Leah McSweeney Admitted to Relapsing Prior to Joining ‘RHONY’

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Leah McSweeney admitted she was back to drinking before joining the cast of The Real Housewives of New York City during an April 2022 interview on The Tamron Hall Show.

Following the filing of a lawsuit days ago in which Leah, 41, accused Bravo and its producers of supplying her with alcohol throughout her time on RHONY and Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip, and encouraged her to drink, even though she mentioned her sobriety before filming her first scene, an old interview in which she spoke of the series helping her has resurfaced, as well as a past lawsuit she filed against the New York City Police Department.

“Watch this. Or scroll to the halfway point and watch it. Literally said she was drinking before the show began filming and then accredits the show for helping her,” a fan wrote in a message sent to Bravo and Cocktails on Instagram.

“The best part is it’s posted in HER highlights lol,” the person added.

Joined by her mother, Bernadette “Bunny” McSweeney, who spoke of her parental guilt and the loss she felt when her daughter was drinking, Leah recalled the moments that led up to her joining the RHONY cast.

“I had relapsed. I had almost 10 years sober, not drinking, and before I got on the show, I had already started drinking and then realized that I got this, you know, job offer, and it was like, ‘How am I gonna do this?’ Because an alcoholic’s worst nightmare is to be drunk on national television,” she recalled.

But in her lawsuit, it was written that the “environment” of RHONY “caused [Leah] to relapse into alcohol addiction shortly after joining RHONY season 12.”

After then noting that joining the series “worked out for [her],” Leah claimed to Tamron Hall that she stopped drinking “after a year.”

“Even before the show aired, I stopped drinking. But then I had to watch myself drunk while I was sober and it was really, but you know what, with the show, if you let it help you, you can have it help you have personal growth if you let it — if you’re open to it,” she stated, praising the series she’s now targeting.

As for Leah’s case against the NYPD, she accused several officers of beating her in July 2002, a lawsuit filed in October 2004.

As noted in a report shared by Radar Online in September 2019, Leah said she was “lawfully” standing outside of the Hammerstein Ballroom in July 2002 when she attempted to kiss her then-boyfriend, Daniel Leff, before he was “rapidly pulled from her by several individuals, whom she recognized to be uniformed police officers.”

“Plaintiff next saw several police officers pulling, dragging, and repeatedly striking Mr. Leff several feet in front of her,” her court papers claimed. “Plaintiff, who had been holding a small, near-empty or empty plastic water bottle, excitedly hoisted said plastic bottle in the air… the bottle landed in the vicinity of the police officers who were assaulting Mr. Leff.”

Leah also alleged that an officer lunged at her and “struck her in the face with his fist and/or some other object, causing injury, including, but not limited to a fractured tooth, bruises and contusions,” and accused three other cops of “assailing Plaintiff with profanity and threats of physical force.”

“Plaintiff was thereafter physically forced into a patrol car with Mr. Leff, where she was subjected to continual verbal abuse from the Police Officers,” the complaint continued. “She was then taken to a Police Precinct, further reviled, threatened, and humiliated by Superior Officers and Police Officers, fingerprinted, processed as a common criminal, placed in a holding cell, and detained for 8-10 hours at a Midtown South precinct.”

Leah was then taken to a different precinct and later, to Bellevue Hospital, where she said she was “handcuffed to a chair in the emergency room of the psychiatric unit for several hours.”

“Upon information and belief, Plaintiff was thereafter arbitrarily, illegally, reprehensibly, with total malice aforethought, charged, under penalties of perjury, in a Misdemeanor Complaint in the Criminal Courts of the City of New York with crimes of Obstructing Governmental Administration and Disorderly Conduct,” her court papers stated.

Leah was ultimately exonerated of the charges brought against her. And, after claiming that being “wrongfully confined to a holding cell” led her to suffer “extreme physical and emotional distress,” she sued the NYPD for $4 million dollars in damages.

In response to Leah’s case, the city denied her allegations and released a statement, saying, “any injuries alleged to have been sustained resulted from Plaintiff’s own culpable or negligent conduct and was not the proximate result of any defendant City.”

When all was said and done, the case was settled for $75,000.

Leah McSweeney starred in seasons 12 and 13 of The Real Housewives of New York City and went on to appear in the third season of Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip.