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The Summer House Three-way Feud, Explained
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images/Bravo (Clifton Prescod, Noam Galai), Maya Dehlin Spach/Getty Images
Loverboy sure does stir up a lot of hate. The casts of Summer House, Winter House, and Southern Charm are beefing over booze brands across the Bravo-verse, on podcasts, and in the tabloids. And Paige DeSorbo is at the center of it: Her co-star Kyle Cooke hates her podcast co-host, Hannah Berner. Kyle Cooke also hates her (now ex-) boyfriend Craig Conover. And Berner’s not a huge fan of Conover, now that he and DeSorbo are donezo. Cooke has mostly lashed out in defense of his one great love, the thing that gives him purpose and motivates him to get out of bed in the morning: Loverboy hard seltzer. Oh, and his wife, Amanda Batula, too. Sometimes.
It all erupted with the return of Summer House season nine at Lindsay Hubbard’s gender-reveal party. Cooke called DeSorbo “two-faced,” which prompted her to unleash hell and disclose the rage texts he had been sending about Conover and Berner. “I’m being two-faced? How fucking dare you!” she yelled. “What you do is two-faced. Rage texting me and then acting like it’s all good.” DeSorbo also said she couldn’t take any more texts “just berating my boyfriend and my best friend.” How did we get here, why are so many people involved, and why does anyone care this much about canned beverage?
Summer 2018: Both Paige DeSorbo and Hannah Berner join Summer House for season three. Berner and Kyle Cooke immediately clash over his de facto leadership of the house.
During this season of filming, it comes to light that Cooke had cheated on Batula. “A year ago, I was on a guys’ trip, I blacked out, and I woke up with a girl in my bed,” he says in the season-three premiere. “I’ve never felt worse in my entire life.”
Summer 2019: Hannah Berner partners with Truly hard seltzer.
That same summer, Cooke inadvertently names Berner and DeSorbo’s future podcast. While he and Amanda vent about how hard wedding planning is going, Berner and DeSorbo keep laughing and talking amongst themselves. Cooke expresses frustration with “the giggly squad” in the corner. And thus a podcasting empire is born.
Summer 2020: The lockdown season of Summer House is filmed, and Hannah Berner is going through it. The entire season plays out like a summer-long friend breakup between Berner and the rest of the house. In hindsight, DeSorbo says she wishes she’d tried to squash the beef when it started. “I would have spoken up more. We had fun. I love doing it. I loved doing it with Hannah,” Paige told Us Weekly in 2021. “I would have gone back to the start of when people started fighting. Let’s not do this.”
Among the things Berner gets in fights about: not cleaning enough, Kyle’s controlling ways, and the fact that Kyle cheated on Amanda in 2018. By the end of the season, Berner is disinvited from Kyle and Amanda’s wedding.
April 9, 2021: Amanda and Kyle find out that Hannah Berner and (then-bf, now-husband) Des Bishop fucked all over the titular Summer House — including possibly in Kyle and Amanda’s bathroom. Amanda says she “actually started crying” when she first heard the rumor. “That bathroom was awesome … I get it,” she said on the Summer House After Show. “I just felt like, after hearing it, like a little, mmm really? You guys just let me be in there and no one gave me a heads-up?” In the same after show, Berner denied doing the deed in the primary bath. “There’s like a rumor something happened in the bathtub, nothing happened in the bathtub,” she said, then added, “I don’t think we had sex in [their bathroom], I like sat up on the sink for a second.”
April 19, 2021: On Everything Iconic With Danny Pelligrino, Cooke and Batula implied that Berner’s fiancé, Des Bishop, is only with her for the fame. “I don’t know him well enough [to say if he’s an opportunist],” Batula said. “I hope that’s not what the case is and maybe it started off that way and then he actually fell in love with her.” Kyle was less charitable, saying Des was “two-faced.” (That insult will come back later in this saga.)
Berner responded to the rumors in an interview with Us Weekly. “My friends are going for Des and I’m like, ‘Come for me, just please leave Des out of it,’” she said. She also re-addressed the sex-in-the-bathroom thing. “We did not have sex in the bathroom. We’re in there for 30 seconds,” she said. “They’re acting like I’ve murdered someone. And, like, since when is sex on Summer House considered this disgusting thing? I’m kind of confused by it all. But I own up to being emotional this season and reactive.”
May 2021: Berner announces on Instagram that she is leaving Summer House. “These last three summers have truly been a whirlwind and the show has, without a doubt, changed my life and I will forever be thankful for the platform it has provided me,” she wrote.
September 2021: Kyle and Amanda get married! Hannah is not invited! Paige and Craig soft-launch at the wedding! And then Craig gets kicked out? That rumor swirls for another few years before being fully confirmed by Kyle in season nine of Summer House.
November 2021: On Call Her Daddy, DeSorbo says she’s relieved Berner is no longer on Summer House. “I was, like, ‘Okay, well now I’m not automatically in the middle of the two of them [Amanda and Hannah] and I can have my friendship with Hannah and I can have my friendship with these other people and they will never be mixed again,’” Paige said. “I would be lying if I didn’t say there was a relief because there was so much animosity when we were all in a room together.”
May 2024: Craig Conover becomes an investor in Spritz Society, a canned-cocktail company competing with Cooke’s. (Try saying that ten times fast.) Conover tells “Page Six” he has partnered with married couple and content creators/podcasters Claudia Oshry and Ben Soffer instead of with Cooke after trying Spritz Society at an Eras Tour show. Conover said he “always respected Kyle’s hustle,” but he also “didn’t understand it at times” until became a booze peddler himself: “I understand why he’s had to work so hard, because the grind in the alcohol business is extreme.” As to why he’d never invested in Loverboy, Conover simply says it “wasn’t an option.”
“I have nothing but respect for those guys and I will always be a Loverboy fan,” Conover says. “But guess what? I’m all the way down in Charleston, and I’m on a different show and we’re going to have Spritz down there now.”
On WWHL, Cooke talks about how he felt wronged by Conover. “The founder took me out to dinner days before they inked a deal, and failed to mention any of that, and milked information from me,” Cooke tells Cohen. “I think Craig had already signed the deal when he confronted me. He claimed he didn’t know I have a spritz. He thought I had just sparkling hard teas. I’m like ‘Bro, we launched our spritz line a year and a half before this company,” he said. “The way they went about it really rubbed me the wrong way.”
June 2024: Craig Conover denies being kicked out of Kyle and Amanda’s wedding. Or at least not, like, fully ejected. Just a cute little denial of reentry. “We had a really good time at the wedding, and then when we already were leaving I basically was made sure to be like, ‘You know what? I don’t think you need to come back in here,’” Conover tells Us Weekly. “It was a filmed event. I think if I was kicked out, we would’ve seen it on TV. But, to be fair, I was asked to not come back in, in case I wanted to decide to come back in.”
July 2024: Hannah Berner says Kyle Cooke got her fired from Summer House. What was her crime? Seltzer disloyalty. “The truth is beef started ’cause I did an ad for Truly Seltzer, and I didn’t know that I, like, wasn’t allowed to,” she says on the BFFs podcast. “I didn’t know that I wasn’t allowed to drink other drinks.” Berner says that the choice to leave was ultimately her own, but Cooke’s beverage-related ego made it too difficult to stay. “I think some of these shows become a lot of egos,” she explains. “And it’s like, ‘It’s my show. It’s my drink. You can’t do that.’ And there’s no rules, and it just becomes fighting over egos and screen time, and it’s not that fun after doing it for too many seasons.”
In an interview with “Page Six” the following week, Cooke says he had “nothing to do” with Hannah Berner’s firing from Summer House. “I’m flattered anyone thinks I could have that kind of pull,” he said, “but clearly, I don’t have any control over what Bravo does.” Cooke calls Berner’s story upsetting, “because there’s no truth to it.” He also questions Berner’s timeline. “I believe her collaboration with Truly was a year after we filmed the season 5 reunion,” he says, “so the timing doesn’t add up.” But it’s Cooke’s timing that doesn’t add up, as Berner had been working with Truly since 2019.
Cooke says that Berner dug her own grave during season five, and claims she called Cooke to apologize for her behavior that year. “I told her no apology to me was necessary but that Amanda deserved one,” he tells “Page Six.” “My issues with Hannah had nothing to do with beverages or egos or screen time — they had to do with how she was treating Amanda.”
That same month, Hannah goes on the Chicks in the Office podcast to discuss leaving Summer House and how it pushed her to pursue standup. She says that the cameras would often go away when Paige and her would go Giggly Squad–mode cracking each other up, which made her realize she’d never get to show the full Berner on Bravo. She also says that Paige was the only person in the house to laugh at her jokes.
September 2024: Craig Conover gives an interview indicating that his feud with Kyle may be on its ebb. “I do like Kyle a lot and we’ve had a lot of good memories throughout the years,” Craig tells E! News, “so I think it was more I didn’t understand it. I also was just shocked. You’ll get to see how that plays out when Summer House comes out.”
“Kyle is actually one of my closest friends in the Bravo world,” Conover continues. “I really enjoy going to film with him, I like hanging with him, we used to do double dates, so I was surprised because I think our friendship goes outside of filming. I was just bummed.” He still doesn’t fully get what Kyle is so mad about. “If any of my friends ever got an offer to do something with a home-décor company, I would want them to do it,” Conover says, alluding to his Sewing Down South biz. “I think the spaces are really big and I think a rising tide lifts all ships. I think we just look at things differently, and that’s okay.”
November 2024: At Bravo Fan Fest Miami, Cooke takes a shot at Conover and his (lack of) business acumen. “He doesn’t actually run his own business. He gets to like, do his thing. I’m jealous of that,” he tells Andy Cohen.
December 2024: Craig Conover responds to Cooke’s snark at Bravo Fan Fest. On WWHL, he says “it just always hurts my feelings” when Cooke negs him. “Um, I’m really proud of what we’ve built, especially with Sewing Down South. And we’ve worked really hard, my two partners. You know, Kyle and I talked about this this summer, so it was weird that it was still kind of living in his head, especially when you said, ‘Just say something nice about what Craig has done.’ So it just hurt my feelings.”
This same month, Paige DeSorbo announces her breakup with Conover, which has its own timeline of he-said she-said drama.
February 26, 2025: In the episode three of season nine, filmed summer 2024, Kyle’s rage texts have entered the chat. Paige shows them to housemate Ciara Miller, but doesn’t confront Kyle about them until the next episode. “What about me gave you the impression you could text me talking shit about my best friend and my boyfriend? Like, what the fuck?” she asks rhetorically. “You have both of their numbers. Be an adult, and if you see something on the internet that makes you upset, sit with it for a minute and then text the person that said it. You trying to put me in the middle of it is absolutely insane.” In fairness (?) to Kyle, Paige is now putting Ciara in the middle of being put in the middle by Kyle.
Later in the ep, Paige says Kyle is being saved from a verbal beatdown by the grace of Amanda Batula. “He’s so lucky he’s married to the woman he’s married to, because it’s the only reason I don’t go up one fucking side of him and down the other,” she tells Ciara. “Now, I’ve gotten to a point where, like, you’ve fucked with my best friend. You’re fucking with my boyfriend. You disrespect me, you think you can text me anything you want. Fuck you. Like, you’re lucky I don’t buy Loverboy and fucking sell it.”
March 5, 2025: The big fight at Lindsay Hubbard’s gender-reveal party airs, complete with shots of Kyle’s rage texts. An intrepid Bravo viewer transcribes them. Kyle complains to Paige about Hannah’s appearances on BFFs and Call Her Daddy, Craig, and Craig’s Spritz Society partnership. He also texts that Hannah Berner had the lowest Q rating of the entire network. (Really? Lower than Jax Taylor?) Kyle semi-apologizes in the texts, saying he “can’t vent to Amanda bc she basically divorced me for potentially hurting your guys friendship with the spritz stuff.”
During the fight, Kyle says his biggest problem with Paige is that “your business partner is still out there lying about why she’s no longer at the house.” Paige sees the issue as less a truth verus lie situation and more like two different POVs. “It’s two different experiences,” she says. “You’ll never agree, and it doesn’t matter because you guys aren’t gonna be friends. So it doesn’t matter.”
March 6, 2025: Kyle Cooke insists he’s not the drama. “I’m not the one talking about Hannah — it’s the inverse,” Cooke says at a “Page Six” Virtual Reali-Tea live event. “I’m not the one out there spewing lies.”
At the same event, he throws yet more shade at Conover. Spritz Society issued a press release saying their product would be on Summer House season nine. “I mean, I’m the least surprised,” he says of the PR move. “I think the only press they’ve received in the last year has had my name on it — or the show.” He blames Craig entirely, sparing his business partners any flack: “I think Craig just fed them a bunch of misinformation, which is what he does.”
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