Bozoma Saint John said her friendship with Dorit Kemsley is the real deal. The “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” newcomer instantly hit it off with Kemsley upon their first meeting while shooting the 14th season of the Bravo reality show.
In a March 2025 interview with Entertainment Tonight, Saint John addressed her fast friendship with Kemsley and the surprising reaction from the other cast members. “I think some of it is just like time, place, opportunity,” Saint John explained. “Like, I don’t know if I had come in in her sixth season if we would have bonded like we bonded now, you know, and that when I met her, she was in a very a vulnerable place.”
Kemsley unloaded on Saint John about her broken marriage and estranged husband’s alleged drinking problem during their very first meeting at Sutton Stracke’s Surrealism party, which was filmed last May.
“Here I come, you know, someone who’s willing to listen, who didn’t carry the baggage of eight years of friendship to say, ‘oh God I don’t want to hear her talk anymore,’” Saint John elaborated. “I didn’t have that, you know. And so when she told me what was going on, my immediate reaction was like ‘oh my God this woman is in crisis.’”
Bozoma Saint John Thinks Her Friendship With Dorit Is Beyond a ‘Trauma Bond’
While Kemsley is going through a difficult separation from her husband PK, Saint John suffered a devastating loss when her husband Peter died in 2013.
Saint John admitted that when Kemsley dumped her marital trauma on her, she opened the floodgates to her own heartbreak. “I feel like that’s what happens in real life, you know what I mean? How you create, if you tell me something that’s going on if I have a similar experience, I’m going to tell you about it so you don’t think that you’re alone,” she shared.
Regarding “Housewives” fans who think Kemsley needed to find a “buoy” this season amid her issues with the other RHOBH cast members, Saint John said she was not at all bothered by the conspiracy theory. “You know what? Maybe, but I’m not offended by it,“ she said. “I think that in life, you often do need buoys. You need people who you can hold on to if you feel like you’re drowning. And even if started in that way, that’s not necessarily where it ends up.”
“I think that we’ve created enough of a relationship, enough of a friendship that it is beyond just the trauma bond,” she said of her relationship with Kemsley.
Kemsley previously explained her immediate bond with Saint John via a response to an Instagram post. “When you have an immediate and genuine connection with someone whom you just met and they make it super easy to open up to them… the result is two women bonding over difficult times in their lives and the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” she wrote in November.
Some of the RHOBH Cast Members Don’t Understand Dorit & Bozoma’s Friendship
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Several RHOBH cast members have questioned Kemsley’s bond with Saint John. Speaking on the RHOBH After Show,” co-star Garcelle Beauvais, admitted, “I thought they were the last people that would be so tight.” Beauvais also accused Kemsley of “hogging the situation” and preventing the rest of the cast from getting to know Saint John.
In the interview with ET, Saint John said she was “very surprised by the fact” that her friendship with Kemsley “became such a contentious point.”
“That somehow me becoming friends with somebody would offend other people, you know, and keep me from becoming friends with them,” she said. “Like, who knew that?”
