Real Housewives Cast Member Beats Bravo Bid to Force Arbitration

Former Real Housewives of New York cast member Leah McSweeney can keep her disability-accommodation claims in court after a federal judge ruled Bravo, NBCUniversal, and other defendants waived their right to seek arbitration.

Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., NBCUniversal Media LLC, Bravo Media LLC, Real Housewives executive producer and host Andy Cohen, and others twice moved to dismiss McSweeney’s harassment and discrimination claims without mentioning the existence of an arbitration agreement, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said. They waited too long to move to boot the case from court and can’t blame a #MeToo-linked law for their delay, the opinion said.

McSweeney, known for fashion design before her star turn on Real Housewives from 2020 to 2021, alleges she faced sex, gender, religious, and disability bias during her time on the show. She said the defendants failed to accommodate her alcohol-use disorder and instead encouraged her to drink on camera. Judge Lewis J. Liman tossed her religion- and gender-related claims last year but allowed others to move forward.

Bravo and the other defendants waited more than a year before telling McSweeney’s counsel that they planned to move to compel arbitration, and waited almost another entire month before doing so, after successfully calling on the court to ax some of her claims, Liman said Monday. They also raised and challenged “difficult issues of First Amendment law that, if the Court had accepted, would have resulted in dismissal of most of Plaintiff’s claims,” the judge added.

It wasn’t until “after they had taken that gambit and lost” and faced “what might have appeared to be the daunting specter of civil discovery in federal court” that they decided the court actually shouldn’t hear the case, Liman said. “By invoking the Court’s authority to dismiss the entire case on the merits and turning to arbitration only after failing in that effort, Defendants have lost their right to arbitrate through their litigation-related conduct.”

The defendants argued that the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act—also known as the EFAA and passed in response to the #MeToo movement—would have kept them from arbitrating anything until they got rid of the sex bias claims. But that doesn’t excuse their delay in raising arbitration as an issue, Liman said, noting that McSweeney has said she reserved her right to appeal that dismissal.

Bravo and the others could have filed a motion to compel alongside their dismissal bids but didn’t, Liman said. “As it stands, Defendants are trying to have their cake and eat it too.”

Adelman Matz PC represents McSweeney. Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP represents the defendants.

The case is McSweeney v. Cohen, 2026 BL 78376, S.D.N.Y., No. 1:24-cv-01503, 3/9/26.