Leah Is The Best Thing To Happen To 'RHONY' Since Dorinda 'Clip, Clip, Clip' Medley

A lower back tattoo, a black mesh bucket hat, and lots of vodka: ‘RHONY’ is clearly just getting started

At the start of Episode 2, we’re back on a rooftop, where Tinsley Mortimer, Sonja Morgan, and the Real Housewives of New York City newbie Leah McSweeney continue discussing that awful, crazy-escalated fight between Tinsley and Dorinda Medley that wrapped up last week’s Season 12 premiere. And Leah isn’t afraid to tell viewers how she really feels about Dorinda.

“Maybe Tinsley confides in me and Sonja because we don’t call her a hooker,” Leah says in a talking head. (Last episode, Dorinda had the nerve to tell Tinsley: “The difference is, honey, I bought them. I never laid on my back for them.”) “If Dorinda treated me like she treated Tinsley, I wouldn’t tell the bitch what I had for lunch,” Leah continues.

It’s then revealed that Leah not only has a lower-back tattoo; Leah has a lower-back tattoo of her own name. And, if there’s anything we’ve learned about these women, especially Sonja, they will absolutely use this information as ammo later.

“The last time you saw Dorinda, she said some wild-ass shit. She’s on your dick. It’s crazy,” Leah tells Tinsley, later adding in a confessional, “Listen, I survived going to an all-girls catholic school on the Upper East Side, so I can handle petty and catty and all that. But! I am on their turf this weekend, so I’m going to be on high alert.”

Leah’s referring to Ramona’s house in the Hamptons, where they’ll all spend the weekend celebrating the end of summer.

In the car with Dorinda and Sonja, Dorinda says she wants to “try to get to know” new girl, Leah.

“I probably didn’t give Leah a fair chance because she was Tinsley’s friend. So, I will try harder to not be so judgmental because I shouldn’t do guilt by association,” Dorinda says in a talking head, adding that, when it comes to Tinsley, though, she wants to “do the ‘see no evil, hear no evil,’ — well, I can’t say ‘speak no evil’ because that always happens.”

We then learn that Dorinda’s home in the Berkshires, Blue Stone Manor, flooded, and it’s required a lot of her energy and attention to repair the 11,000 square-foot home.

“And I’m so overwhelmed because I had to deal with so many moving parts all day everyday — and then do my normal life!” she says in a talking head. It’s an issue that brings an overwhelmed Dorinda to tears while talking to her contractor on the phone. “It just seems to never end: the questions, the phone calls, the replacement values, the estimates, the claims. Nonstop.”

Makes you wonder: Is this why Dorinda is really upset with Tinsley? Is she taking her frustrations out on her instead?

“I’m doing everything and nothing well,” she cries to Sonja while sipping a glass of rose. “I just don’t have anybody. I wish I had somebody who could step in and say, ‘I’m going to make it all better, and you can be that carefree person.’ There’s nothing carefree about me anymore. I’m not nice to anybody.”

Dorinda then admits she feels the same anxiety she felt when her late husband Richard died. “You don’t know who to turn to, where to turn to because it’s so big,” she says.

“For Dorinda to say she’s been mean to people, this is big,” Sonja then says. “When she blows up, she can rip you a new one. And she’s actually admitting that right now.” Yeah, but not to the person she’s been aggressive to: Tinsley.

Speaking of, Tinsley shows up to the table where a red-, misty-eyed Dorinda also sits.

“She says she’s not being the nicest person recently,” Sonja says the second Tinsley sits down. But Dorinda refutes it, saying (while impressively never making eye contact with Tinsley), “No, I said I’m just tired all the time. I go to bed and feel like I’m not getting ahead.”

Reason No. 57 we love Leah then shows up on screen: her black mesh bucket hat and her unwavering love for it.

“It’s interesting. I don’t know that I could pull it off,” Ramona says, echoing our own thoughts verbatim. “It’s something my daughter would make fun of me for wearing,” Leah than adds.

Ramona may quickly get over the bucket hat, but she sure as hell isn’t over Leah’s tattoos, particularly her lower-back tattoo. The rest of the women also harp on and on about it.

“It’s not like I have a penis tattoo across my forehead, or a gun tattoo on my neck. I have pretty little, cute tattoos,” Leah says in a talking head.

“I don’t talk to people with tattoos,” Ramona then admits to a flabbergasted, semi-voiceless Tinsley.

“She knows your name, which is amazing,” Sonja says at the table with the rest of the women, to which Dorinda quips, “And if she forgets it, you just need to turn around and bend over.” Dorinda’s ignorant comments about tattoos don’t end there, either. Later in the episode, she also says, “When I was growing up, people with tattoos were going to kidnap you. My mother told me that, and I believed her.”

Throughout the episode, Leah makes it very clear: She’s not here for Dorinda — or any of the women’s — snide, judgy comments.

“We just met. That is rude. Do you ever leave your little 1 percent Upper East Side bubble? Ever?” Leah says in her confessional.

After the women get ready for dinner, and after Sonja stirs the pot by telling Dorinda that Leah was upset over Dorinda’s “bend over” comment, Dorinda wastes no time in the foyer defending the comment to Leah, eventually offering a half-assed “apology.”

“It was your delivery,” Leah says to Dorinda, who brushes it off and says they’ll talk about it at dinner. “There’s a lot of hostility,” Leah then says, not backing down. Dorinda, though, “thought it was funny.”

To wrap up the episode, Leah appears to learn her lesson to not divulge any information she doesn’t want to get around to the other women to Sonja, and that she’ll speak directly to Dorinda moving forward. “Dorinda, girl, I’ve got my eye on you now,” Leah says in a talking head.

“I was unfair in my judgement of Leah,” Dorinda says. “She seems to hold her own, which I like. Tattoos and all.”

RHONY airs Thursdays at 9/8c on Bravo.