ANAHEIM, Calif. — Coming back to “The Real Housewives of Orange County” this season, Gretchen Rossi says she hoped things would be different between her and housewife Tamra Judge.

A few episodes into the new season, Rossi sees that she was wrong.

“When I decided to do the show, I really wasn’t coming back to start this feud with Tamra again,” says Rossi, who returned as a friend of the housewives for Season 19 after starring as a full-fledged housewife from Seasons 4 to 8.

“I was hopeful that maybe we could actually have an adult conversation,” she says. “There could be some accountability that was taken on her part, which I was foolish to think because I’ve been watching her, you know, for the last 11 years, being the same person.”

Rossi says she thought that maybe things had changed since they last worked together.

“I was like maybe she was in a different place,” she says. “My point being I didn’t comein with the intent to reengage the feud or have an issue with her, but I certainly wasn’t afraid to call her out and address her on the B.S. and the stuff that she had done for years.”

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Rossi talked about the origins of the feud, how she ended up talking on camera about Slade Smiley’s injury to a very private part of his anatomy, and whether their 5-year-old daughter ever got the chicken she’d been asking for in an episode.

Q: You were as out of the spotlight as a former housewife can be, and then you decided to go back into this world of high drama. Why put yourself back in the ring?

A: You know, it was interesting how it all came about. Throughout the years that I’ve been gone, there’ve been talks here and there where someone from production will call and put their feelers out: Would you ever want to come back? There was definitely a time I was like, “Absolutely not, no, no, no.”

Then, when they called this season, I was like, “Nice of you to call, but no thank you.” They were like, “Well, let’s not just say no off the bat. Let’s talk through these emotions.” [She laughs] Finally, as me and Slade sat down to think about it, I had a lot of friendships from the past cast, and I had a lot of friendships with newer cast members..

I looked at Slade, and I was like, “If there ever was a time for me to come back, this would probably be the season.”

Q: How did it make you feel?

A: Was I anxious? Was I nervous? Was I like, What am I doing? All of those emotions, 100%.

Q: Of your former cast, there’s Heather Dubrow, and so far it seems like you and Heather are fine. And then there’s Tamra. Tell me about how that all started.

A: When I first signed up for the show, I was very naive and I was very young. I was like, “This is going to be fun. I get to go shopping and drink champagne with my girlfriends.” Lo and behold, I walk right into the lion’s den, and I was like, whoa, what is happening here?

Back then, I felt it would be conceited to be like, Oh, she’s just jealous or whatever. Even though the audience was always like, “She’s jealous of you.” I was like, OK, OK, but I never really understood it, and I was like why does this woman hate me so much? You know, you hear stuff as the years go on.

People from her camp who used to be friends with her were like, “Oh, she was so mad because you came in and she was always considered the hot one and the young one, and you stole her thunder.” I don’t know if any of that’s true. But then it just kind of became this epic feud between us, and changed a little bit of the trajectory of “Housewives” as a whole.

Q: You shared something very personal about Slade on the July 24 episode that I think had a lot of people talking. [She laughs] What made you go there?

A: Oh my gosh, right? This is what’s crazy about reality TV. Sometimes you forget the cameras are there. Yeah, probably not my best moment, but also a little bit of what is required to be on reality TV. You’re just supposed to be yourself and share what’s really happening. So I haven’t seen the episode yet. It’s silly of me to say that, but how did it get brought up? Was there anything that showed why I said that or did it just all of a sudden click to me saying that?

Q: The show was just cutting around to different clusters of people at the party and kind cuts to you saying that.

A: That’s funny you say that because Emily [Simpson, another housewife] and I go to the same hormone doctor, and we both are getting testosterone pellets. So I have to presume that the conversation started with her and I talking about testosterone and how it makes your libido a lot higher.

Q: Oh yeah, that’s in there.

A: That makes a little more sense to me. But yeah, I think it was a silly conversation with your girlfriend of, you know, the testosterone was so wild that we had a wild night of sex and ended up breaking his penis. [She laughs]

Q: Slade’s reaction is kind of funny. First, he goes, ‘Hey, hey, hey!’ and then, after you’ve said it, he says Yep, that happened.

A: He just expects it from me, you know. Slade and I, we’re very open and vocal about everything and anything in our lives, whether it’s good, bad, ugly, indifferent. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’ve been together 16 years, and we’re best friends.

And listen, if I knew something was bothersome to him, I would never share something super-personal. But we’ve had this conversation with a lot of our friends. To tell you the truth, it’s a refreshing conversation sometimes to have with friends around sexual health, because I think so many people are afraid to talk about it.

This season, Emily and I went to the hormone doctor. I was talking about women in our 40s and what happens to our body hormonally. Not enough women are talking about this. I’ve had 12 of my friends come to me that I sent to my doctor, and they said, “You’ve literally saved my marriage because we’re back like we’re in our 20s having sex again.”

Q: I guess what happened to Slade is entertaining, but also informational or education as well.

A: There you go. Turning a bad situation into a good one.

Q: I want to ask you about Slade and your 16 years together. You guys got engaged on camera during your original run on the show, but all these years later, you’ve still not gotten married.

A: So there really isn’t any like, “Oh, we’re not getting married.” I don’t think that’s ever been our intent. It’s been more about circumstantial situations. When we first put a date on a calendar, we didn’t realize the date we had picked was a holiday weekend, and a lot of our families were not available, had already booked a trip or whatever. And then Slade ended up getting booked for a miniseries with the History Channel down in Mexico for multiple months that interfered with the date as well.

And I started looking at my biological clock, going, you know, I’m 26, 27, and I really want to have a child. By the time we figure out this wedding crap, I’m probably not even going to be able to have a child anymore. So we decided to put our efforts and our money into IVF and try to have a child, because he had had a vasectomy 15 years earlier, and we knew we probably had to do IVF.

Then, after I had Skylar, I was in massive postpartum depression for almost three years. I felt overweight and I didn’t feel good. My mind, you have a newborn, you’re not sleeping, you’re angry, all the stuff. So it wasn’t about, “I don’t want to get married,” it was just circumstantial stuff.

Q: It’s good to hear you got through that. Is a wedding back on the table now?

A: It really wasn’t until this year when it’s all brought back up again. Everyone’s asking us so maybe this is the time to do it. Skylar is of an age where she can truly understand it. [Skylar turned 6 in July.] She can be our flower girl.

I will say, what’s interesting to me is I feel like there’s something to be said about two people choosing every day to wake up and stay together rather than people that want to put so much emphasis on, “Oh, you have to have a marriage license.” To me, it proves something more that you don’t have a marriage license and you’re choosing to stay together because you want to be together.

I actually think it’s a beautiful thing that Slade and I have been able to show that we’re in love and we’re together because we want to be, not because we have to be.

Q: After this conversation, I’m starting to think you should have your own health and relationship show.

A: What’s funny, we did. Slade and I had our own podcast. It was called Knot Too Taboo, and we talked a lot about sexual health on there. So thank you for saying that.

Q: We got a glimpse of Skylar on a recent episode. Did she ever get her chicken?

A: That is hilarious. I was like, “Her chicken?” So we don’t have a very big backyard, and if I got a chicken coop, it would take over basically the whole yard. I think the whole idea in my head of I’m gonna get a chicken coop was probably not our best plan yet. So no, we do not have a chicken, but she does have three chickens at her school where she literally is the chicken whisperer. And we get our fresh eggs from those chickens every day. It’s literally the cutest thing.

Q: Without giving anything away, how does the rest of the season go?

A: Ooh, that’s a very loaded question. What’s so interesting, a lot of these housewives shows there’s kind of like a linear storyline that happens throughout the entire season, right? And you sometimes hear the audience going, “Oh my God, we’re talking about the same thing.” This season there are so many twists and turns and new things that happen.

Every time you turn around, there’s some new storyline that could be a whole season. Unfortunately, I am kind of in the center of it, and so it’s going to be interesting to see how it all turns out. It ended in a way that was unexpected and surprising. I had an incredible season. I got along really well with all the cast – obviously, besides Tamra.

But at the end, it definitely made me question a lot of things. So we’ll see how it all pans out.

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