Bronwyn Newport Gets Undressed

“Email me if you still like me at the end,” the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star says of season seven.
Photo: Michael Friberg for New York Magazine

“I’m trying to consolidate everything.” Bronwyn Newport, 41, is standing barefoot outside of her unit at the Extra Space Storage facility in Millcreek, Utah, a suburb ten minutes from Salt Lake City. Wearing a Moschino coat made up of hundreds of plastic flowers, she surveys the racks of ruffles, feathers, and furs straining to escape their concrete prison. A pair of shimmering aubergine Jimmy Choos sits by the curb. “I was afraid the gravel would mess up my shoes,” she says, giggling and shaking her signature bob. “I like these shoes more than I like my feet.”

The unit is one of several the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star has scattered across the Northern Hemisphere. She squats between two racks of high-top sneakers, platforms, and ballet flats piled two deep and lists off locales: New York, Cabo, San Francisco. That doesn’t even count the climate-controlled space where she safeguards her custom creations and vintage spoils, including the Dolce & Gabbana dress Heidi Klum wore while stepping over “fashion roadkill” Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. (Newport bought it from another collector who was selling it on 1stDibs and, yes, she has worn it.) She emerges from her rifling with a pair of maroon leather opera gloves she says are impossible to get off and tries them on anyway. “It feels a little Hansel and Gretel. I’ve dropped crumbs everywhere I’ve been.”

Two years into her tenure on Bravo’s most high-octane franchise, Newport has narrowly ascended to fan favorite among a famously tribalistic viewership, her sculptural coats and spiked heels belying a self-effacing authenticity and unexpected candor. Cameras documented every tearful exchange between Newport and her husband, Todd Bradley, a tech investor 26 years her senior, as their nine-year marriage collapsed in real time. But they also captured Newport’s delightful tinkle of a laugh as she delivered biting commentary about her co-stars’ behavior or showed off her corny sense of humor (she used to surprise Bradley in a different inflatable costume every time she picked him up from the airport). As season seven airs, Newport is juggling her divorce alongside a string of high-profile romances. She even copped the center snowflake from Angie Katsanevas in the series’ campy, catchphrase-filled opening credits. (Newport’s: “You collect rumors while I’m collecting designers.”)

She edges further into the unit, maneuvering racks, skirting piles, stacking and restacking Hermès and Nike (special-edition) boxes, emerging with some new discovery and the story of how she acquired it, a treasure hunt where the map exists only in her mind. “I know where everything is, yes. I have a system,” she says. “It’s like a Clueless closet, but it’s an intense spreadsheet.” Each entry includes a picture of the item of clothing, which storage unit it’s in, where she wore it last, and what she accessorized it with. What’s not listed is the price. Newport had an unlimited clothing allowance while married to Bradley, but had to inform him when she spent more than $10,000 on a single item. With her divorce in the works, she acknowledges she has to account for what she can afford on her own income but still thinks budget is “a really long four-letter word.” The lack of spending cap explains how this storage unit (one of several in the Salt Lake-Park City area) wound up looking like a Barneys Warehouse sale. When she’s out of town, she’ll send her daughter, Gwen, 20, to retrieve something, and it won’t be there. “I think she just lies on the floor of the storage unit on her phone for 20 minutes and says she can’t find it,” Newport says.

It’s a metaphor for her life right now. “Chaos is kind of my brand accidentally,” she says, tugging on the sleeves of a neon-striped sweater that looks like both Bert and Ernie combined into one fuzzy Muppet. “I didn’t set out for that to be it, but there’s a little bit right now.”

Newport wound up in Utah accidentally. A San Francisco native raised Mormon, she attended Brigham Young University briefly before getting pregnant with her daughter and dropping out. (Gwen did not have a relationship with her father, who died when she was 2.) Newport went back to San Francisco and started working in finance, where she met Bradley. They bought a house in Park City for the skiing, and when Gwen became a competitive ski racer, they started spending more time in the area, transitioning to full-time residents right before COVID shut everything down. “It was shocking news that when I wasn’t at BYU, I loved Utah,” she says, laughing.

Bravo was looking to add to the RHOSLC cast after Jen Shah went to prison and Monica Garcia got caught spreading rumors about the other Housewives on Instagram. Newport joined in season five on the recommendation of Lisa Barlow, whom she knew socially, alongside friends-of Britani Bateman and Meili Workman. “I was at the inflection point in my life of wanting to do something that was just about me,” Newport says. “Todd had such a big career, and I really felt like a support system for him. Maybe I would make friends, maybe it was an adventure, maybe I’d embarrass myself. I grossly underestimated how it would affect my family.”

Newport captured the fandom’s affections almost immediately, busting into her first scene wearing a $15,000 heart-shaped Saint Laurent coat and a devious smirk. After Bateman complimented her “costume,” Newport cut back with, “Not a costume. Those are fighting words to me,” followed by a flick of her bob behind her ear with a single finger, her signature move. It was just the right amount of rebuttal, putting Bateman in her place without making anyone feel too uncomfortable, another signature Newport move. But viewers did not take kindly to Bradley, a gruff and controlling presence who didn’t seem to enjoy filming and regularly condemned Newport’s behavior on-camera. (On a couples trip to Palm Springs that the pair hosted for their anniversary, he didn’t like all the fighting — as if that wasn’t the whole point of the show — and told John Barlow, “If Lisa doesn’t stop, you’ve gotta go.” ) Last season, Newport was forced to address photos a fan took of Bradley texting another woman on a plane (she has called it an “emotional affair”), but he’d already sealed his fate a few episodes earlier. In a scene set at an ice-cream parlor, Newport explains that she ordered a sundae because the maraschino cherry is her favorite part and she hates when he plucks it off and eats it. What happens not more than 30 seconds later is Bradley doing exactly that. “I cried when I watched that episode,” she says. “To watch myself being like, ‘Oh, you asshole,’ and laugh it off and make these jokes — I didn’t want to laugh it off anymore.”

Newport decided to leave Bradley when her 40th birthday rolled around and he didn’t acknowledge it. She got a cherry tattoo on her shoulder to commemorate the end of the relationship. “Not because the cherry broke us up and I’m happy about that,” she says. “Going forward, I always want to notice those things that I’m not saying, that I’m not putting an emphasis on. I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who did that to somebody else, and I don’t ever want to be okay with somebody doing that to me.”

Five months after announcing her separation, Newport confirmed she was dating model Brandon Good, 32, a relationship viewers will watch unfold on this season of RHOSLC. They have since broken up. (When I asked Newport’s castmate Heather Gay how she kept her own new boyfriend a secret from fans until they saw him in the season-seven trailer, she replied, “It’s apparently really easy if you don’t have a publicist and don’t do press releases to People magazine.”) Newport’s publicist could not have been happy when DeuxMoi got pictures of her at the U.S. Open kissing a “mystery man” who turned out to be married. (Technically, so is Newport.) It all seems to be part of the “hot-girl summer” she says she spent living in New York with her friend the fashion designer Christian Siriano, who found himself single and looking for a place at the same time as her. “For the summer, yeah, I felt like the dating pool, no disrespect but all disrespect, is way better in New York,” she says.

Part of wanting to get out of town had to do with difficulties filming season seven with her castmates. “We had a season. I don’t know what else I could say about it,” she says. “It’s a nice excuse to be like, I’m in New York right now, and I’ll see them when I see them.” Wary of spoilers, Newport declines to elaborate on the details, but points out that much of the tension has already been covered in the press: the death of Mary Cosby’s son, Robert Jr., in February, followed by the announcements that Katsanevas and Whitney Rose, Newport’s closest ally, are both separated from their husbands. “I was in a very personally chaotic and messy place, and then so much is going on with all of us,” she says, ducking behind some racks and reappearing in a leopard-print bra and booty-short set so skimpy Madonna would blush. “There was never a minute to breathe. Everybody needed everybody else all of the time. You really see us trying to balance our own personal lives and how we contribute to a group dynamic and how we are friends for each other.” Even Bradley makes an appearance this season, storming out of a conversation in a cloud of expletives in the trailer. “He came to me about filming those things,” she adds. “Just keep that in mind when you see it: I did not bamboozle Todd into filming ever.”

She pauses to rearrange the shelf of Moon Boots, sorted into a puffy rainbow, and, like a true shopaholic, refuses to select her favorite piece in the unit. “The next discovery is always my favorite,” she says, giggling again. Over the summer, she launched a YouTube series, Walk-In, in which she tours the closets of particularly stylish people like Betsey Johnson, Laverne Cox, and RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Symone; she’s also parlayed her RHOSLC visibility into red-carpet commentary gigs for People at the SAG Awards and E! News at the 2026 Met Gala. Her affinity for fashion might be part of the reason she was tapped for the upcoming season of Peacock’s super-popular competition show The Traitors.

Between her personal chaos and that within the group, things got so bad that even getting dressed couldn’t improve her mood. “At one point during this season, I say to whoever I’m with, ‘Well, I showed up in jeans, so obviously I’m in a very dark place and I don’t give a fuck about this conversation,’” she says. She doesn’t regret the messiness. (Executive producer Andy Cohen has said that Newport is setting the bar for transparency among the Housewives.) “As I walked away from the last day we filmed, I thought back on everything I’d said and every decision I made, and I kept thinking, My life is so good and so full and I’m so grateful and optimistic about where it goes,” she says. “It doesn’t mean I haven’t done dumb things, doesn’t mean I haven’t said things I regret, but you can tell when somebody is happy and when somebody is just trying to look happy.” If fans delighted in Newport’s honesty in the past, season seven can only raise her stock further. “Talk to me in six months,” she says with a smirk. “Email me if you still like me at the end.”