No one is above the law. Not even a Real Housewife.
3/3/2025 5:30 a.m. ESTchat_bubble3
Chris Weedon has never watched “The Real Housewives of Potomac,” but he knows he has a lot in common with Karen Huger.
For one, they both have deep roots in the tony Montgomery County suburb at the center of the series.
And, much like the show’s self-proclaimed Grande Dame, he has also been sentenced to serve time in that county’s correctional system for reckless and potentially dangerous acts committed while intoxicated.
Huger, sentenced Wednesday to two years’ jail time with one year suspended in relation to a 2024 DUI incident, is a wealthy, well-dressed reality television star with a lot of fans. But her fame should not, and did not, save her from facing the consequences of her actions.
I have no conflict about a perpetual drunk driver being taken off the street. But I do watch “RHOP” and I liked Karen — or the Karen of the show, at any rate — because she’s such a specific kind of Black Maryland bougie. She knows things. She makes observations. You don’t necessarily want to be the person she’s observing, but there’s a certain Dominque Deveraux from “Dynasty” thing about her that I find compelling. Still, she did what she did, and that’s not grand. It’s dangerous.
“She’s not a criminal, just a rich lady who’s bored,” said Weedon, 66, a Rockville native who served more than a year in prison for robbing a Potomac bank in 2001 while in the throes of a heroin addiction. “But let’s say she’d swung over into the wrong lane and she hits a family with two kids in the car, and all four of them are killed. It didn’t happen that way, but I hope she takes it to heart how serious it was.”
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Fan reaction to Huger’s punishment has been mixed. “4 DUIs in 17 years–yes on jail time & take her licenses away. She can afford Uber!” wrote Baltimore Banner reader Fred McGuire in response to an online query by my colleague Tennyson Donyea Coleman, who writes The Scan newsletter.
On the other hand, Ellicott City’s Donna Robinson wrote me that she felt bad for the TV star. “I think the one year sentence is a bit much,” she said. “There are certainly others out here doing far worse without consequences.”
Huger is not the first cast member of Bravo’s glitzy, gossipy “Housewives” franchise to run afoul of the law. Teresa Guidice, star of the New Jersey iteration, served 11 months in prison for fraud. Salt Lake City‘s Jen Shah is in the middle of a 6½-year sentence for defrauding hundreds of people in telemarketing schemes. So there’s precedent here. It’s just never clear how sorry these women are until they have to be.
At last week’s sentencing, Huger admitted to Judge Terrence J. McGann that it was her responsibility “to make sure that my community members make it where they need to be safely.“ But she previously denied being an alcoholic in a pre-recorded video played during the “Potomac” reunion. That video was filmed over a week after she was found guilty, but before checking herself into rehab.
As McGann pointed out, this was Huger’s fourth DUI offense in 17 years, casting doubt that those were the only times she’s ever driven drunk. If she’d killed someone, her fame would not have brought those people back.
“I was never a big fan of Karen, but after seeing the [body camera] footage of her DUI, I couldn’t watch the show anymore,” Lisa Stewart, a Cincinnati resident who has family in Towson, wrote in a message to me on Bluesky. “The way she was playing it down, when she could have killed someone, was nauseating. It was shocking to discover this was her FOURTH DUI. I know someone who lost his license after ONE. It DEFINITELY seems she has received special treatment in the past.”
Weedon, a former University of Maryland, College Park tennis player, relates to being a repeat offender who finally faced consequences he could not shirk. He became addicted to prescription pain killers after breaking his ankle and eventually turned to heroin, plunging into a 17-year addiction. He bounced in and out of jail and rehab until that fateful day when he barged into Potomac Valley Bank with an empty BB gun, hoping “for a suicide by cop.”
Instead, he wound up sentenced to 18 months with 23 years suspended. He served 14 months behind bars and another 2½ years in a Texas drug program that he would eventually be hired to work for. What started him on that path to real recovery, he said, “was admitting that I’d done something wrong” — something he hopes Huger really understands.
“She’s got the influence — if she really does take it to heart — to help a lot of people,” he said. “She will still be in the spotlight on the show, so she should not make it about her. She should say, ‘I am a conduit.’ ”oung lady that will need her guidance,” Hill wrote me on Facebook. “Martha Stewart did her time and came out smelling like a rose. This too shall pass.”
Weedon also thinks some good could come of Huger’s conviction.
“She’s got the influence — if she really does take it to heart — to help a lot of people,” he said. “She will still be in the spotlight on the show, so she should not make it about her. She should say, ‘I am a conduit.’”
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In her reunion video, the star pledged to return to “RHOP” as just Karen, “not as the Grande Dame.” I assume this means she’ll try to be real, without the artifice. Do I think that’s possible on a show that makes artifice, wealth and privilege the central plot line? I’m not sure. But I hope so.
L.A.’s Total Leadership Failure
The city slashed fire and other basic services after Mayor Karen Bass awarded fat contracts to government workers.
/ Eye on the News / Politics and Law, Public Safety, Infrastructure and Energy
Jan 10 2025/ Share
The devastating wildfires in Los Angeles have spotlighted questionable state and local government policies in California that may have contributed to the blazes and left areas like Hollywood vulnerable due to insufficient firefighting resources. Mayor Karen Bass’s budget cuts to the city’s fire department, enacted just months ago amid warnings about the city’s deteriorating finances, stand out as a striking example of misplaced priorities. The cuts stemmed from a budget crisis triggered by her administration’s decision to reward city employees with rich contracts and benefits—even as it dismissed worries that the reductions would hurt services. “Predictions that city services will be impossible to deliver,” deputy mayor Zach Seidl told the press, “are simply false.” Few public statements have aged as poorly—or as hauntingly—as this one.
Bass took office in December 2022 after a surprisingly close race against real estate developer Rick Caruso, a Republican who had switched to the Democratic Party. A Los Angeles Times poll showed that Caruso did well among voters viewing the economy and public safety as key issues; Bass dominated among voters who prioritized climate change and “coalition building.” Shortly after taking office, Bass began negotiating with public sector unions over expiring contracts. Early last year, those talks resulted in more than two dozen agreements with unions representing the city’s civilian employees, guaranteeing wage hikes of between 20 percent and 25 percent over five years. The contracts raised the minimum wage for city employees from $20 to $25 per hour and also contained rich benefits, including allowing workers to cash in 100 percent of their unused sick time when they retire—an increasingly rare perk in the private sector. An analysis by the city’s administrative officer said the deal would cost Los Angeles $3.5 billion over the life of the contracts. A similar multiyear deal with police unions was projected to add another $1 billion to costs.
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The new contracts were the largest, in percentage terms, given to city employees since 2007, when then-mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered pay raises amounting to 25 percent over five years. Coming just before the 2008 Wall Street crisis crashed the economy, those contracts helped to blow a huge hole in Los Angeles’s budget—leading to the elimination of thousands of jobs and shrinking investment in basic services. Critics warned that something similar might occur following the 2024 contracts, which could drain the city’s fiscal reserves.
It took just months for those fears to materialize. This time it wasn’t a Wall Street meltdown that busted the budget but a series of unanticipated expenses related to judgments against the city in personal-injury negligence cases arising from dangerous conditions, such as broken sidewalks and inadequate streetlighting, as well as judgments against the police. Under normal circumstances, Los Angeles should have been able to absorb those costs, but its reserves had dropped below acceptable levels, and paying the liability cases without additional revenues or budget cuts would have been enough to force the city council to declare a fiscal emergency. In response, Bass cut the city’s budget to $12.9 billion, down from $13.1 billion the previous year. This involved making reductions in some 20 areas, including a cut of $17.6 million in the fire department—the steepest decline in any area except street services, where Bass reduced spending by $21 million.
“The city is living beyond its means,” the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times noted at the time, adding that the problem was “self-inflicted.” For Angelenos hoping the city would invest in infrastructure—“smoothing busted sidewalks, fixing burned-out streetlights, trimming trees, or any other public improvements”—those hopes seemed unlikely to be realized. Critics also faulted the administration for how it handled union negotiations that led to the budget-busting contracts. Most of the talks were conducted in secret, with little public discussion of the costly perks included in the agreements until they were finalized.
California’s latest bout of horrific fires will reopen debate about the state government’s failures to address a deadly problem. California’s decades-long resistance to boosting its water-storage capacity—what Victor Davis Hanson has described as “the scorching of California”—will face new scrutiny. The state’s land-management practices, which incoming President Trump has already criticized, will provoke more controversy. Los Angeles’s water-management system, lambasted by former mayoral candidate Caruso—formerly a commissioner of the city’s Department of Water and Power—for running dry in some neighborhoods during the current fires, will require new investment. Questions will linger, too, over how much difference the $17.6 million cut by Mayor Bass from the city’s fire department might have made.
What is beyond dispute is that Los Angeles and the surrounding area have a long history of wildfires, including in recent years. That threat didn’t seem to be much of a priority in Karen Bass’s budget.
