When did you realize there was some juice to the rumors of Amanda Batula and West Wilson’s forbidden romance? My eureka moment was that February 22 video of Amanda wiping down West’s French dip–encrusted lips, twin shit-eating grins on their faces. I felt like I was Hannah Horvath watching Jessa and Adam eyefuck in the fifth season of Girls. Friends don’t make bedroom eyes at each other in the middle of an avant-garde play. Friends don’t clean friends’ faces with balled-up napkins at Salt Hank’s.
There were plenty of other moments, too, as the duo gallivanted around New York and teased a “hard launch” to the masses. But Amanda and West’s “connection” (don’t call it a relationship!) wasn’t confirmed to the wider world—or to any of their Summer House castmates—until March 31, in a noncommittal, possibly ChatGPT-scripted Instagram Stories statement: “It was never our intention to purposely hide anything,” they said, forgetting that they’d been lying to Ciara Miller, Kyle Cooke, and the Page Six–scouring public for weeks (months? years?!). “What’s developed recently has been the last thing either of us expected. Our connection grew out of a long-standing friendship, which made it especially important for us to handle this with care.”
If you’ve gotten this far and you don’t know who these people are or why they posted their grim announcement on Instagram Stories: Congratulations, and welcome to the internet! But now it’s time to start paying attention to the things that really matter, goddamnit, because this wasn’t just a dime-a-dozen situationship between a West Village bro and a girl who insists she doesn’t care that her sneaky link is hooking up with other people. Ciara, Amanda’s Summer House castmate and so-called best friend, had dated and gotten her heart broken by West two years before. Amanda herself was freshly out of a four-year marriage to Kyle, a different blond Summer House bro who parties hard and has a history of disrespecting women. On the most recent season of Summer House, Amanda had staunchly defended Ciara against West, shouting from the Hamptons rooftops that she’d never forgive him if he did Ciara dirty again—which made it all the more shocking when she turned around and started dating West anyway, breaking Ciara’s heart and the world’s.
You with me? If not, Lindsay Hubbard, another Summer House cast member, summed it up in a way Kelly Ripa could understand:
But why is this such a big deal, to the point that it’s boosted the show’s ratings to record highs and gotten everyone from Jon Hamm to Rihanna to Zohran Mamdani to declare themselves Team Ciara? Vanderpump Rules’ Scandoval is the obvious precedent, but that Bravo-verse scandal arose when Tom Sandoval cheated on Ariana Madix, his partner of nine years. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is literally set in stone; “Thou shalt not hook up with your best friend’s ex-situationship and your ex-husband’s bro” isn’t (although it may as well be now).
Even if Amanda and West didn’t technically violate any of God’s laws, they did run afoul of the internet’s. Some folks are even claiming that Scamanda is bigger, and more consequential, than the web-rocking Scandoval. And unlike most of the internet’s pet outrages, Scamanda has outlasted its expiration date, enduring all the way from the first rumors of a Super Bowl fling to the recriminations and speculations of the Summer House reunion. So in the midst of that three-part reunion—“one of the most intense we’ve ever shot,” per Bravo ringmaster Andy Cohen—let’s explore why this is the reality TV scandal that just keeps on giving.
The Internet FBI
Could there be a Scamanda if there were no Reddit or Deuxmoi? When the lovebirds started popping up at all of New York’s late-night spots, Bravo fans were on the case, taking blurry shots of the pair’s tête-à-têtes. Fans were the first to notice that Amanda was wearing West’s sweatshirt, and they took to the message boards to compare receipts, timelines, and screenshots. Then there was the straw that broke the camel’s back: a video allegedly of the two in West’s apartment that allegedly got sent to Ciara herself (maybe by a private detective hired by Paige DeSorbo?!). Amanda and West had been dogged in lying about their situationship—to their friends, on TV, perhaps even to themselves. But in leaked audio from the Summer House reunion, Amanda says the misinformation campaign had to stop when video evidence threatened to come out. The fans solved the case (and may have crossed some ethical lines to do so), but they weren’t going to stop there.
Because when you get caught in a lie once, it’s a lot harder to believe anything else you say. Viewers have gone back through the most recent season of Summer House, noting lingering caresses and suspicious socks, trying to find signs that the entanglement started last summer, not this February. They combed through Amanda’s Instagram for hints she may have been dropping about West last fall. And they watched years of Summer House footage like it was the Zapruder film, seeking confirmation that Amanda had been a bad friend all along—whether she was holding hands with a different friend’s boyfriend or breaking a bottle in some poor girl’s mouth.
Para-Loveshock
The chase may be the thrill ride that’s given Scamanda extra lift, but the real stakes have come from the relationship fans have with Summer House. There’s something about the long-enduring friendships of the show, amid the typical muckraking of reality TV, that makes you feel like you could be buds with these people, too. There’s nothing wrong with us for feeling that way; it’s science! As clinical psychologist Hayley Watson says, “Seeing scenarios that depict real life brings up the same feelings that we would feel if we were experiencing the situations ourselves. This releases hormones in our brain that suppress other, less pleasant emotions. Similar to a drug addiction, we get used to an overly positive emotional experience and we don’t want to let it go.”
When you feel like you’re friends with Amanda and Ciara—and have witnessed Ciara push Amanda to start her own career, and dry Amanda’s tears, and give her a marriage exit plan—watching their relationship fall apart feels like watching your own friend get taken down by a snake in the grass. There’s a study that calls this reaction “para-loveshock”: When someone you’re a fan of does something bad, you can feel just as heartbroken and betrayed as if you were the one that’s been wronged. And you react in all the same ways as you would after a breakup—namely, by telling all your friends about it.
The internet breakdown of Summer House timelines and psychology—the obsession over Amanda’s avoidant tendencies and all the toxic men Ciara’s loved before—is like a big gossip session about our messiest friends. And gossip’s normal and fun! It reinforces social norms, establishes what’s expected in relationships, and deepens our bonds with our fellow gossipers. So the past few months have been a big bonding party with thousands of our close and personal internet friends, about our close and personal Summer House friends. Ten years of Summer House have given us plenty of fodder for talking shit—if only we had that much dirt on the people in our actual lives.
Race on Summer House
When Ciara joined Summer House in the summer of 2020, she was the first Black cast member in the show’s five-year run. And her arrival came in the midst of a broader, long-overdue racial reckoning on Bravo. Ciara has said that she still receives an additional level of criticism for being Black on TV, especially when it comes to her dating life. She’s also talked about her fear that men just want to “experience” her in bed but will never want to be in a relationship with her—or that they only notice how hot she is, at the expense of her intelligence, her kindness, her generosity, her humor, her love for her friends, and all the rest of her wonderful qualities.
Now, in the wake of the West, Ciara, and Amanda love triangle, viewers have pointed out that it’s a pretty common trope for a white guy to date a Black girl until he ultimately gets serious with a white woman. That idea—that Black women are more valuable for their sexuality than as romantic partners—is called the “Jezebel stereotype.” (Austen Kroll, another member of the Bravo-verse who once dated Ciara, literally called her a “Jezebel” once.)
Of course, Ciara is so much more than just her white castmates’ Black sidekick or therapist—and if there’s any silver lining to this scandal, it’s that she’s fully stepping into her own limelight now. As she said in her first post-Scamanda interview, “When I first came on the show, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be the first Black person on this show.’ The showrunner at the time was like, ‘Well, maybe don’t overthink it.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, a white guy telling me not to overthink it. OK.’ But to turn the corner six years later and have so much support from everyone, it’s really sweet. It makes me feel like I didn’t just spend my 20s on this TV show for nothing.”
Friendship Beats Courtship
While there’s always been the requisite reality TV squabbling on Summer House, it’s typically been based on real-life conflicts—not Real Housewives–style controversies about Alibaba jewelry or runaway Mercedes sprinter vans. But even after broken engagements or broken wine glasses, the housemates usually make up and sometimes also kiss.
I wouldn’t expect that to happen this time. Backstage before the filming of the reunion, Ciara confirmed that Amanda was the one who hurt her—she’d expected this of West, but not of her longtime friend. In her own pre-reunion interview, an unnervingly chill Amanda said, “That’s my friend, and it kills me that I’ve caused her any pain.” But by the time they got onstage, Amanda didn’t seem to feel that bad. She told Ciara to fuck off and asked what she was supposed to do—ignore her feelings for West because it would have hurt Ciara to act on them? The rest of the cast responded with a resounding yes, but God forbid you tell Amanda how to be a friend. With a lack of self-awareness that borders on the pathological, she praised West as a paragon of friendship, crediting him with helping her get through her separation from Kyle—and somehow forgetting that Ciara had been there for her first (and probably with purer intentions).
If you’ve ever experienced a friendship falling-out like this one, you know that it’s fertile ground for obsession—maybe even more than a breakup. There should be something sacred to female friendships. Men come and go, but your friends will outlast them; as Amanda herself should be able to attest, friends can provide a physiological boost when you’re in a bad relationship, and they’re essential bolsters in the battle against depression and anxiety. At a time when we as a society are all a little more isolated and a little lonelier than ever, watching a once-beautiful friendship get discarded for West is a low blow. Regardless, the backlash to Scamanda feels like a reaffirmation: Friendships do matter, and sometimes you have to give up the scarf-wearing sports podcaster you love to keep them.
Fuckboy Justice
In his time on Summer House, West has become an avatar for the fuckboy who keeps the lines around his relationships blurry. Like fellow internet pariah West Elm Caleb, he’s become a rallying point for women, a source of angst and communion in the dating trenches. No one really expected much of West after he broke things off with Ciara—and broke her heart the first time around. But like the worst kind of fuckboy, he still manages to disappoint. Case in point: Despite their shared fall from grace, West won’t give up other girls to be with Amanda. As Mia Calabrese said to Amanda in the first part of the reunion, “You went from being married to being one of West’s side bitches? That’s crazy.” (Amanda just responded: “’Kay.”)
Somehow, West just has power over every woman he meets; as we find out in the tease for the third part of the reunion, he was dating yet another girl—Meija, she of the horse hair tie—and lying about it all of last summer. And because most women have encountered their own version of West in the wild, the Summer House scandal offers a chance to compare notes, and to burn this West as a kind of effigy. He represents so many frustrations about dating right now: the lack of communication, the lovebombing that goes nowhere, the reluctance to commit, the illusion of endless options. He may be receiving a slightly misdirected portion of the blame for all that, but he does make for a fitting stand-in for every man on Hinge who says he “wants a relationship” but is also “figuring out his dating goals.” Reality TV isn’t the place to go if you want your nuances to be seen and forgiven—it’s the place where you become the symbol of a problem that’s a whole lot bigger than you.
The Promotional Spin Cycle
If you know one thing about Summer House right now, it’s probably that Carl’s a mess. When Kyle invoked hapless softboy Carl to show how devastated the cast was, fans clung to that absurdity—that the housemate least involved in the drama was perhaps the most distraught about it—to bring some light to dark times. And because these are reality stars with mortgages to consider, “Carl’s a mess” rapidly became an Uber Eats commercial and a merch line/lifeline for Loverboy, Kyle’s ailing hard seltzer company.
Ciara, meanwhile, went the Ariana Madix route, taking cheeky brand deals with Sephora (“@sephora actually rewards loyalty”) and Sonic (“Dumped your baggage? Sip to that”) and gigs on Love Island USA’s aftershow and Dancing With the Stars. (And in a stroke of capitalist karma, Amanda was dropped by at least one of her own brand partners.)
I’m happy for Ciara to get her check, especially if she opts to leave Summer House and all its horrors after this season. It may be hard to throw a celebration for yet another influencer brand deal, but I’ll admit that I cracked a smile when she showed up alongside Paris Hilton in an Old Navy ad (we take what joy we can in these times). No matter your feelings about consumerist creep, the stars’ omnipresence in every ad on TikTok has kept all eyes on Summer House. And we can only hope that it’s keeping Kyle and Loverboy afloat.
The Thrill of Communal Outrage
All these disparate parts of the Scamanda ride have brought us down a shared path of catharsis. We might not be able to right West’s wrongs or check Amanda’s eye rolls, but we can erupt, at once, for a common cause—which is nice, because common causes aren’t that common these days. Are Amanda and West’s sins totally deserving of this level of internet reaction? Probably not! They may deserve a spot in Dante’s Inferno, but not all the way down where Satan lives.
Some of this response is based on genuine love for Ciara, sure—but maybe more than that, because justice tastes so sweet, especially when we can all agree on who was in the wrong. It’d be great to see this energy harnessed into something more productive, of course—for her part, Ciara took all the attention and redirected it to fundraising for Girl Scouts in New York, proving once again her angelic nature.
It’s no revelation that the internet gets too hung up on the fine lines between good and bad behavior and punishing those who cross them. Establishing and debating those lines is socially necessary; what’s also necessary is acknowledging that these things happen every day. Amanda and West are just two of the latest figures to be thrown to the fire of debate. They probably deserve forgiveness—or at least the right to retreat from the public eye—eventually, but Scamanda will stand forever. And maybe next time, some Amanda won’t do the same thing to another Ciara. Maybe she’ll remember the agony and the ecstasy of public shaming and choose her friend over her feelings.
