Real Housewives of Atlanta alum Peter Thomas took to Instagram on Wednesday to deny claims made by Real Housewives of Potomac star Mia Thornton that he had an affair with Wendy Osefo.
Thomas, 62, who was formerly wed to Cynthia Bailey, 56, addressed the claims made during the show’s seventh season reunion, threatening possible legal action against Bravo if his name continued to surface in storylines on the series.
He captioned the clip, ‘With all the s*** I am going through, then come this BULL****, @bravoandy @bravotv stop using me for y’all rating, please facts check before y’all air these episodes.’
In the clip, Peter described the scenario and said the network took liberties with the footage they filmed at his Bar One establishment.
‘Mia is going at it with Wendy and Bravo, this is kind of your fault, cause I taped with you for five minutes promoting Bar One Baltimore and Bar One Miami Beach – and you turned that five minutes into nine episodes – and now my name is being thrown around on the reunion show when in real life, I don’t mess with none of those women,’ he said.
He said he shot scenes with Osefo one time for five minutes and never went out to dinner with her.
‘I didn’t have no late night snack with her,’ he said. ‘She’s a married woman, she’s very respectful, very honorable. For Mia, for you to be talking about me and Wendy getting together is so disrespectful, it’s so thirsty, it’s for thirsty for you to do that just to collect that check from Bravo.’
Thomas continued, ‘There’s nothing cool about that. You can’t just use my name like that, because if you use my name like that I’m going to have my lawyer get in touch with you guys, and it’s going to be really ugly because I do not know any of those women, I’ve never seen them outside of my establishment.’
He said that the backlash from the broadcast was impacting his business for the worse.
‘Y’all just can’t recklessly just throw people’s name out like that because it actually hurt my business,’ he said. ‘And that’s irresponsible. Please cease and desist.’
In the reunion special, Thornton was responding to an incident in which she tossed a drink into Osefo’s face, and said that Osefo’s true anger was rooted in the issue involving Thomas, which Osefo denied.
‘Do you want to talk about the real story of how you f***ed Peter and that’s why you’re upset?’ Thornton said. ‘You wanna talk about that? I have my little receipt of you giving Peter the cookie, so you get a restaurant at Bar One?
‘You wanna talk about that? She had dinner with him before filming, and they had a whole entrée, and I heard all about it, it was after hours, in Bar One. I saw the cameras.’
Following Thomas’ clip, her husband Gordon Thornton, 68, took to Instagram with a clip in which he pushed back against claims made by Thomas that he was not particularly close with him and his family.
Gordon said that Thomas, who he thought was his friend, was close with him and his family though a number of events, despite distancing himself from them now.
‘I wonder if he didn’t know us like that like the times he had been at our house,’ Gordon said.
He added that they had spent time with one another playing cards, socializing with friends and family and going on boat rides.
Gordon noted that he and his family had dined at Thomas’s restaurant many times, and that he once asked him for a $60,000 loan to help with the business.
‘I don’t know why Peter says he doesn’t know us like that – maybe that’s his definition of not knowing us like that,’ he said.
Gordon said that a mutual contact told him that the publicity was helping Peter’s business, and that there wasn’t enough time to determine an impact as the allegations only came out a few days ago.
‘Peter, I guess we don’t know you like that,’ he said.