Bethenny Frankel Pauses Divorce Podcast Following Mom’s Death

Bethenny Frankel is taking time to grief the death of her mother, Bernadette Birk.

The Real Housewives of New York City alum announced on Tuesday, April 23 that she pausing her popular iHeart Radio podcast, Just B Divorced with Bethenny Frankel, in order to give herself the time and space to process her loss.

Episodes of the special series, which saw Frankel pulling back the curtain of her “nightmare” 10-year divorce to ex-husband Jason Hoppy, began dropping earlier this month. They’ve all since been removed from all podcast platforms.

“I have chosen to temporarily remove my divorce podcast as a result of an overwhelming response and an influx of messages that have converged with the most significant loss of my life,” Frankel wrote on her Instagram Stories. “It is impossible for me to give and process both of these traumatic events at the same time.”

“The unforeseen circumstances and the reaction to this triggering topic has confirmed how important this conversation is,” she added. “In the coming weeks, we will continue this dialogue to help you navigate your challenging divorce journeys.”

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Frankel went on to thank listeners for “supporting me in both areas,” telling them, “I love you all and am so grateful to you.”

She added in a follow-up Instagram Stories post that “there has been no backlash” to her podcast, squashing rumors that her pause was due to any pushback from fans or from Hoppy himself.

“I simply can’t respond to the questions and demands at this time and will resume shortly,” Frankel said, calling her podcast a “shocking success.”  

Frankel, 53, and Hoppy, 53, met in 2008 and got married in a lavish televised wedding in 2010. The pair welcomed their daughter Bryn, now 13, shortly after.

While documenting their romance in two spinoff shows for Bravo (Bethenny Getting Married and Bethenny Ever After), tensions between the two began boiling over. They announced their separation in December 2012 and filed for divorce in January 2013.

But uncoupling would take much longer than their coupling. The two were stuck in messy court proceedings and a years-long custody battle for nearly a decade. They reached a financial settlement in 2016 before finalizing their divorce in January 2021.

On the first episode of her podcast, published Thursday, April 12, Frankel called her divorce from Hoppy “worse” than death. “I experienced someone very close to me dying, and it was really horrific,” said Frankel, whose ex-boyfriend Dennis Shields died in 2018 of a suspected overdose. “But nothing will ever be, in my entire life, as torturous as my divorce. … It was by far the worst experience of my life.”

“I thought I would never survive it,” she continued. “I did not see a way out. It was suffocating. I thought I was gonna be miserable for the rest of my life. I thought I was gonna have a terrible life. I literally could not see out of it — and I, at the time that I could not see out of it, was a well-known, wealthy, powerful, successful, attractive, smart woman with a whole big career ahead of her. So imagine what a person who doesn’t have all those things going for them goes through and feels like?”

She said it left her with “massive trust issues” and “post traumatic stress disorder,” pointing to it as one of the reasons she doesn’t want to marry fiancé Paul Bernon.

“I’m not sure if I would ever get married again or ever be legally bound to someone for anything other than a business contract,” said Frankel. “It just is insane to me in many ways.”

“I’ve been burned,” she added. “I have been through a f—ing war, a war. I have questioned myself as a human, as a parent, because I was told so many times how terrible I was, and disgusting, and old, and irrelevant. … had no power to get out of it. … This was this was mental and emotional torture, what I went through. … It was literally the most traumatizing thing that I will hopefully ever go through in my life.” 

Birk died of lung cancer on Friday, April 19 at the age of 73.

She and Frankel had a complex relationship, though reconnected later in life so she could know Frankel’s daughter, Bryn.

“Despite not being equipped to be a mother, she loved me and I have beautiful memories of her,” Frankel wrote on Instagram, praising their challenging relationship for making her “strong, tough” and “a survivor who is able to handle anything.”

“Goodbye mom, Bonnie, Bernadette,” Frankel said. “You did the best you could and you are free and at peace.”