Lindsay Hubbard weighs in on the aftermath of Ciara Miller's wine-soaked fight with Danielle Olivera and more.
Lindsay Hubbard seems a little activated after filming the Summer House season 6 reunion.
"Oh, the reunion... I don't even know what to say about the reunion," she sighs to ET over video chat. "You're just going to have to watch it." Yeah, the PR pro says there was "no" forward movement for the group from their day of filming.
"I don't know," she laments. "I think some of us tried to have productive conversations where we could move forward, potentially. Some of us took accountability, but ... for me it was just a reflection of the summer. It was very much, 'Let's talk about Lindsay and lay into her.'"
That reunion filmed in between the airing of two tense episodes for the Summer House crew, one that featured the beginning of the now-infamous Italian dinner that turned into a wine-flinging fight between Lindsay's best friend, Danielle Olivera, and Ciara Miller; the second focused on the altercation's conclusion and awkward aftermath. The house shockingly moved on quickly after Ciara unloaded wine on Danielle, before launching the glass from which it came at the tech entrepreneur's chest. Danielle and Lindsay went out after the incident, and the next day the dinner's attendees took part in a beach volleyball game.
"That was probably the biggest situation in all of Summer House and [it] seemed to be pretty glossed over by a lot of people," Lindsay admits. "I think from Danielle and I's standpoint, it was just, 'Let's just get through the summer and focus on that and try to have a good time,' which to be honest is not a very hard thing for Danielle and I to do. But yeah, it's really hard reliving it, and the whole situation was just completely-- it's unacceptable to throw and be violent in any situation. But if you really look and break down the why of it all, to get that way and to be violent and to throw glass because of a make-out just seems incredibly and wildly unnecessary."
That make-out went down between Lindsay and Southern Charm star Austen Kroll, her longtime friend (with benefits) who came to the Hamptons for what turned out to be a disastrous weekend trip in honor of Lindsay's birthday. Austen and Ciara had a bit of a situation-ship, too, having sensed a spark while filming the Vermont-set spinoff Winter House months before Summer House went back into production on season 6. The two seemed to attempt taking their relationship to the next level after leaving the mountains, but ultimately opted to just stay friends.
"I had no clue that Ciara still had deep, intimate, strong feelings for Austen," Lindsay says. "I also knew that Ciara had feelings for Carl [Radke] all summer, and she made out with Carl, she made out with Alex [Wach]. So in my mind, I'm like, 'Cool, great. Austen's coming for my birthday.'"
"He asked me if he could flirt with girls," Lindsay continues. "I said, 'Yeah, go flirt with whoever you want,' and he said he talked to Ciara. I actually made sure before my party started, I was asking him over and over and over, 'OK, if you're going to go flirt with girls today, make sure you were very specific and clear in your conversation with Ciara,' and he promised me that he had been. As we now know, Austen's version of 'clear and specific' is not very clear and specific."
"And listen, at the end of the day, I'm not the one picking myself up and making out with myself," she adds. "I'm not the one throwing myself in the pool and chasing me around, etc."
As Lindsay and Austen's flirty moments played out, Ciara and her bestie, Paige DeSorbo, came to the agreement that Lindsay was acting out some sort of revenge plot on Ciara for Austen choosing her instead of Lindsay at Winter House. Lindsay's maintained that she had no ill intent.
"The facts are I was not there the weekend before that [Ciara] apparently told me she was excited for Austen to come next weekend," she says. "I wasn't even there that weekend. I'm not in the room with the door closed when she's talking to Paige about her feelings for Austen. I'm also listening to Austen tell me his version of their conversations, which included that he made Ciara very much aware that he was single, and that was it."
Ciara doubled down on those feelings, though, during a recent appearance on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, proclaiming that Lindsay had "intent to hurt" and that "98 percent" of her actions were designed to target Ciara.
"I'm shocked by that because do you really think I'm over here thinking about you that much? Like I have that much time on my hands in my day?" Lindsay asks. "I'm not over here calculating and coming up with some big scheme to hurt somebody. That's the furthest thing on my mind. What I'm doing is just reacting to someone picking me up and making out with me. And guess what? If it was Luke [Gulbranson] picking me up, I would have made out with him. If it was Carl, I would have made out with him. If Ciara came up to me and picked me up and made out with me, I would have made out with her. I had zero ill intentions and zero malicious thoughts of, 'I'm going to get Ciara back for Vermont.' Vermont was nowhere close to my mind."
Before Ciara's feelings exploded in the form of the wine-throw, she asked Lindsay for time to talk about the Austen situation. Lindsay turned down her request, a moment which was replayed by Summer House editors when Lindsay said she wished Ciara had reached out to talk. Lindsay says she meant before the night of her birthday party.
"When I said, 'You should have come to me,' it was before the weekend, before the party, not in the 11th hour, when we're all wasted," she explains. "I still have people there -- literally still a bunch of my friends are there -- and after all is said and done, every time I looked over at Ciara, she has this scowl on her face. I'm in the middle of still throwing a party. I'm not going to stop -- as I'm wasted now -- and go have a serious deep conversation with you that should have happened before the weekend."
Lindsay says the conversation should've actually happened months before the party, back when they were all still in Vermont.
"I think Ciara should have talked to me in Vermont, but she didn't," she says. "And I think also before Austen coming for the weekend, Ciara should have made sure that I knew how she felt about him, because I did not know how intense her feelings were for him. Otherwise, had I known, I'm a human, and I have compassion. I would have been like, 'Put me down. Put me down.' I obviously would have said that. But I'm over here like, 'Oh, Ciara's making out with Carl. She has a crush on him. She's making out with Alex. Austen's telling me that they're on the same page as far as being single.' I thought there's three people in this situation. We're all single. We can all do whatever we want. All is good in the world."
This whole situation only got messier when Winter House aired in the fall, after this all went down while filming Summer House. On an episode of Watch What Happens Live, Austen and Lindsay's friendship essentially ended after he chose Ciara over Lindsay for almost every category in a game, all while Lindsay was seated in the front row.
"Listen, since the October Watch What Happens Live episode ... more has happened," she notes. "Him commenting on Instagram, or him telling more lies, I'm just like, dude, come on. When are you just going to stop putting your foot in your mouth and just stop? So, at this point because I had already reclassified him in my head, he'll never again get a title of 'best friend' to me and that's OK. I don't think he'll ever title me as his best friend again. I think we've discovered who he is with female relationships and friendships and that's OK. I just don't need that, where I'm at in my life, my priorities have changed and we're all good. I'm obviously going to hold on to the fond memories that we once had and we're still cordial."
Lindsay says she now classifies Austen as an "acquaintance," and teases the two recently hashed things out, seemingly while filming the (as yet unconfirmed by Bravo) second season of Winter House.
"I saw Austen in Charleston, [South Carolina] in December," she says, "and we agreed that we needed to have a deeper conversation about everything that happened. And we did have it recently, that was in Vermont, that conversation."
"I don't really have surface-level friendships in my life," she notes. "I've worked pretty hard and long to create my inner circle of best friends. So yeah, it's unfortunate. But listen, when people show you their true colors, you have to pay attention to them and adjust. And this is not the first time that this has happened to me in life. It's happened with a lot female friendships."
It seems some of Lindsay's female friendships within the Summer House cast were tested while watching back moments she missed while filming the show this season. She says it's been illuminating to see what went down before and after Ciara and Danielle got physical, notably how Paige told Ciara to, "bring out your inner Italian tonight and just go off on this b***h."
"I had no idea that that happened, and to me it was just really just disgusting," she admits. "I just have never seen somebody wind somebody up like that to basically 'go full-blown Italian on that b***h,' or whatever the case was. What does that even mean? It was clear that Paige wanted Ciara to explode onto me, whether she meant verbally or physically I'm not sure, but yeah, I was pretty shocked to see that."
Then there was Mya Allen comforting Ciara in the immediate wake of the glass break, telling her, "Don't ever let someone like Lindsay or anyone get the best of you."
"It was just like, what?!" she says. "I literally just sat there, and I'm the one who took the verbal attack, and Danielle took the physical attack. So at least we had each other, and Danielle's been such an amazing, phenomenal friend to me over the years, and I try to be an amazing, good, phenomenal friend to her as well. So we really lean on each other, and sometimes that's all we need in those moments is just the strength of each other."
Viewers pointed out on social media that the majority of the house appeared to comfort Ciara after the fight, while Danielle only had Lindsay, but that's not how Lindsay sees it.
"A lot of people were in Alex's room, just gathered in that room, and Ciara walked into it," she explains. "So I don't think it was people purposely rallied around Ciara as far as that specific room of people. I had to get Danielle out of the house immediately. I knew she needed space and air to just cool off and vent and talk through everything that had just happened. ... There was so much negativity that night that we had to just get out and invite positivity back into our lives."
After an apology from Ciara the next day, Danielle asked Lindsay a pointed question during the group's beach outing: do you love the drama you (unwittingly) caused? Lindsay's answer didn't make it into the episode, though.
"No, I don't love that Ciara got hurt," she now shares. "It's a s**tty feeling, and that's what I said to Ciara, too. I went through a couple of different situations this summer with different guys where it was a s**tty feeling for me, being hurt by those guys. I don't wish anyone to feel that way, especially because of a guy being an a**hole to you."
"So, no, I don't love the drama and I especially don't love that the drama turned into violence," she continues. "That's something I just don't like at all, and it should have never gone to that point. So, no, I don't love the level to which the drama happened. Absolutely not. I'm not perfect. I've had plenty of times where I've f**ked up and had to take responsibility and make amends and be accountable for my actions, and I do feel bad that Ciara got hurt, but I don't feel like I'm to blame."
There's more girl drama to come for Lindsay, as this week's episode finds the other women in the house questioning her "Hot Hubbs Summer" approach to dating. In the first look that aired at the end of last week's episode, Ciara gets frustrated that Lindsay is talking about other guys after the Austen drama.
"With the whole Austen thing, I never was like, 'Oh, I'm going to get into a relationship with him. I like him in that way.' No. Of course, I like Austen. He's my best friend, and we have this attraction towards each other, but I don't think that we're going to be together -- and I never thought that over summer," she says. "The whole bringing it back again and again and again, it was just like banging my head against the wall. Come on. Not everything is about you. I don't make calculated decisions with Ciara in mind."
Then there's the housemates questioning why Lindsay's moving from one man to the next so quickly. Lindsay says the sneak peek scenes don't properly set up just how hurtful those questions were for her.
"I was pretty disappointed," she confesses. "First of all, it was just this constant laying into Lindsay. Second of all, I don't like the idea of, 'Oh, I'm a concerned friend. I've never seen you this single.' Well, that's because you don't hang out with me. Listen, what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit on my couch and not put myself in a situation to potentially meet somebody? That's just not who I am and how I operate, and I thought it was extremely unfair to attempt to connect dots. That said, 'Hey, because you had a miscarriage and you're single and dating, is there something wrong with you?' It was just really sad that they were connecting dots that were completely unrelated in my opinion."
Lindsay started off the summer processing the loss of an unexpected pregnancy with her Winter House hookup Jason Cameron.
"I think for women who go through having a miscarriage, it affects everybody in a different way, and it really just depends on where they're at in life," she shares. "I was in a position where I wasn't even dating the guy. I certainly wasn't in love with him. And yeah, the second I found out I was pregnant, I thought my summer was about to be going in a whole different direction, and then within a split second, it wasn't going in that direction."
"I made that conscious decision early on before summer started, OK, Linds, last summer you were in a relationship for far too long, that was extremely unhealthy, and you wasted a lot of time in that relationship," she rattles off. "Then, I didn't really date and met Jason in Vermont at Winter House, dated him for a couple of months. But even then I wound up in this very interesting and strange situation where I was pregnant and had a miscarriage. So for me, I was like, OK, I'm just going to focus on myself, have as much fun and meet as many potential suitors and not get stuck on one of them."
Lindsay says her approach feels "healthier than getting gaslit or being in an unhealthy situation with one guy and continue to go back to him like some other roommates of mine in the house."
"I just thought it was extremely unfair," she reiterates of being questioned. "I was very disappointed that people who have never been, A, in a situation where they've had a miscarriage judge me thinking this has anything to do with that, no. My decision to be single this summer was simply to focus on myself and not get in a situation like I have in the past that I've now learned from not to waste time."
It all worked out for Lindsay in the end, as she found love with co-star Carl. The two have been dating for nearly nine months now, after first attempting to move out of the friend zone back in season 4.
"Isn't it so funny to think back to season 4 and us yelling on my rooftop with nips of Fireball?" she laughs. "We are just in such different head spaces. If you really, really, really think about it, we have been through so much together. From the loss of his brother to my miscarriage, to countless significant others or us dating different people along the way. We've been side by side through it all as friends."
"I think the biggest difference with him is his sobriety has allowed him to be OK feeling emotions and accepting my love and giving his love," she adds. Carl recently celebrated one year of sobriety.
"Before, he was just constantly trying to run away from those emotions and was kind of in denial of where we were," she says. "But now it's just, he's such an amazing, he's just... I can't! Carl, I never expected it. He is a better boyfriend than I could have ever imagined him to be. And I'm just like, every morning, it makes me tear up a little bit because he's just so affectionate, he's so loving. I have so much emotional security. And he's this fierce protector. I think he sees me for the good, the bad, the ugly, the crazy, the whatever -- and he loves it all. And I to him."
"I'm so happy," she gushes. "He's the best. He's the sweetest. I don't even know how to explain it. I never expected him to just be... it was everything I wanted in a guy, the communication, obviously the attraction, but everything. Everything that I've been searching high and low for, I found, and it was my best friend, and it was just shocking to me."
Lindsay calls falling for her best friend "the ultimate dream come true." She says almost everyone in their life saw it before they did, as evidenced by Carl's mom making a crack about him needing to move on up to Lindsay's apartment (they live in the same building) on a recent episode of Summer House -- long before they started dating again. That might happen sooner rather than later. Lindsay says they're actively looking for a place together.
"Had we not lived in the same building, I think there would be a bigger rush for us to find something that we could live in together," she notes. " As far as Carl and I in season 7, hopefully we find an apartment by then. If we decide to buy an apartment, by the time we close on that would probably be over summer. So, you guys would watch that."
Until then, there's more of season 6 to play out, and Lindsay's amped for the fans to watch her and Carl finding their way to each other.
"I'm personally excited to watch those very, very, very beginning moments of Carl and I," she says. "Not often do you get that opportunity to relive those very beginning moments where you're almost just re-meeting each other as friends, but something else is happening inside. So, I'm just excited for that. All summer long, there was not an ounce in my body that thought I had feelings for Carl, and I wasn't thinking of him, or looking at him like that, and then something just clicked for the two of us at [a prom-themed party], and we just were vibing with each other in a way that was more flirty than normal."
"I have these small, little baby butterflies fluttering inside," she recalls. "I'm just like, 'What is going on? Am I imagining this?' Then you watch it, and you're like, 'Oh my God! This is that moment where things are clicking for the both of us at the exact same time, where we're just super on the same page with each other.' It was so unexpected."
Summer House airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo.
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