Luann de Lesseps On Eating a Bologna Sandwich During Her Night In Jail: 'I Was Just So Pathetic and So Sad'

On Wednesday night’s episode of The Real Housewives of New York, former Countess and current layperson Luann de Lesseps addressed her 2017 arrest in Palm Beach, Florida (during which she drunkenly threatened to kill a police officer), calling the experience “pathetic and so sad” while recounting the bleak as hell series of events to co-star Dorinda Medley in the back seat of a black car.

De Lesseps claims she was arrested after barging into the wrong hotel room at the Colony Hotel and—because she and her “friend” had had too much to drink—fighting back against security when she was told about her mixup. (She has since completed a stint in rehab.)

“Before I knew it I was in the back of the squad car,” de Lesseps tells Medley of the moments just before she threatened to kill the cops.

Medley, clearly loving every second of this, is rapt. “Were they at least polite, the police, or were they not nice?”

“Well,” de Lesseps says, deciding to skip over the more unpleasant bits and going straight to the part where she spent the night in jail. “I didn’t sleep the whole night because it was freezing cold. I had a sundress on, I had no shoes, no blanket, no water, no nothing.”

“Did you eat?”

“They threw me a bologna sandwich, which was so crazy,” de Lesseps says, a hint of a smile on her face. “You know the last time I had a bologna sandwich? Probably 40 years ago!”

In a confessional taped later, she provides more details about the bologna sandwich, saying:

“I took a big bite out of that and inside was the mustard packet. I pull out, it was almost like a dead fish hanging out of my mouth. I was just so pathetic and so sad.”

After this hilariously dark (or darkly hilarious?) retelling, Medley takes a moment to steer the conversation in a more woke direction. “You can see how people that get in those things—that don’t have the resources—can get very hopeless,” she says. “So they keep repeating it, and then they get stuck in the system.”

“It’s awful. I felt what it’s like to be stuck in that system,” de Lesseps adds. “I mean, when they put shackles on my ankles to take me to the courtroom in the morning…”

“That’s awful. Why is that necessary?” a nonplussed Medley asks.

“Maybe because I tried to slip out of the handcuffs,” de Lesseps says with a laugh. Segment over! Cut to commercial! Jail is a fun learning experience! Womp womp!