Tamra Judge Says Andy Cohen Facilitated Her Make Up with Alexis Bellino; Why She Was Able to Forgive (Exclusive)

They had one of the biggest rivalries in Real Housewives of Orange County history. So you could imagine the confusion fans felt when Alexis Bellino returned to the show in season 18, and was all buddy-buddy with Tamra Judge.

“If you told me years ago that Alexis Bellino and I would be friends one day, I would have told you you were absolutely f—ing nuts,” Judge, 56, laughs to PEOPLE. “But here we are!”

So how exactly did Judge and the women she once dubbed “Jesus Jugs” find their way back to each other.

‘It was Andy Cohen, actually,” the Vena CBD owner says, explaining that the Watch What Happens Live host “really facilitated” their reconciliation while they were at BravoCon 2023 in Las Vegas.

“The night of the Bravos, they had a big party for us afterwards back at the hotel,” Judge recalls. “And at that point, I think they might have been talking to Alexis about coming back — I’m not completely sure — but I hadn’t seen her in years and suddenly there we were, with Andy literally standing over us as we talked!”

That conversation, turns out, gave Judge all she needed to move on from the resentments she was still harboring.

Though they were mostly on good terms when Bellino left the series a decade prior after RHOC’s eighth season in 2013, Judge soured to Alexis over the years after her now ex-husband Jim Bellino sued Judge in a $1 million defamation case back in 2018. The two were entangled in a legal back and forth for years until December 2021, when they reached a settlement.

“I really blamed Alexis for that just as much as I did Jim, but she stood there that day and she apologized to me and said, ‘I told Jim that was a bad idea, I don’t think he should have sued you,'” Judge recalls. “And then she told me she was going through a really hard time. Her mother had just passed away, and she had just broken up with her fiancé. So I just felt a lot of compassion for her and told her right then and there that I forgave her, and I was sorry too, and that it was all in the past.”

“Time really does heal all wounds,” Judge adds. “But I think Alexis are a lot alike where we don’t hold grudges. We were in difficult times in our life the last time we were on the show together. I was in a bad marriage, she was in a bad marriage. And we’re both in different places in our lives now.”

“We’ve moved past it,” Judge continues. “I apologized, she apologized — it was just time to start anew.”

From that moment on, the two stayed in text touch. And when Judge was doing her now-defunct Tres Amigas Tour with Shannon Storms Beador and Vicki Gunvalson, she told audiences that she’d like to see Alexis back on the show.

“Heather had wanted her to come back, and I thought, ‘You know, it’d be cool to see Alexis back on the show — a single mom, without Jim in her life, free and able to really speak her mind.’ Little did I know that by the cameras went up, she’d be dating John Janssen!” Judge says.
Janssen, Storms Beador’s ex-boyfriend, met Alexis in November 2023 through mutual friends. By Dec. 5, the two were ready to make their romance official, with PEOPLE reporting exclusively about their coupling.

“We tried to fight the feelings,” Alexis shared in the season 18 premiere, “[but] after week two, John and I knew that was it.”

Their coupling came as a shock to Judge.

“I was recording my podcast [Two T’s in a Pod] when Alexis texted me that they were dating and I was just as surprised as anyone,” she remembers. “Alexis told me they had met and bonded because they had both just gotten out of long-term relationships. But she said, ‘I don’t see myself being with a 60-year-old man again.’ Those were her exact words. So I was like, ‘What!?'”
That point is important for Judge to make, she says, especially as fans have falsely claimed the only reason Judge and Alexis became friends again was because Judge had fallen out with Storms Beador.

“People have been like, ‘You’re just trying to get back at Shannon,’ and that really had nothing to do with it at all,” Judge says. “Alexis didn’t even want to come back to the show at first. John was trying to talk her out of it and she told me, ‘I don’t want to kick Shannon when she’s down.’ But I knew she was a single mom, and I really just encouraged her to do what she thought would be right for her for her own independence. I honestly thought it would be good for her.”