A Pepsi demand, a boardroom takedown, and a 62-year-old with receipts.
Lisa Rinna is in tell-all mode, and she’s naming names. In her new memoir, the former Real Housewives star calls Dionne Warwick a “nasty piece of work” and says Star Jones helped get her canned on The Celebrity Apprentice. It’s messy, unmistakably 2011, and it says as much about the nostalgia economy as it does about manners.
The Moment
In her 2026 memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, Rinna recounts a create-your-own-pizza task on NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice (2011), claiming Warwick ordered her to fetch a Pepsi and later worked to push her out. Rinna also alleges Star Jones “threw [her] under the bus,” contributing to her early exit that season.
She characterizes the environment as cutthroat, writing that she “couldn’t trust any of the women” and, yes, her words describe what she experienced as “woman-on-woman hate crimes.” Representatives for Warwick and Jones had not issued public comments at the time of publication.
“Nasty piece of work.” – Rinna on Warwick, as written in her memoir
Rinna has been publicly promoting the book, including a late-February event in New York, leaning into the greatest hits of her reality era friction, fallout, and a little bit of score-settling.
Lisa Rinna exposes the rudest celebrities she’s ever worked with: ‘Nasty piece of work’ Rinna’s memoir, “You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It,” is currently available for purchase wherever books are sold. https://t.co/GSd0xdFSpF pic.twitter.com/gPWSBFvNTB
— NahBabyNah (@NahBabyNahNah) March 6, 2026
The Take
This is the fame cycle doing what it does: rerun the tape, add spicier captions, and call it closure. Rinna’s not inventing a feud here-the 2011 footage shows real tension and an early firing-but she’s sharpening it for 2026, when “rude” is a shareable genre and memoirs are the new reunion specials.
It’s also a generational clash in miniature. Warwick, a music legend of a different era; Jones, a lawyer-turned-TV personality forged in daytime debate; and Rinna, the consummate reality survivor who understands that specificity (“Go get me a Pepsi”) is the currency of modern confession. The details feel designed for pull-quotes, because they are.
The culture read: nostalgia sells, but accountability sells faster. We forgive the reheated drama when it comes with exacting memory and a wink. This is like throwing a vintage boardroom blowup into an air fryer-crisper edges, same middle.
Receipts
Confirmed
- Rinna’s characterizations and the “nasty piece of work” quote appear in her memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It (2026), a first-person primary source.
- The Celebrity Apprentice Season 4 (NBC, 2011) footage confirms Rinna competed alongside Dionne Warwick and Star Jones, experienced on-air conflict, and was fired early in the season.
- Rinna promoted the memoir and a New York event in an official Instagram post in late February 2026, confirming the timing of her press push.
Unverified/No public response
- As of publication, no on-the-record rebuttals from Dionne Warwick or Star Jones to Rinna’s specific claims in the memoir.
Backstory (For the Casual Reader)
Lisa Rinna, 62, jumped from soaps (notably Days of Our Lives) to primetime personality, then spent eight headline-heavy years on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (2014-2023). Before that, she appeared on The Celebrity Apprentice in 2011, where she clashed with teammates, including Warwick and Jones, and exited early. Off-screen, she’s married to actor Harry Hamlin and is mother to models Amelia and Delilah Belle Hamlin. Translation: she’s lived several Hollywood lives and knows how to turn a chapter into a headline.
Question for you: Do you want stars to keep naming names years later, or is it time to let the early-2010s reality drama stay in the vault?
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