Kim Zolciak admits she used daughter's modeling earnings to pay bills out of desperation
The 47-year-old appeared on Watch What Happens Live, where she told host Andy Cohen that she spent all of her daughter's modeling income from her teen years - but she insisted that she only used it to pay bills out of desperation amid her home foreclosure drama and her ugly divorce from her estranged husband Kroy Biermann, 39.
Elsewhere in the interview, the former Real Housewives Of Atlanta star revealed that she had moved on with a new man after splitting from the ex-NFL player, though she kept his identity a secret.
While speaking of turning to her children for financial supporting, Kim claimed that 'the rug was pulled out from the Zolciaks.'
She said: 'I was left holding the bag for the family, and yeah. . . '
Zolciak also confirmed that it wasn't just 23-year-old Ariana's money that went to paying for necessities, as her daughter Brielle, 28, also pitched in money 'for the bills and stuff,' though it sounded as if she at least had the option to consent to giving up her money.
Ariana previously claimed on her reality series Next Gen NYC that her mother and stepfather didn't tell her that they had used all of the money she had earned from modeling gigs and influencer jobs.
However, Zolciak appeared to have worked things out with her daughter, as Ariana didn't look overly angry with her mother during the segment, and she beamed widely when Zolciak and Cohen talked about more upbeat topics.
The reality TV star added that she had already repaid Ariana's money that had gone toward bills, and she suggested that she had 'spreadsheets' of what her daughter had made over the years to balance further down the road.
But Cohen didn't buy that Zolciak had done full due diligence on her debts to her second-oldest daughter.
He quipped: 'I don't imagine you have any spreadsheets.'
Zolciak admitted: 'I don't have — I don't even know how to do it!'
She was more animated during her appearance when the reality star admitted she was seeing a new man after splitting from Biermann.
Kim said: 'He's just great. You know, I sat in the house and just worked and tried to take care of everything for 20 months, and then I finally met somebody great.'
She didn't reveal her new man's identity, but she did say that a mutual friend had introduced them.
Kim also indicated that things were tense with her estranged husband, though the pressure seemed to have gone down a bit after she had moved out of their mansion outside of Atlanta into her own home.
She said: 'I would definitely prefer to communicate more regarding the children, but it's just not there right now.'
The exes share four minor children: Kroy 'KJ' Jr., 14; Kash, 12; and fraternal twins Kane and Kaia, 11.
Kim's adult daughters, Brielle and Ariana, both come from previous relationships.
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The ninth and youngest child of a British media magnate, Maxwell was doted on by her father, the Hungarian-born Robert Maxwell, and raised in Oxford in a family as obscenely wealthy as it was darkly tragic: one of her older brothers was in a hideous car accident just days after Ghislaine's birth, and the boy lingered in a coma for years before dying before her 10th birthday. Her father financed her life as a high-class party girl – first in London, and then in New York – where she spent much of her time accompanying famous and wealthy men to the kind of rich people's social functions that have a pretext of raising money for charity. She does not seem to have had aims beyond that: despite her ample resources and encouragement, Ghislaine never showed much sign of intellectual ambition, or political interest, or business acumen, or general curiosity. (A short-lived 'ocean protection' charity that she founded accomplished little, and shut down after her arrest on sex trafficking charges.) It was not merely that Ghislaine was a product of an elite unburdened by principle, who often reduce their daughters to mere ornaments. It is that an ornament, it seems, is all that Ghislaine Maxwell ever aspired to be. It was not her charity, or her father's publishing, that were Maxwell's great passions. Her great passion appears to have been for the romantic attention of men – and specifically, her life's greatest animating goal seems to have been to achieve, and keep, the attention of Jeffrey Epstein. From those accounts we have of their relationship – and admittedly, these are not always reliable, given how intense, widespread, and prurient the attention on their activities has been – it appears that Maxwell's devotion to Epstein was intense. At her trial in 2021, prosecutors entered into evidence a photo of a cleavage-bearing Maxwell with Epstein, massaging his foot. This seems to have been her posture toward Epstein for the entire time she knew him: slavish, nearly worshipful. The pair met sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Maxwell's father, Robert, died in an apparent suicide in the ocean off the coast of the Canary Islands – aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – in late 1991. Soon thereafter, it was discovered that millions of dollars were missing from pension funds that he managed; two of Maxwell's brothers were charged for their alleged role in the fraud. (They were later acquitted.) It was during this moment of rupture and imperiled status that Maxwell was romantically involved with Epstein. Her boyfriend would have served as a meal ticket as well as a source of validation: Maxwell is alleged to have received payments from Epstein totaling more than $30m; she told one of her victims that he bought her her New York City townhouse, just a few blocks from his own. By 1994, she was recruiting and grooming teenagers for his sexual abuse. Maybe Maxwell justified what she did for Epstein as kink – a kind of sexual libertinism that shrugged off the regressive, prurient mores of the lower classes. The 90s were the peak of a kind of reductive heterosexual sex-positivity: lots of women were telling themselves, and being told, that sexual submission was a mark of sophistication – that the more liberated they were, the more of men's desires they would grant. But this is all speculation: trying to provide a rationalization for Ghislaine Maxwell's actions evades the true terror of her, which is her seemingly profound and horrifying vacancy. To such a person, obedience does not require a justification. Unequal desire in love – particularly when the suffering lover is a woman – tends to elicit a kind of pity. Feminists, too, often depict women's outsized desire for men as a form of gendered victimization. Generally, it is not seen as serious – women's limerence, romantic obsession, and striving for men's attention is broadly relegated to the realm of the adolescent and the vulgar, the embarrassing and the silly. But Maxwell's case suggests such desire can breed not just frustrated vanity but also a kind of monstrousness. Untempered by principle or self-respect, it can contain in it the seed of the grotesque. In her efforts to please Epstein, and to make herself useful to him, Maxwell became something hideous and unforgivable. In her deficient, warped soul, it seems she lacked something that every woman must have: a morality that she valued more than male approval. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
