After joining the cast of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (RHOSLC) last season as a “friend-of” Heather Gay, Britani Bateman has regularly brought her chaotic charm and family drama to one of Bravo’s biggest hits.
Her time on the show has been marked by her on-again, off-again relationship with Utah royalty Jared Osman, her secret recording of the cast fighting in the back of a sprinter van and accusations from her castmate and salon owner Angie K of having “high body-count hair.”
During her time on the show, Bateman has mostly been on the receiving end of backlash from her fellow housewives and fans watching along each week. She has been called a bad mom, delusional and desperate for attention. But through all of the scrutiny, Bateman maintains that she only has the best intentions as she tries to deepen her friendships and reconnect with her family.
When her first marriage ended, Bateman said she wanted to create “the perfect happy family.” But her second marriage pulled her attention away from being a mom and led to a long estrangement from her two daughters. After her most recent divorce in 2023, Bateman accused her second ex-husband of “controlling and abusive behavior,” which he has publicly denied.
“I chose to date and it was absolutely the worst thing I could have possibly done for my kids,” Bateman told Newsweek. “I thought I was doing the best thing I could [by] finding a father so that there were two parents. That’s what I was looking for and it could not have gone more sideways.”
Since then, Bateman has been working to rebuild her relationship with her two daughters while navigating life as a single woman. This season on RHOSLC, she reconnected with her youngest, Olivia, 20, and promised to take a break from dating to focus on being the best mom she can be.
Bateman was raised Mormon in Utah, where she performed in a family singing group before attending Brigham Young University to pursue musical theater. She spent a decade working as a singer and actress, with runs as Ariel and Belle at Walt Disney World and as Ellen in the 1999 national tour of Miss Saigon.
In December, Bateman will take the stage once again in her one-woman cabaret show, What About Me: An Evening with Britani Bateman, that will run for two nights at New York City’s 54 Below.
Bateman recently spoke with Newsweek about fitting in with the women of Salt Lake City, her journey back to her daughters and her ultimate quest for authenticity as she prepares for her cabaret show.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was it like to join this cast of women and also coming back for Season 6?
I was a little apprehensive coming in this year to the friend group because we ended sort of on an off-note last year [with] everyone ganging up on me in the van. So I had a lot of nerves coming in this year, like, “Am I going to be the punching bag again?” Because I felt like the pincushion last year. They’re not an easy group to break into, it feels like you’re getting hazed in a sorority. But I think by now I’m coming into my stride and I’m earning my place.
How does it feel watching the show each week? Is there anything you see that you would have done differently or didn’t fully realize at the time of filming that is more obvious or clear now?
Oh, there are always things. It’s like nails on a chalkboard watching back, because hindsight is 20/20 and I’ve grown so much as a person in the last six months since this was filmed. It’s painful to look back on my conversation with Olivia and [think] that’s where we were. It’s unimaginable to me that we were so disconnected.
The lashing out has been painful. I’ve gotten a lot of negative feedback. People don’t understand that there’s a lot of complexity and nuance to what happened. It isn’t that I’m a bad mom or a deadbeat mom [who] doesn’t care about her kids. There’s so much, I can’t really speak to it yet because a lot of the reasons [why] I wasn’t as there for my children as they needed me to be is going to be revealed later [this season]. It’s hard without people understanding the complexities and the nuances.
I want to ask about your conversation with Olivia in episode six. How has your relationship evolved since that meeting?
I’m so grateful she agreed to meet for coffee because it had been a long time since we had talked at that point and she was very angry with me. All I wanted from her was to tell me how she felt [and] just get the ball rolling. And it sent us on a much-needed path for both of us. Kids need their moms and moms need their kids, too. It’s a two-way street, and I don’t want to sound selfish, but I was so lost without my babies. I can’t even describe the amount of pain a mom goes through without being able to mother her own children. It’s literally the worst. I’m taking a beating right now, but I take full responsibility for everything that happened to me.
The reason she and I were willing to expose the most tender part of our lives is for the greater good. It’s really a conversation that needs to happen — stopping the generational impact of abuse. It’s why I partner with this company called Generation All, which is looking into how and why the generational DNA passed down impact of abuse to our children.
Having those vulnerable conversations is such a foundational part of being a Real Housewife. What have you learned about being a better communicator from being on the show? What advice do you have for people going through a tough time with a friend or family member?
The best advice I’ve ever been given is to be authentically myself. It sounds so cliché, but it’s really true. The highest form of vibration we can experience as humans is authenticity. So why not be exactly who you are? People can either love you for who you are or not like you, but at least you’re who you are. The people-pleasing part only causes [us] to downgrade our emotional state and our emotional intelligence. It doesn’t serve anybody, and people will still hate us anyway. So why not be hated for exactly who you are?
How are you leaning into your authenticity as you prepare for your upcoming one-woman show later this year? How has reality TV prepared you for this new role?
There is zero acting on Housewives. If you are anything but authentic and reacting in the moment, then everyone’s going to see it and there’s going to be dire consequences. People will jump on you like velociraptors. [Housewives] all have extroverted personalities and that’s the part that lends itself to a one-woman cabaret show.
What can audiences expect from your show that they don’t see on The Real Housewives?
I feel like on Housewives, nobody sees any layers in me. I’m a one-note wonder, I’m the comic relief punching bag, really kind of the ditz. I hope the rest of the season mirrors my show in that everyone starts to see the complexities of who I really am and gets a little bit deeper than just surface-level.
That’s what the show is about, my history. I might sing a song from a show that I’ve done [and] talk a little bit about where my musical roots came from, which is my parents. My parents met in a “Battle of the Bands” in Park City, Utah, and my mom taught all five of us siblings to sing in arpeggio by the time we were nine months [old]. We toured a family show called “The Martins,” it was so Osmond-esque.
[What About Me] is just gonna be super-fun. Maybe we may hit a serious note or two, but it’s just going to be a party, and I may or may not record people.
What’s more stressful, preparing for your one-woman show or sitting down at a lunch with your Salt Lake City castmates?
Lunch! You don’t even have to finish that sentence, lunch. With a one-woman show, I’m used to that. It’s so comfortable for me. I haven’t done musical theater for a decade, [but] in rehearsals it feels like it was yesterday.
With these ladies, everything is new. I’ve never been in a friend group where we all speak our minds. It’s almost like no one has a filter. I’ve never been in a situation with so many women [where] we’re so alike and [we] clash. But we also love each other like sisters, which also makes us fight like sisters, too. It’s just very unique.
Can we expect any of your castmates to make a special appearance onstage? Or any collaborations with other housewife-performers? Did Countess Luann give you any cabaret tips?
Maybe. That’s all I can say. We haven’t released our special guests yet and I don’t even know if we’re going to. It’s going to be so fun. I’m so excited to see people’s reactions.
Are there any other announcements you’d like to make? Anything you can tease about what we’ll see from you the rest of the season?
We start to delve a little bit into my real estate career, because I’m a developer and a builder and I’m an agent, so I sell my own products. And then I am really excited to watch back the journey that Olivia and I go on. It’s a really special one. I just got the chills. It’s going to be hard to watch. But I feel that it’s very important for people to heed our warning.
Olivia has been coming everywhere with me lately to all my interviews. Luckily, we were together when we were watching that episode and we both had tons of tears. I’m so grateful and it’s the show that brought us together. I’m so grateful for Bravo and Peacock and for the other women [on RHOSLC] that they all collectively facilitated this reuniting with my baby.
