of-the-cast Kathy initially thought she was Kyle because of her bright-pink pantsuit and black hair.

‘You have really bad eyes,’ Dorit told her.

Crystal and Garcelle mingled a bit as their husbands had been work associates, and the new addition noted that it was common to know people through people in Beverly Hills.

‘If you don’t know someone, they might not be worth knowing,’ she purred.

Garcelle had been going through a kind of reckoning with Kyle and Lisa since last season.

Kyle had called her out on the reunion show for allegedly not donating to the Children’s Hospital after bidding $5,000 at her charitable gala.

Garcelle was so annoyed by Kyle she named her very plain goldfish after her, while dubbing the ‘fabulous’ fish in her tank ‘Dorit.’

She hadn’t spoken to Kyle much as the RHOBH vet was busy recovering from a nose job she’d gotten after an accident on the set of Halloween Kills.

Something ‘flew up’ and hit her in the face, Kyle said, so she told the doctor: ‘Make it cuter!’

Garcelle was equally upset with Lisa for failing to support her good friend Denise Richard, 50, after rumors of her affair with Brandi Glanville, 48, circulated.

She’d earlier shared dinner with Lisa, who launched into apologies the moment she sat down.

‘I’ve taken a lot of time to self-reflect,’ Lisa told her, ‘and I want to apologize if I hurt you, because I know I did. Because my intention is to never to hurt you. You know, hurt people hurt people. And I was hurt, and I hurt.’

‘Here we are,’ Garcelle said, staring at her with a fixed smile.

‘I was harder on Denise than I needed to be,’ Lisa shared. ‘I’d much rather have been like you and gone, ”I don’t care. I’m standing by my friend.” Like, that’s f***ed up. Absolutely 100 perccent.’

In a confessional, Garcelle said, ‘I think Rinna is trying to own it really quickly so that I don’t come for her.’

Lisa said she couldn’t be there for Denise because she wasn’t honest about the friendship she had with Brandi, which purportedly turned sexual.

‘It’s not about Brandi,’ Lisa emphasized. ‘No one cares what they did.’

Garcelle wondered if Lisa would turn on her someday, especially considering Lisa had been friends with Denise longer.

Lisa said she’d actually known Garcelle longer, despite what Denise said.

‘I was actually really protective of her,’ Lisa went on, referring to Denise. ‘But sometimes I can be a c***. Sometimes I can be a real c***. I’m gonna say it about myself: I was a f***ing c*** in a lot of ways. Don’t disagree: I’m a c***.’

She asked Garcelle if they could move on from what happened with Denise, and Garcelle replied, ‘I would tread lightly. But I’m open.’

At the barbecue, Garcelle heard that Lisa thought everything was suddenly fine.

‘It takes more than one drink to fix our ‘friendship,’ she moaned to the cameras. 

Erika Girardi, 49, also described the ‘incredible dread’ that prefaced the end of her 20-year marriage.

The entertainer recalled the ‘dark’ moments she’d had quarantining during the pandemic and how spending that time alone affected her.

She first described the year as ‘insane’ but said she’d loved the nightly dinners she enjoyed with husband Tom Girardi, 81, adding, ‘it was nice to talk and just kind of reconnect, in a way.’

She offered a bleaker picture in a confessional, remembering how hard it had been on her when her role as Roxie Hart in Chicago ceased with Broadway’s shutdown in March 2020.

‘I was on such a roll: New York Times bestselling author, I’m on Broadway, I was two weeks short of ending my run,’ Erika recalled. ‘It all just came to a screeching halt.’

She was excited to see her castmates at a fancy barbecue thrown by Dorit Kemsley, and donned a flouncy pink frock her stylist called ‘expensive hooker Barbie realness.’

‘When you look good, you feel good,’ the Pretty Mess singer considered. ‘Sometimes you have to put things on just for yourself, and be in your own little fantasy for a second.’

But when talk turned to everyone’s lowest moments during the pandemic, she got real.

‘When I came home from New York, it was really silent,’ she told her friends. ‘And then, when I didn’t have anything to do, I was walking down the halls of the house, and I couldn’t sleep. And I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t shake it. And I was feeling like, this incredible dread.’

Erika said the quiet forced her to ask herself who she was if she wasn’t working all the time.

‘Every day I dreaded waking up,’ she went on. ‘So I called a psychiatrist. And I went on [the anti-depressant] Lexapro. And it was the greatest thing.’

In private, she admitted that she hadn’t wanted to see a psychiatrist, considering it ‘a sign of defeat,’ but she told the ladies it had changed her attitude toward the problems she still had.

Lisa said she’d had a similar experience in that not working forced her to look at her own issues, and affirmed, ‘I can’t hide and run from my feelings and run from who I am.’

‘That’s right,’ Erika agreed. ‘Cause I was running, too.’

To the cameras, she added, ‘There’s so much that these women don’t know about my life, and about my personal life. Because you know what? Everyone has problems. Everyone. And the bigger your life is, the bigger your problems are.’

‘Has anyone decided who they can live without and maybe weed out?’ asked party guest Kathy.

‘I already did all that,’ Erika crowed, thinking about her Dutch shepherd dog Tiago. ‘There’s only about the dog and my husband and that’s about it. So you know, I’m down to two. Tiago’s looking like the number one. They’re duking it out, neck and neck.’

Erika filed for divorce from Tom on November 3, 2020, citing ‘irreconcilable differences.’

Several times during the episode, she emphasized that she wasn’t very good at being ‘still’ at home while lawyer Tom was ‘as busy as he can be’ even though the courts were closed.

She pointed out that she once dressed up in fishnet stockings and walked around the house just to amuse herself; in another scene, she moved clothes from one closet to another restlessly.

‘I’ve never taken success for granted,’ Erika mused. ‘And the one thing that quarantine has taught me is that on a dime, the world can change.’

In a preview of next week’s episode, it seemed as though the divorce took her by surprise.

‘I did not see it ending that way,’ she declared. ‘I was gonna hold that man’s hand until he died.’

As the episode wound down, Lisa asked the cast what had been their best moment during the COVID crisis, and their hardest moment.

‘For the first eight weeks, I stayed in the bed,’ said Sutton Stracke, 50. ‘I did not want to get out.’

Sutton recently sold her old home for $7.7 million and bought one in Bel-Air for $5.35 million, but it need a ‘facelift’ so she rented Kyle’s Bel-Air house for $20,000.

‘The worst part was, just for me, the beginning and the unknown, because of my anxiety,’ Kyle shared. ‘But then, I really loved having all of my kids home with me every day.’

Crystal agreed that the time with her kids had been rare and precious.

‘When I didn’t have my kids, I was so lonely,’ Garcelle said, her voice breaking, then joked about how she’d had no one to do TikTok with.

As everyone got comfortable, Lisa engaged the group for a trip to a house she’d rented in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, which will be shown on the next episode.

In a preview of that show, Garcelle also asked Kyle: ‘You calling me out about the charity. Would you have said it to one of the white women?’

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills will return next week on Bravo.