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Credit: Michael Simon/startraksphoto.com
Nia Booko is speaking out against claims of secrecy from her co-star on The Valley.
After being accused of acting fake and attempting to hide certain things about her marriage to husband Danny Booko, 41, from the cameras, the 35-year-old former Miss USA explained why some things have been kept behind closed doors as Danny labeled the other couples of the show “toxic” and admitted to thinking the allegations against them were “ridiculous.”
“We’re not perfect, but we do our best not to speak negatively of each other. If we have an issue, we talk about it [and we aren’t] like, ‘Oh let me tell [Kristen Doute] all this crap about Daniel,’” Nia revealed on the May 20 episode of The Valley: After Show. “Do you want me to not be there for my husband? Do you want him to not be there for me? Do you want him to talk trash about me when I got mad about something…? Do you want me to go and rant about that and try to make him look like a bad guy when he’s not a bad guy?”
Noting that “everybody has moments,” Nia said that when it comes to Danny’s intoxication on the show, it comes down to perspective. After all, she, too, has had moments when she’s overindulged.
“If I’ve had moments where I’m in a place where I’ve had too much to drink and I’m not at my best, I want Daniel to be like, ‘We’re gonna go.’ We are each other’s partners. We are there for each other,” she reasoned. “If Daniel’s in a place where I know that he doesn’t feel his best. ‘Alright, let’s leave. I got you.’”
According to Nia, she and Danny handle issues in their marriage “behind closed doors,” whether the cameras are on or off — and with the help of individual and couples therapists.
“We are trying to be true to who we are and how we operate, but then we get called out for being fake or hiding things or doing it for the cameras when it’s like, I would be being fake to then sit in front of the girls and talk trash on Daniel,” she stated. “That would be fake of me because that’s not how I operate.”
In his own segment, Danny offered similar statements.
“We actually love and respect each other and don’t throw each other under the bus,” he clarified. “I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. Just watch the first summer. Were we not vulnerable?”
Pointing to Nia’s postpartum depression and their past struggles with sleep deprivation, Danny noted that he and his wife didn’t hide those things before taking aim at his castmates.
“Just because it wasn’t maybe as toxic as most other relationships and how they handle their things, they tried to put a target on us and say, ‘You guys aren’t being real,’” he stated.
Still, Janet Caperna, 34, felt that because Nia has been vocal about their co-stars’ relationships, hers shouldn’t get a free pass.
“How can you give your opinion on everybody else’s relationship and point out what’s wrong with them, how people should be doing things differently? But yours, we’re not allowed to say a thing about. So it just feels unfair,” she said.
And Brittany Cartwright, 36, agreed.
“I felt bad for the extent of how bad it got that night. But I’m glad that I pointed out that I thought that they were hiding things because it was eating me up that day,” she recalled. “We would see the fights, and we would know everything that was going on, and as soon as the cameras would turn on, everything was perfect.”
Elsewhere, Scheana Shay, 40, shaded Nia and Danny for their “constant covering up” as she admitted to doing the same with her ex-husband, Mike Shay.
“You really just want to protect your spouse, and you don’t want them to get any hate, but by trying to protect them, you’re just opening up more hate from people,” she revealed.
Looking back at the cast’s feud with Nia in Santa Barbara, Kristen Doute, 42, told Nia that Brittany’s claims against her and Danny were likely the result of her own experiences with estranged husband Jax Taylor, 45.
“It’s so easy to see now in hindsight what lens Brittany was speaking through,” she explained. “She used to just get sick from stress, and he’d be like, ‘See? You’re hungover, you’re wasted.’ I think that’s the lens she was looking through. I don’t think it had anything to do with you and Daniel at all. I think it had to do with her and Jax.”
“That makes sense. Her lens being her marriage. Our marriage is different,” Nia agreed.
Danny also mentioned Brittany’s troubled past with Jax.
“[Jax] just threw her under the bus over and over and over about her drinking, saying we shouldn’t have another child because of you with all the stuff that Jax was doing,” he recalled.
He then asked Luke Broderick if he ever felt that he and Nia were “being fake,” and Luke replied, “No.”
The Valley season two airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on Bravo.
