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Credit: Instagram
Jill Zarin says she’s “done” with Below Deck chief stew Fraser Olender after he refused to defend her publicly after claims of being “spoiled.”
After the Real Housewives of New York City alum, 60, embarked on a superyacht getaway, which aired across two episodes of the Bravo reality series, prompting claims of her being “spoiled” and “absolutely insufferable,” Jill spoke out against Fraser, who labeled her as “demanding,” saying that while Fraser privately apologized for the backlash she received, he refused to defend her against it.
“Fraser and I, and we kept in touch for a year. But after that, I never want to talk to him. Not at all up until this week,” Jill told Us Weekly on April 12.
After receiving a private DM from Fraser, in which he “apologized and said, ‘I feel bad about the bad pressure you’re getting. You don’t deserve it. You’re a nice lady. You didn’t do anything wrong,’” Jill asked him to say something publicly, “and he didn’t.”
“I’m done. He doesn’t want to listen. I tried to reach out to him on Instagram. He just said, ‘I feel bad that you are getting a lot of hate, and you don’t deserve it.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you say something?’ And he ignored it,” she continued.
According to Jill, she had a “great time” with Fraser on the superyacht and believes certain behavior was executed, and certain edits were made, in an effort to create “a good TV show.”
“Sometimes they may overproduce themselves,” she shared. “After I got off the boat, I DMed Fraser. I said, ‘Thank you so much for the most amazing time. We had the best time ever. Love to stay in touch.’ He wrote back, ‘I’ll write it down. Thank you so much. Let’s stay in touch. Love to see you again.’ Did he ever complain about me or say, ‘I don’t ever want to talk to her?’ [No], because I was nice.”
“I’m good with everything I did,” she continued to Us Weekly. “[However], I don’t agree with how they reacted to why I said what I said on the show. So I kind of came back and gave my point of view because I don’t get an interview on the show. I don’t get a confessional.”
Because Jill wasn’t given confessional scenes of her own, she felt that what the viewers saw on the show was “one-sided.” And, while she acknowledged the “awful things” the Below Deck cast said about her, she said she was more frustrated with what didn’t air.
“There’s a couple of scenes that you miss that they cut out of the show. There’s only 50 minutes in a show and they’re going to focus on the drama,” she explained.
One particular thing she didn’t like was stew Barbie Pascual‘s “freeloading” diss.
“I wasn’t a freeloader because I contributed to the tip,” she clarified. “I paid for my airfare and I paid for my hotel. So I spent $6,000 to fly to Grenada for two nights. That’s a lot of work for me to go somewhere for two nights and a lot of money. I could do a lot of things for $6,000,” Jill explained. “So I was hardly a freeloader. And my friends who are beyond generous didn’t deserve to have any of their guests treated disrespectfully by the crew after spending $65,000.”
She also denied charter guests who agreed to film get a discount.
“When they look at each other, when we gave a $20,000 tip, as if we were cheap is insulting because the week before they got a $30,000 tip. Do you know why? Because it was a three-night trip. We were on a two-night trip. So they gave 10,000 a night. We matched it. We gave 10,000 a night. That was very generous,” she confirmed.
As for her suggestion that the boat didn’t have snacks readily available, Jill explained that was based off something Fraser told her.
“I have a video that I took when we got on board and we were sitting at the dining room table and he went over the lay of the land for the next two days. He said there will be snacks. I didn’t ask. It wasn’t prompted,” Jill said. “He said, ‘There’ll be snacks and food everywhere the entire time. You won’t need anything.’ So imagine when we got the lunch problem, we were starving.”
Looking back, Jill said she stands by her statements regarding the slow turnaround for food orders.
“We were starving. We were absolutely starving,” she voiced. “We hadn’t eaten lunch or dinner and there was no snacks. I had put on my preference sheet that I’d like to have fruit out all the time. A very common thing [is] fruit, cheese and crackers,” she continued. “Those are the kinds of things you usually see. The bar nuts and things like that. There was nothing and I was hungry and maybe a little cranky because I was so hungry.”
Overall, Jill said she was “disappointed” with the edits of the series.
“I wasn’t whining. I wasn’t complaining,” she continued. “There was plenty to complain about. I didn’t complain about it. Now that you want to know my complaints, I’ve got more. But I didn’t at the time.”
“I think they handled the episode wrong. I think having a Housewife on was fun,” she went on. “They should have let me be me, which I was. And they should have laughed with me. They should have made fun of me in a loving way. Not in a mean way.”
Below Deck season 11 airs Mondays at 8/7c on Bravo.
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