NEED TO KNOW
Rachel Zoe is ready for her reality TV return.
More than a decade after her Bravo show The Rachel Zoe Project ended, the celebrity stylist-turned-fashion mogul, 54, is back on the network for season 15 of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, premiering Dec. 4.
“I feel different on every level,” Zoe tells PEOPLE of her life now. “I’m very honest about where I am and what I’m dealing with on [RHOBH]. I think my goal is really to share the reality of my life. And everyone’s going through stuff, right?”
The new season of RHOBH will see Zoe navigating life post-split from her husband of 26 years Rodger Berman. She filed for divorce in July, 10 months after they first announced their separation.
“I’m really trying to help as many women as possible,” says Zoe. “I mean, probably at least 30% of the women in my life are going through a separation or a divorce. The question I kept getting asked and still get asked is: ‘Why am I so okay coming out of a relationship that really transcended my entire adult life?’ It’s because I’m independent — financially, professionally and socially. I think that there isn’t enough emphasis put on the importance of that.”
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Zoe says having her “own things to wake up for every day” made the “decision to leave” her marriage easier.
“It was like, okay, next,” she says. “No matter what life throws at you, you have to be able to stand up on your own. You just have to.”
Zoe and Berman, 57, first met in 1991, while they were both students at George Washington University. They got married in 1998 and share two sons: Skyler, 14, and Kaius, 11.
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The boys were a major reason why Zoe decided to step away from reality TV with the end of The Rachel Zoe Project in 2013.
“I was being chased down alleyways by paparazzi with baby strollers, or holding my kids in my arms and physically running from paps,” she says. “I remember a turning point when Sky took one of the paparazzi’s cameras out of their hands and turned it on him. He was like 3 or 4, and I was like, ‘No, this isn’t what I want for them.’”
Before signing on for RHOBH, she called a family meeting with her boys.
“I wouldn’t have agreed to do the show without my kids,” she says. “I mean, they’re the ones that told me to do it. I told them what it would mean and that Mommy would have to be gone a lot more and that they would possibly be on it. I told them I’d be talking pretty openly and honestly about things. They were like, ‘Mom, it’s your truth. You should speak freely and honestly. Don’t hide things from us.'”
Zoe says she’s candid about her split from Berman on RHOBH and how they became different people over time.
“I was done. I was really done,” she says. “I don’t suffer from guilt of not having given it everything I could have. I don’t suffer from that, and I don’t suffer from feeling like it was a failed marriage. Having been married for 26 years, I would say that three-quarters of that was amazing.”
Zoe says she “ultimately did what’s best for the kids.”
“I think that having two parents that love them is more important than having two parents together that maybe shouldn’t be together anymore,” she says.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 15 — which, along with Zoe, also stars Sutton Stracke, Bozoma Saint John, Erika Jayne, Dorit Kemsley, Kyle Richards and Amanda Frances — will premiere Dec. 4 on Bravo, with episodes available to stream the next day on Peacock.
