25 most outrageous moments in Real Housewives history

Vicki helps her bae fake cancer – RHOC

Before Vicky and her then-boyfriend Brooks came along, you couldn’t even imagine a world in which a TV personality would fake cancer, but here we are. And what a world to live in.

Vicki Gunvalson is the OG of the OC. That is, she’s the original cast member and has been on the show for the longest (save, maybe Tamara). She’s mostly earned her orange with her hazing of new housewives, inability to keep anything from in front of the cameras, and general pot-stirring. However, she took things to a whole new level a few seasons back when she corroborated a fake cancer diagnosis from her grifter boyfriend.

Although it is still a little fuzzy whether she was completely in on the scheme from top to bottom, it’s since come out that she knew everything wasn’t on the up and up. If this is true, and Brooks really did trick her as well, she was the very last to know.

Her castmates smelled something super fishy long before she did, and even Megan took it upon herself to do a little investigative digging. While I think it’s a bit intrusive to expect our reality stars to divulge their medical records, in this case, it turned out to be justified.

Cancergate rocked the OC for at least two seasons, and spilled over into after shows, podcasts, and Page Six. Everybody had an opinion, but for a while, Brooks maintained his poor health and Vickie backed him up. Eventually, because of relentless fans and the internet, his plot was revealed and they broke up. But it took a really, really long time for her to come around to it. These days, she’s still pretty cagey about what really went down, but it’s clear she knew something wasn’t right all along.