Before Justin Anderson and Kelly Henderson sat down to “get to the bottom” of her fallout with Kristin Cavallari, the Velvet’s Edge podcaster had gone off the grid.
“I don’t really know why Kelly went MIA for so long and Kristin didn’t hear from her,” Justin told Very Cavallari cameras near the top of tonight’s new episode. “For all I know, she could’ve gone to Europe, she has a new boyfriend, she took some big job. I don’t know. It’s just kind of mysterious that she just disappeared.”
As audiences learned earlier this week, per the emotional preview clip above, Kristin was distraught, frustrated and reasonably confused after Kelly—with whom she’d built an “amazing bond,” as Justin put it, over the course of eight years—stopped returning her text messages several months prior. The radio silence trailed what sounds like tense correspondence between the former friends, due, in part, to an unsubstantiated spell of online rumors that suggested Kelly and Kristin’s husband Jay Cutler had an affair.
“Not for one second have I ever thought that it was true,” the Uncommon James founder and CEO said in a confessional during last week’s season premiere, going on to explain this week why Kelly’s response to the accusations felt considerably more hurtful than the bogus claims themselves.
“It wasn’t even about the rumors,” she told Justin amid an emotional conversation about the friendship’s decline. But when Kelly “went on social media and kept talking about [Cutler]” shortly after the gossip surfaced, Kristin felt she was “fueling the fire” for personal gain.
Considering that in conjunction with Kelly’s spotty communication since filming wrapped on Very Cavallari‘s second season, Kristin started to question whether the celebrity hair stylist was really her friend or “using” her for a different reason.
“Kristin felt like Kelly was in it for the show,” Justin noted. “It’s like, where were you when we weren’t filming? And Kristin’s dealt with that since she was 17 years old.”
During their face-to-face, the celebrated hair colorist didn’t receive a straight answer from Henderson regarding her whereabouts in the interim between seasons, though—after admitting she was “so emotional” en route to their meeting, which took place at Kristin’s former Nashville home, where Justin and boyfriend Austin “Scoot” Rhodes were temporarily living—she insisted her ties to Kristin were “not about the show” and spoke frankly when she told him she had “[her] own s–t going on.”
“Right before the show starts again, I got excited. I’m like, ‘Oh, our schedules are gonna be back on the same thing. We’re gonna be together a lot,'” Kelly continued, recounting a check-in text sent to Kristin and a subsequent response that she “did not interpret to be very nice.”
When Justin went on to address the rumor, Henderson started to cry, calling it the “most f–king stupid thing ever” and declining to discuss it further.
“I feel like this is all coming down on me,” she said, telling him Kristin “hurt [her] feelings, too,” before opting to take a “time out,” quickly removing her mic and leaving the property. So, what happens now?
When Justin relayed the details of the Kelly interaction to Kristin days later, she said she was “blown away” by Henderson’s actions and bewildered knowing they still couldn’t see eye-to-eye. “If she can never understand my perspective, I can’t move past that,” Cavallari told him, emphasizing that she didn’t understand what she’d done to hurt Kelly and wondered why the former friend “didn’t tell [her] that she was hurt throughout this entire thing.”
Is this the last we’ll see of Kelly on Very Cavallari? Keep up with the rest of season three to find out more.
Watch a brand new episode of Very Cavallari Thursdays at 9 p.m., only on E!