The saying goes: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And this holds true for The Real Housewives Of Melbourne regular Gina Liano and newcomer Sally Bloomfield.
Chatting to TV WEEK ahead of the premiere of season four, criminal barrister Gina reveals she struggled to get along with her new co-star. And Gina doesn’t hold back when it comes to telling us exactly how she feels about her.
“Sally and I were fine at the start,” Gina, 51, reveals. “But we didn’t end up in the same space.”
The legal eagle says she found the hotelier and former Melbourne editor of Harper’s Bazaar “offensive”.
According to Gina, there was a moment during filming which saw the pair, who knew each other before the show, go from friends to foes.
“She [Sally] was trying to prove a point and accused me of being someone I’m not,” Gina recalls.
“I tried to tell her that I didn’t want to spend time with someone who’s doing that, and she needed to back off. I had to plead with her to leave me alone.”
Meanwhile, Sally, who lost her husband, Ian Robertson, to cancer last year, has no regrets about her behaviour.
She says her on-screen rival was a tormentor.
“The other girls will vouch for that,” Sally, 52, says. “I called Gina out on something. She didn’t like it and came back at me in not a very nice way. I just tried not to engage.
“I had said my piece, hoping she would check her behaviour. But it got worse from there.”
The mother-of-two adds that, at times, she felt out of place.
“There’s a lot of history from previous seasons that I wasn’t part of,” Sally says.
“It was challenging to try to keep up and interject when it [the issues] had nothing to do with me.
“[The show’s] producers want you to get in there and have an opinion – but it was hard at times.”
Despite feeling like an outsider, Sally says she was grateful that the other housewives had her back.
“I think the other women have witnessed a lot of that over the years [on the reality series],” she explains.
“I stood up to her [Gina], and she didn’t like it. I obviously hit a nerve. You will see that I’m not a bully. I just call things as I see them.”
