The first rule of Bravo’s Summer House is you do not talk about … any hard-seltzer company that isn’t Loverboy, the brand founded by Summer House star Kyle Cooke. Over the past few seasons of the Hamptons-based reality show, that much has become clear. Cooke launched Loverboy, a line that includes hard iced teas and canned cocktails, back in 2018 with his now-wife Amanda Batula and friend and fellow cast member Carl Radke. The colorful cans have been a fixture on the show ever since, and now, tensions between other cast members over their ubiquity have reached a boiling point. Who, exactly, is at war here? And is peace possible? Let’s discuss.
The warring parties
➼ Kyle Cooke, 42: Loverboy founder. Original Summer House cast member. Hard-drinking (and sometimes cheating) husband of Amanda Batula. Part-time DJ.
➼ Amanda Batula, 33: Head of creative and branding at Loverboy. Longtime Summer House cast member. Nascent swimwear designer and wife of Cooke.
➼ Paige DeSorbo, 32: Fashion influencer and co-host of the Giggly Squad podcast. Medium-term Summer House cast member. Friend to Batula, tolerant of Cooke. Historically Switzerland in the hard-seltzer wars, but that may be changing now.
➼ Hannah Berner, 33: Comedian and co-host of Giggly Squad. BFF of DeSorbo. Former Summer House cast member who was fired after season five. Disinvited from Cooke and Batula’s 2021 wedding. Recently under fire for her cringey interview with Megan Thee Stallion at the Vanity Fair Oscars party.
➼ Craig Conover, 36: Pillow entrepreneur. Longtime cast member of Bravo’s Southern Charm. Former boyfriend of DeSorbo.
The conflict at hand
At its core, this is a story about loyalty. What inspires it? How is it practiced? Do we owe it to our fellow reality-show cast members even though we’re all trying to make as much money as we can during the limited window we have to be on television, and sometimes that requires making tough choices like promoting another hard-seltzer brand?
Opinions vary among the Summer House cast on these issues. Cooke is of the mind that everyone on the show should be happy to drink Loverboy and nothing else. On the Trading Secrets podcast last summer, he revealed that he does not pay his fellow cast members to drink Loverboy on the show, but he doesn’t charge them for it, either, so that’s nice.
“I’ve given the house about $100,000 worth of booze over the years,” he said. And he noted that he “never forces” his friends to sample his products. “I always want my friends drinking it because they want to reach for a Loverboy,” he said. “There have been plenty of times this season where I wasn’t even in the house, people arrive, they grab a Loverboy.”
Shortly after this interview, Berner went on the Barstool Sports BFF podcast and claimed she had been fired from the show after season five for promoting Truly hard seltzer and generally not getting along with Cooke.
@bffspod @Hannah Berner explains why she was fired from Summer House
♬ original sound - BFFs Pod
“Beef started because I did an ad for Truly seltzer and I didn’t know that I, like, wasn’t allowed to,” she said. “I think these shows become a lot of egos, and ‘It’s my show, it’s my drink, and you can’t do that,’ and there are no rules, and it just becomes fighting over egos and screen time.”
Coincidentally, Conover, who is not an SH cast member but appeared on the show semi-regularly when he was dating DeSorbo, announced he had invested in yet another hard-seltzer company around the time Berner’s interview came out.
Conover is now a public-facing investor in Spritz Society, a brand founded by the reality-TV-adjacent influencers Claudia Oshry and Ben Soffer. In his announcement post, Conover said DeSorbo had initially turned him on to the brand. Uh-oh.
Cooke later claimed on Watch What Happens Live! that he had asked Conover to invest in Loverboy instead of Spritz Society but Conover declined.
All of this came to head during last week’s episode of Summer House, which was filmed in the Hamptons last summer. Cooke expressed his frustrations with Berner and Conover by “rage texting” DeSorbo and demanding to know where she stood in these disputes.
One enterprising Bravo fan actually transcribed said rage texts from a blurry screenshot of the episode, and they are intense. “Honestly beyond discouraged,” Cooke allegedly wrote. “With Craig too. This wouldn’t be a topic today if it wasn’t for him and about a dozen lies. I can’t believe this is where Hannah is at 3 years later. I’m fucking apeshit.”
He later (slightly) walked back his text blitz with the following: “Sorry to barrage you I was just heated in the moment. Can’t vent to Amanda because she basically divorced me for potentially hurting your guys friendship with the spritz stuff.”
Cooke and DeSorbo then blew up at each other during cast member Lindsay Hubbard’s gender-reveal party at the house. (It’s a girl!)
“I thought we were closer than this,” Cooke told DeSorbo. “And I thought we were closer than you texting me, just berating my boyfriend and my best friend,” she replied. The episode ended with Batula tearily hugging DeSorbo in her bedroom while Kyle huffed and puffed downstairs.
Potential peace talks
Based on the teaser for tonight’s episode, the fighting continues in the Summer House world. But are the seltzer soldiers ready to lay down their weapons IRL? Ehh, not likely. DeSorbo and Conover have now broken up, so it’s possible she no longer cares about Cooke’s issues with her ex-boyfriend. But she remains close to her podcast co-host, Berner, who is still persona non grata to Cooke. Batula, as always, is caught between pacifying her husband and fostering meaningful connections with the women in her life.
During a live appearance on the “Page Six” Virtual Reali-Tea podcast this week, Cooke doubled down on his issues with Berner and Conover, accusing Berner of “spewing lies” and Conover of spreading “misinformation.” But he suggested that he and DeSorbo may yet patch things up: “Ultimately, sometimes I just gotta blow off some steam, and sometimes she has to blow off some steam, so we’re good.”
Let’s all drink an ice-cold sparkling beverage with no specific label to that.