“Forgiveness should be in everyone’s future,” Williams tells PEOPLE
Porsha Williams says Kenya Moore’s time on The Real Housewives of Atlanta shouldn’t be gone with the wind.
PEOPLE caught up with Williams at Bravo’s Fan Fest 2024 in Miami on Saturday, Nov. 23, where the reality star opened up about Moore’s recent apology for the incident that led to her exit from the Bravo show.
Asked whether Moore deserved a second chance, Williams insists, “forgiveness should be in everyone’s future in their own time.”
“I think that was very noble of her to apologize,” says Williams. “At the end of the day, everybody’s human. Some people have thresholds, and then you break it and then they go low — or they go all the way to hell. But either way, once you recognize that you’ve done something to hurt someone and you acknowledge it? I think, let’s start there.”
Moore, 53, made headlines in back in June when news broke she had allegedly exposed sexually explicit pictures of new cast member Brittany Eady during a filming at the grand opening during her new Kenya Moore Hair Spa.
The scandal went viral and sparked headlines of revenge porn. At the time, an insider told PEOPLE that Moore was retaliating after Eady allegedly threatened her costar using the word “gun.” However, a second source close to production disputed that, saying, “At no time was Kenya ever threatened with a weapon, nor was there ever a weapon present during the course of production.”
In the wake of the incident, Moore was abruptly and indefinitely suspended, pending an investigation by Bravo. She will appear on the new season, but did not complete filming.
Breaking her silence on the troubles that same month, Moore — who is mom to 6-year-old daughter, Brooklyn — noted that there was more to the story, but that, “my heart is full and my conscience is clear.”
Later, during an episode of Tamron Hall on Nov. 14, Moore said she’s “taken full accountability for the things that I’ve done.”
“Hindsight is always fifty, fifty. If I could do it all over again, I believe the photos were very distasteful…” she said. “I am sorry for what I have done. I didn’t have to take it that far.”
Still, Moore stressed again that she only posted the X-rated images — which she described as “receipts” she found online and knew would be blurred on television — because she felt threatened and felt like she was responding to Eady’s verbal attacks.
“I told the producers, ‘I’m concerned, I’m scared.’ And I kind of feel like they said, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ and it didn’t feel like it was taken care of,” Moore explained. “They actually made me feel like I was being a Black Karen. Like, ‘Here Kenya goes again, nothing really happened, [she] was joking.’ ”
“I don’t take threats, or the way that I felt, you can’t invalidate my feelings. It was a real concern for me. I’m a single mom with a beautiful child where if anything happened to me, nobody would be there for her,” Moore added. “I didn’t feel like I was being protected and I took actions into my own hand. …. If no one else is going to step up for my and protect me, I’m going to protect myself and tell everybody what I found out about her.”
