The Casual Cruelty Of Amanda Batula

Until a few months ago, everything I learned about the cast of Summer House was against my will. Frankly, I did not care to learn who Amanda Batula and West Wilson were, let alone to know the details of their friend group dynamics or when they did or did not turn their locations off. Ciara Miller was just a beautiful woman who crossed my timeline every now and then, who seemed smart, savvy, and the perfect person to shine on reality TV. That was the extent of my knowledge of this trio before the bombshell scandal broke that Amanda and West were hooking up behind Ciara’s (her best friend and his ex-girlfriend) back. There’s also the juicy detail that Amanda is still legally married to Kyle Cooke, who was also good friends with West. They lied to the rest of the Summer House cast for months, causing a seismic rift in their friend group. It’s the perfect gossip storm, and enough to get me to tap all the way in. For the past few months, I’ve inhaled old episodes, watched every second of all three parts of the Summer House Season 10 Reunion and Summer House: The Aftermath bonus episode, and gone down Reddit rabbit holes for all the receipts, proof, timelines! (I’ve also gotten a crash course in Bravo lingo). The Amanda-West-Ciara situation is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but the biggest thing I’ve noticed is how so many people within the Bravo cast, the fandom, and on the internet keep treating Amanda Batula like a victim. 

Again, I preface the following thoughts with the fact that I’m new to the Summer House world, but in everything I have observed — especially during the reunion — Amanda is a cold, fraudulent, male-centered, vain social climber. From what I’ve seen, yes, she’s also ignorant, insecure, and careless. But I don’t think she’s stupid or oblivious. Amanda’s insecurity does not excuse her inhumanity. To paint Amanda as just another poor girl West Wilson has played would be completely depriving her of the credit she deserves. She didn’t meet West at a bar and unwittingly fall into the manipulation of a stranger she thought she could trust. Amanda watched West break her friend’s heart repeatedly, toy with multiple women, and still chose to enter into a relationship with him. That’s deliberate and diabolical. And if Amanda wasn’t white, I think we’d be having a different conversation. 

This is the narrative we are being sold: Amanda is weak, fragile, and just wants to be loved. West took advantage of her. West manipulated her. Amanda is the damsel in distress and West is the big bad fuckboy who locked Amanda in a tower and forced her to betray her best friend. In the bonus episode Bravo aired last night, Amanda sits down with Lindsay Hubbard, who fans affectionately call “Mother Hubbard,” and Lindsay gives her some tough love. Lindsay pulls no punches, but she also continues to push the idea that West tricked Amanda into dating him. When Lindsay calls out Amanda for going after the “one guy” who hurt Ciara over and over, Amanda goes straight to her defense that West “pursued” her and tearfully explains that she felt “unloveable.” 

After the reunion. Ciara was called “too harsh” and “mean” and a “bully” and yet Ciara showed more emotion on that reunion stage than Amanda did over the dissolution of their friendship. Ciara’s tears are interpreted as strength while Amanda’s are seen as fragility. As Ciara cried that she never thought they’d be in the situation they’re in, after she was there for Amanda during her worst years with Kyle, Amanda looked on stonefaced (and probably stoned). Amanda had little to say for herself throughout the reunion, dropping in halfhearted excuses or a “yeah, no, I know” every now and then with a defensive tone. She came across entitled and combative. The one time Amanda got visibly emotional and left the stage was after she admitted to feeling embarrassed that she was pursuing a relationship with West while he was seeing someone else (Meija Moreno and who knows who else). When castmate Mia Calabrese told her that yes, in fact, that detail is embarrassing, Amanda broke down and left the stage. We see Amanda get upset when it’s about her and her feelings, not Ciara or their friendship. In the moments during the reunion when Andy tried to get her to confront how much of a betrayal her actions were, Amanda would steer the conversation back to herself or make excuses. Wait, do beta blockers make you a bad friend?

It was the same playbook during the Lindsay Aftermath sitdown. The emotion only comes when Amanda is talking about herself and why she made her dumb decisions, not who she has harmed through her choices. I think that’s because Amanda doesn’t actually care about hurting Ciara. If she did, she wouldn’t have let it get this far with West. If she did, she wouldn’t have gone to Italy with West after she saw how much harm she had caused. The recklessness and entitlement cannot be divorced from Amanda’s whiteness. She’s the one who will get the benefit of the doubt. She can afford to make these irresponsible decisions because she knows that people will ultimately pity her. Ciara held Amanda’s face in her hands and told her she was worth something, told her that she loved her, and that she was there for her. Amanda refused to take the love and value that was being offered to her from her friend and instead decided to seek it from a man. She refused to accept Ciara’s invitations to go out and instead partied with West so she could feel chosen and “like [herself] again.” It’s self-hatred and deep-seeded misogyny on full display, but it’s also the same inclination we’ve seen so many white women lean towards throughout history. 

White women like Amanda will choose men and their own self interests (and choose men over their own self interest) consistently, and use their tears as a weapon. See: the history of white woman victimhood, Karens, the 53% of white women who voted for Trump, the white suffragettes Sojourner Truth addressed in her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, I could go on. It’s individualism over community and selfishness over everything. I’m sure Amanda can’t see the bigger picture of why her actions have racial implications (even though she’s been in multiple conversations where Ciara spelled out how she is treated differently as one of the few Black cast members of Summer House), because, as Alanah Mortlock writes for the London School Of Economics Department of Gender Studies, white women “distract from conversations about structural power by individualising experiences of fraught racial dynamics.” Amanda’s focus on “me, me, me” rather than confronting what she did to Ciara and the larger implications of a white woman and a white man discarding a Black woman they bamboozled into thinking she was someone they cared about is her way of shirking any responsibility she holds, and of dismissing the larger conversations about race that this scandal has sparked. 

When Amanda cries to Lindsay about being “unloveable,” she is essentially saying that her feelings matter more than Ciara’s and that her personal comfort is paramount to protecting her friend, not only from West, but from the onslaught of racism that comes with being a Black woman in the Bravoverse. Amanda didn’t think of the attacks her actions would open Ciara up to because has the privilege of being willfully ignorant. This is a scandalous story about boy drama and betrayal, of course, but mostly it’s about the casual cruelty of an insecure white girl who saw competition where Ciara saw friendship. Amanda’s tears can’t let us forget that. 

“If anger is the main expression of white power in a masculine register, tears are its feminine equivalent,” Alison Phillips writes in the European Journal of Cultural Studies about the history of white women using tears to get what they want. “This ‘damsel in distress’ evokes a protective response: and simultaneously, colonial archetypes of people of color as aggressive and frightening come into play.” To echo that, here’s author Jamilah Lemieux in 2017: “white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy.”

I don’t think making sweeping generalizations about all white women or interracial friendships is helpful in this context; nuance is necessary. But, as my former colleague L’Oréal Blackett wrote in an essay on Substack, “That’s not to say interracial friendships don’t work. They do, and can. They just come with additional consideration… I read somewhere that now, Ciara is keeping her friendship circles small. I understand that. Some friendships can’t survive the weight of what goes unsaid.”

If Ciara had done what Amanda did — secretly hook up with her friend’s ex and lie about it for months — the pitchforks would be out and sharpened. No one would see her as a victim. I know this because Ciara actually is the victim in this scenario and she’s barely being acknowledged as one. Amanda is getting the sympathy edit, one that she would have gotten if she hadn’t blown up her life for West. Lindsay and Kyle are both playing into it. These are all reality stars whose livelihood depends on drama, who are no strangers to playing it up for the cameras, and who know how to brand themselves. There is a lot of strategy going on (like Lindsay and Kyle agreeing to sit down with Amanda and West as a blatant attempt to save their new show, In The City) and that plan is predicated on the aforementioned stereotypes: Amanda, the helpless, coddled casualty of West, and Ciara as (at best) the Strong Black Woman™ and (at worst) the aggressor. We’re watching in real time Amanda being afforded the grace and generosity that Black women aren’t. 

At one point during Part 3 of the Summer House Season 10 Reunion, Kyle accuses West of isolating Amanda after she was finally free of their marriage. He says this to Wilson: “I honestly just have to ask, what is your plan for Amanda? Is all of this really gonna be worth it? I’d like to think you feel like you owe her something, but where do you go from here?” The response to this moment has been overwhelmingly positive. People are praising Kyle for “protecting” Amanda and still looking out for her even though they are separated and their relationship is over. 

By all accounts, Amanda and Kyle were in a bad marriage. And most of that seems to have been Kyle’s fault. But Amanda is a grown woman who cannot take accountability for her actions. When Lindsay asks her what she took away from the reunion — again, in which she sat across from a visibly emotional Ciara — and she said she didn’t remember because she dissociates when people are “yelling” at her. To whittle down the hurt, tears, and genuine feedback that her friends shared at the reunion to “yelling” is just another example of Amanda’s calculated victim mentality. She heard everyone tell her that West cheated on Meija with her, and she listened to Lindsay tell her all the ways in which West is a narcissistic loser who, once again, broke her best friend’s heart and she still went on a trip with him to Italy to spit in his mouth (I wish that was a euphemism). 

One of my girlfriends was cheated on and left homeless by a man who let her give up her apartment to move in with him even though he was home decor shopping with his side piece in his spare time. He broke up with her and immediately moved in with the new woman. My friend was devastated. If I ever catch this man in the street, I have a whole speech prepared about what a shitty person he is and how my friend deserved better. That was over a decade ago and she’s happily married to someone else with two kids now. Still, I promise if I ever run into her cheating ex, he’s getting the speech. I will curse the ground he walks on. Regardless of race, that’s how a friend is supposed to feel about someone who hurt you. Grudges aren’t healthy and it’s good to forgive and move on — if you are the one who was wronged. If it’s someone who harmed your best friend, you can hold that grudge for the rest of your life. That’s sisterhood. Amanda Batula pretended to be a good friend to Ciara Miller and dropped her as soon as it was convenient. That kind of callousness deserves consequences. West has been dropped from Summer House. What repercussions will Amanda have to face? 

Amanda should be grovelling and begging Ciara, and the audience, for forgiveness. The fact that she’s not should tell you everything we need to know about what kind of person she is. The race discourse surrounding this scandal has gotten weird – as internet discourse tends to — and turned more to debates over interracial relationships and declarations about Black women being chosen by white men. There are things to explore here (Rachel Lindsay has been giving some great commentary on the subject), but that’s less interesting to me than a brutally honest reckoning of the ways in which white women, especially on reality TV, are infantilized and empowered to wreak havoc on Black women and the real world implications of that. What I think we should be talking about is friendship and betrayal. Amanda Batula is a villain. If we have to see her on our screens again, that’s the reality in which she’s living in, and the only portrayal anyone should be interested in. 

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