After hearing celebrity gossip columnist Rob Shuter speak to Kate Casey on her eponymous podcast Reality Life with Kate Casey (which I will be recapping shortly for AllAboutTRH.com), I caught up with the well-informed New Yorker to ask the question bugging me and so many fans of Real Housewives of New York.

“Was Carole Radziwill fired?”

After covering Bravo shows extensively for The Huffington Post contributor platform and interviewing many of the network’s talent over the years, one thing I’ve learned is that stars don’t simply quit while the season is airing. That is, unless something goes terribly wrong for them. In addition, Bravo does prefer to urge their talent to hand in a letter of resignation. This helps to avoid the semantics of “she was fired” and we’ve seen it in the past with Housewives of other franchises.

The network may or may not have gone this same “letter of resignation” route with Carole Radziwill, but it all boils down to the following:

“Carole was fired,” Shuter confirms. “Bethenny is great TV, but bad on a personal level.”

In his earlier interview with Casey, Shuter discussed Bethenny’s inability to maintain relationships, and we’ve seen on RHONY how her friendships have either experienced extreme turbulence and weathered those fraught conditions, or failed to thrive due to interpersonal chaos.

While Bethenny certainly isn’t “easy,” she is hilarious, clever and her one-liners have become truly exquisite RHONY gems. She knows how to drive a storyline despite exhausting viewers when an emotional roller coaster becomes terribly convoluted.

According to Shuter, Bethenny is most valuable to RHONY of all the cast mates. In the opinion of shrewd observers, after Carole went rogue in some of her interviews and refused to hold back in her Bravo blog entries (several of which Bravo reportedly asked her to go back and edit in order to tone down the verbiage), Carole put herself in a precarious position. In light of this, it makes sense when Rob confirms to me that Bethenny was successfully able to give producers the “It’s her or me” ultimatum.

Bethenny is seen by production, the network and fans alike as the powerhouse necessary for this franchise. However, there is also a contingent that views her as the difficult “mean girl” who has successfully chased other RHONY cast members away. It is an argument that can be made if you comb through the archives and consider cast members of past seasons who shared screen time with the Skinny Girl.

What do YOU think of Carole allegedly being fired from Real Housewives of New York?