West Wilson may have fumbled the bag with Ciara Miller, but he’s certainly no Tom Sandoval.
When Wilson joined Summer House Season 8, he and Miller immediately hit it off. During the weeks, they went on horseback riding dates and chowed down on crispy jalapeño deviled eggs in New York City restaurants — and on the weekends, they smooched in front of campfires and had sleepovers in the Hamptons.
While they left the summer with plans to spend the fall together, they later revealed during the Season 8 reunion that Wilson ended things for “show-related” reasons — or, in other words, he didn’t quite know how to navigate a relationship amid his newfound fame.
As Wilson pointed out when he caught up with DECIDER via Zoom, he faced “a lot” of criticism for the way he handled things with Miller.
“Even when the show was airing, I learned every day how many people watch this show, which is more than I ever thought, and how many people have opinions about everything,” he said while promoting his partnership with Captain Morgan Sliced. “So, yeah, when it happened, obviously, no one’s ever really ready for anything like that.”
Wilson added, “I think it would be a mistake to go through something like that and not try to reflect and take away something and learn from it and grow from it.”
Some Bravo fans even compared Wilson to Sandoval, who became the “most hated man in America” after he was caught cheating on his then-girlfriend of nine years Ariana Madix with their mutual close friend Rachel “Raquel” Leviss.
“I think even being compared to him is so insane. It’s nuts,” Wilson said of the Vanderpump Rules star, whose lack of genuine accountability made him even more disliked in the Bravo universe.
Despite facing backlash after the Summer House reunion episodes aired, Wilson said the negative comments have since subsided.
“Amidst all the negative feedback I got, you always have like a percentage of people who are like, ‘Don’t worry, the Bravo audience is like this and it’ll go away super quick,’” he said. “And it actually, I don’t know, I feel like I woke up a week later and it just stopped. So, yeah, it was just a bottleneck on fire for a little bit and everything’s cool now.”
He was even spotted in a recent photo with his castmates, Miller included. Of reuniting with everyone after that tense reunion, Wilson said it felt “pretty natural.”
The first eight seasons of Summer House are currently streaming on Peacock.