In ET's exclusive first look at 'The Real Housewives of Dubai,' Chanel Ayan confesses to suffering her first-ever anxiety attack.
This might be a Real Housewives first: one cast member telling another that she induced an anxiety attack over some petty drama! Well... except for that whole, "I had to go on Xanax for it, Lydia!" moment from RHOC.
It all unfolds in ET's exclusive first look at this week's all-new episode of The Real Housewives of Dubai, which sees Chanel Ayan (who fans now know prefers to go by her last name), Lesa Milan and Caroline Brooks sitting down for lunch. The meal starts with an extended, awkward silence, Ayan looking to Lesa, who's looking at Caroline, who's staring back at the BFF duo and sipping champagne. Ayan breaks the tension, telling the ladies she's happy to be with them, because she has some feelings to unpack about her altercation with Caroline at co-star Nina Ali's rooftop dinner (which aired on the premiere episode). The clip flashes back to the incident, which will likely go down in Bravo history as the "Look at your face, look at my face, b***h!" fight.
"Walking into that dinner, I hadn't seen you in a really long time," Caroline tells Ayan, "and I felt like you iced me a little bit. We went from speaking every single day to all of a sudden, you just vanishing."
The two got into it after Ayan accused Caroline of saying the other Caroline in their circle -- Stanbury -- refused to invite Ayan to her hen party (aka bachelorette party) because Ayan was "not important" or up to Caroline S.'s standards. Caroline B. ultimately walked back the comment, saying it was her reading of the situation, not a direct quote from Caroline S... though, at the end of the argument, Caroline S. admitted she'd be fine with the comment being attributed to her, regardless.
"I can tell you exactly what happened: I don't know if you remember that my husband was going to America for a month, because his sister's really sick, so I was really in a bad place when it came to, like, not having my husband home for a month," Ayan tells Caroline, "my mom not feeling well, my sister not feeling well, and then when you called me that day, in the morning, and you said, 'Oh, have you been invited by Stanbury? She thinks you're not important...' or something, I was like, you know what? I need space because I'm going through my own stuff. First time in my whole, entire life I had an anxiety attack. I didn't even know how it felt like."
"I didn't know that, Ayan, and I felt like as a friend, you could've told me," Caroline softly fires back.
"I'm tired of 'friends' when they're like, 'You didn't call me, so we have issues now!' But you didn't call me," Ayan then quips in a confessional. "It's a two-way street, honey! That's why the road is left and right. You gotta go left, you gotta go right, and then there's a straight-line where you meet in the middle. We never met in the middle. That is the f**king problem."
Watch it all play out here:
"I don't know who I'm going to get," Ayan admitted to ET of Caroline B. ahead of RHODubai's premiere. "That's my issue. She likes to piss me off, and she likes to cry about things towards me, and that I do not like."
"She just likes to find a way to anger me intentionally so she can enjoy it," she added. "I'm her friend and sometimes she's my enemy. So it's like that. ... But I do love her. I do love her as my friend and I care about her, but we do have issues."
Viewers will get to see the unconventional friendship evolve in the coming weeks, as well as learn more about Ayan's struggles with processing her past (and sometimes present). She said sharing so much even surprised her.
"I have a lot of all these things that I experienced that I didn't know about, I talk about," she teased. "I'm very open. I would say that I have all this beautiful pain that I didn't know I was dealing with, so I literally let people see, and I actually open up and go with them through the experience, because I never opened up to myself in that way."
"Also do not play with me," she then declared. "I don't let nobody play with me. I speak my mind. I tell you how it is, 24 hours a day. And like that, it's done for the day."
The Real Housewives of Dubai airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo.
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