Why Former The Real Housewives of Atlanta Stars Left the Show

The Real Housewives of Atlanta is commemorating it’s 15th season!

On October 7, 2008, NeNe Leakes, DeShawn Snow, Kim Zolciak-Biermann, Shereé Whitfield, and Lisa Wu made their television series debut in the third iteration of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise.

Naturally, the majority of those women aren’t Housewives full-time any longer, and there are rumors that some or all of the Season 15 cast members may have to give up their apricots as well.

According to an Entertainment Tonight source from August, the program will undergo “a major shakeup,” possibly even a reboot similar to the one that threw out the whole cast of RHONY.

Continue reading to learn the reasons why the former cast members of RHOA left their gigs while the world waits for word on Season 16 of the show.

Porsha Williams

Williams reflected on her The Real Housewives of Atlanta Season 13 exit in a statement to People back in March, “I had already decided that it was time for me to step away at least six months before I told any of the executives what I was going to do — and long before I even met my now-husband. I was turning 40, I was hitting my 10-year mark on the show, and I really just had to reassess where I was and what I wanted totally out of my life. So that’s where that decision came from.”

NeNe Leakes

Leakes revealed on the Reality With the King podcast in August 2023 that she departed the program after RHOA Season 12 because producers only gave her a six-episode role in the upcoming season. “Why are [co-stars] being offered 18 episodes, and I am being offered six episodes?” queried the reality star. “What did I do? Because I don’t know anything that I’ve done ever on this show that no other Housewife in this franchise [has] not done. I’ve never done anything that no one else has done.”

DeShawn Snow

After leaving The Real Housewives of Atlanta at the end of Season 1, Snow admitted to being fired but said she was “fine” with the choice. “[One of the RHOA producers] called and said that I was ‘too human for a circus show’ and that because the show did so well, they are about to pump up the drama and they didn’t think that I would fit in,” Snow furthered. “He gave me an example, saying that during the reunion when I found out what a few of the other ladies said about me, they were expecting me to say more, but I’m not the type to go ‘television’ and start acting crazy because somebody’s talking about me.”

Kim Fields

Because it was “only supposed to be a one-and-done,” the Living Single actress said on The Breakfast Club in 2022, she only appeared on RHOA for Season 8. “For me, I did what I set out to do. The mandate at that time in my career was, ‘I’m celebrating 40 years in the industry.’ And so [to] my team, I said, ‘Hey, let’s go into uncharted waters. We’re only going to do stuff we’ve never done before.’ And so they kept asking me to do reality for years, and I was like, ‘No, the time is not right. It’s just too much.’ So we said let’s just give that a try and see, but knowing I still had other shows to do, other work to do as a director, as a producer, all kinds of things.”

Cynthia Bailey

Bailey wasn’t a cast member when The Real Housewives of Atlanta made a comeback for a COVID-19 delayed 14th season. In an interview with E! News in 2021, she noted: “It was time, it was honestly time. I had been thinking about it for a while, just the whole transition. I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. I knew I didn’t want to do it forever. … Then the whole thing happened with us going on hiatus, so it gave me more time to think about it, and then I got really used to not going back.”

RHOA cast — Paras Griffin/Getty Images for Focus Features

Phaedra Parks

According to E! News, Parks mislaid her peach in 2017 when she was fired on RHOA for fabricating a terrible tale about her co-stars Todd Tucker and Kandi Burruss. After the ninth-season conflict, Andy Cohen told the publication that none of the stars on The Real Housewives of Atlanta wanted to film sequences with Parks. In 2022, the reality TV actress stated to Entertainment Tonight that there are “two sides to that story.”

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