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"Housewives" Star Faces Reality
NeNe Leakes, the breakout star of the hit Bravo reality show “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” is no longer living at the pricey Duluth five-bedroom residence shown on the series.
According to Darryl Pierce, the broker for the 5,000-square-foot home at 1765 Silvermere Court in Duluth, NeNe and her husband, Gregory Leakes, left in November after Winwood Properties filed an eviction notice in September.
The notice, filed Sept. 24 with the Magistrate Court of Gwinnett County, said Greg Leakes owed $6,240 in past due rent. “The tenant said they would move by Sept. 14th because they could no longer afford the house,” the notice said.
The owner of the home, Kajani Shenaz Ali, lives overseas, Pierce said. Online records show the home in the gated community of Stonebrier at Sugarloaf, was purchased for $829,400 in September 2006. Pierce said the Leakeses moved into the home shortly after it was built in 2006.
NeNe Leakes, in a series of e-mails Tuesday, would not say where she is living now. “It’s none of your business,” she wrote. But she noted that they “are financial able [sic] and stable to live where ever we feel fits.”
NeNe, 41, wrote that the eviction notice does not have her name on it, adding “you don’t know my relationship with Greg so be careful what you report!”
The Duluth home, she wrote in an e-mail late last week, “was a lease purchase corporate deal with Greg & his company. Things didn’t work out between the two of them so they did what they had to do and he did what he had to do.”
On Tuesday, she wrote, “If we rent, lease purchase or buy, money is still coming out of my pocket. So who’s [sic] business is that??”
Gregory, 54, couldn’t be reached for comment. The TV show called him a real estate investor. The only business the AJC could find under his name in Georgia is called Advantage Move LLC. The phone number listed for Advantage Move has been disconnected.
“The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” in its first season, became a watercooler show packed with jealousy, petty arguments and conspicuous spending. It averaged 1.3 million viewers over seven episodes, the biggest freshman series for the Bravo cable network since “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” in 2003.
Bravo spokeswoman Rachelle Savoia said, “We don’t comment on the personal lives of our talent.”
NeNe has been featured in Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide, lauded by fans for her honesty and her sense of humor. The show’s ratings climbed steadily during its brief run, culminating in a fiery reunion episode, which aired Nov. 25 and drew 2.8 million viewers. That’s more than any “Real Housewives” episode, including versions in Orange County, Calif., and New York City.
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