Danielle Olivera is addressing confusion surrounding an In the City moment involving Lindsay Hubbard’s claim about her and Carl Radke, insisting in a new interview with Parade: “I know it did not happen.”
During tonight’s episode, Lindsay recounts that years ago, after she and Carl had broken up the first time, Danielle had given Carl a handjob in the back of an Uber a week later. “I don’t think I did that, though,” Danielle says to Lindsay in the episode.
Danielle says she didn’t give Lindsay a strong rebuttal because “I was caught so off guard” by the claim, adding, “I went into the conversation wanting to come away in a good place. So I was like, OK. Eat s—t kind of like you know you’re going to eat a little s—t, and it’s going to have to be OK. This conversation is to move forward and get into a better place, not to move 100 steps back.”
She also questions the timing of the accusation, adding, “This is from six years ago that you’re calling me a bad friend? Why didn’t we address it fully then?”
The situation is further complicated, she explains, by what Carl allegedly told others at the time. In a Summer House flashback, Kyle Cooke tells his wife, Amanda Batula, that Carl told him they had hooked up. “I had no idea she had talked to Kyle about it before,” Danielle shares. “It was done without my knowledge, so this is like the very first time that I’m hearing it.”
She adds that Carl’s account helped fuel the confusion: “The thing is, for better or for worse, she looks at what the show puts out, and Carl did say that it happened. And so I think Carl is the one who should have cleared it up, but I think that Lindsay was just taking that and running with it.”
But Danielle does offer a mea culpa for earlier tension in their friendship, admitting she didn’t watch the previous season of Summer House, which played into how her comments were received.
“That’s on me,” she says. “I should have been clued into the comment that I made [about] single momming it up. And it sucks because my mom made so many sacrifices. She was a single mom. Like I would never judge someone for that, and the way that it came across was 100% judgmental.”
Watching it back, she adds, “I cringed. I was like, ‘Oh God, that does sound bad.’ And if I were her, watching that back, I would have an opinion.” Danielle also says she didn’t have the full context of Lindsay’s relationship with Gemma’s father at the time.
“Because Lindsay and I weren’t close then, we were still repairing our friendship then,” she recalls. So, “I’m hearing this, and I’m just like, ‘Oh, you’re giving him the out. You’re not gonna move in with him’ because I thought they were in a committed, serious relationship.”
Lindsay also criticized Danielle for saying she and Carl were moving too fast during their relationship, which ultimately ended before their wedding. Danielle clarifies her intent: “I truly thought at the time, in my heart of hearts, knowing both of them, Carl being new to his sobriety, and not really knowing who he is. And her being so confident… like it was just a mismatch of phases of life.”
In the episode, Danielle and Lindsay are cautiously dipping their toe back into their friendship, with Danielle sharing that she plans to keep some of her opinions about Lindsay’s life to herself, especially if it comes, “at the expense of your friend’s heartache and pain,” she tells Parade.
In the City airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on Bravo.
