The 10 Cruelest Things Ever Said on Vanderpump Rules

In the very first episode of Vanderpump Rules, at a brunch with a trio of couples, one of the boyfriends bemoans having to "go to bed with the devil" aka his girlfriend, who’s right next to him. That was the tone Vanderpump Rules set from the very beginning — not simply "The Real Housewives, but younger and sexier" but a literally leaner and meaner kind of show than Bravo had ever delivered.

Over the years, the bartenders, servers, and hoststaff at SUR, Pump, and other Lisa Vanderpump-backed business ventures have swapped sexual partners and thrown cocktails with abandon. They've also said the cruelest things to each other, things that would end friendships forever and cause regular people to cross to the other side of the road to avoid the person who said such an awful thing to them. And yet season after season, these adult children are back in each other's orbit. A near-constant low simmer of hostility has nothing on a Bravo paycheck.

The 11th season of Vanderpump Rules, premiering January 30th, comes at one of the most contentious points in the show's history. The Scandoval drove temperatures so high, they still haven't come down. Last time all these people were in a room together, at the Season 10 reunion, the air was so thick with bone-deep personal insults that they had to rent a trailer out back to send people to cool off.

To get into the spirit of a season where Ariana Madix doesn't want anyone to film with Tom Sandoval, Lala Kent is doubling down on calling Sandoval "dangerous," and exes Katie Maloney and Tom Schwartz are still way too involved in each other's lives than is normally healthy, we sat down to determine the 10 cruelest insults that have ever been delivered on this show. (Note: It has to have been on the show. Social media posts and blind-item quotes don't count.) What we discovered was that, in most cases, the meanest thing of all was to tell the truth about someone.

10. "You're a bootleg Kardashian!" — Tom Schwartz to Scheana Shay

One of the more illuminating things that can arise from a Vanderpump Rules blowout argument is the realization that two cast members who you didn't even realize had beef truly hate each other. It took us about eight seasons before we realized the depths to which Stassi Schroeder and Tom Sandoval despised each other. Similarly, the blowup fight in the middle of Season 6 between Scheana and Katie, where they accused each other of using Lala to attack the other, revealed just how low of an opinion Tom Schwartz had for Scheana. Sticking up for his new wife, Schwartz jumped into action, saying everything about Scheana's appearance and personality was fake. Calling Scheana a "bootleg Kardashian" wasn't entirely wrong, but it had been the template for her hustle for so long that it felt un-sporting to call it out like that.

9. "I'm not really sure what I've done to you, but I'll take a pinot grigio." — Stassi Schroeder to Scheana Shay

After the tumult of the Season 2 revelation that Kristen Doute and Jax Taylor had sex (more on that later), Stassi left her job at SUR and took off for New York City. Upon her return, her nose was firmly in the air about her old job and former friends. You couldn't blame her, really, even if it was her old frenemy Scheana who bore the brunt of it. After confronting Scheana a few episodes earlier for retweeting some ugly insults about Stassi (a classic source of Housewives-style tension), Stass returned to SUR for a meeting with Lisa Vanderpump. Scheana, their server, decided to give Stassi the silent treatment. Stassi's response, quoted above, pinpointed Scheana's attitude as misplaced and managed to emphasize Stassi as the customer and Scheana as her “lowly” waitress.

8. "It's the second time you've wimped out like a big bloody wussy p*ssy." — Lisa Vanderpump to Tom Schwartz

This is another selection from Season 3, as Lisa Vanderpump upbraided Tom Schwartz for quitting his bartending job at Pump mid-shift after suffering what he called a panic attack. We suppose we're meant to chalk up Lisa's unnecessarily gendered assessment of Schwartz's fortitude to her salty English upbringing. Regardless, this particular insult likely wouldn't have stung so much had it come from Jax or Lala or even Katie. But because it was Lisa, who, for all her faults, is still looked up to as an authority figure by most of the show's cast members, Tom was legitimately chastened. LVP has spent the better part of a decade lobbing insults at the Vanderpump Rules cast members (mostly Jax and the Toms), but pulling out the p-word for Schwartz was a direct hit at his puppy-dog affect.

7. "Go try to ruin another girl's life. I know you will. You’re dirty.” — Brittany Cartwright to Jax Taylor

Plenty of people have said rude things to and about Jax Taylor, but few with the pinpoint accuracy and righteous fury of his current wife, Brittany. Back when they were merely engaged, yet another rumor emerged about Jax cheating on her. When he confessed, Brittany was on fire, memorably telling Jax to "rot in hell," a phrase which has several more syllables in it than you'd think when delivered in her Kentucky drawl. But it was this other insult that cut Jax to the bone: go ruin another girl's life. Jax had always been a bad boyfriend with a trail of carnage in his wake. But Brittany was supposed to have been the girl to set him on the straight and narrow path. Now, she was just another girl whose life he'd ruined. If the man had a soul, no doubt it would have been scarred by this.

6. "You are a dirty whore." — Stassi Schroeder to Kristen Doute

It wasn't so much the words that Stassi used in the Season 2 finale that wounded Kristen so much as the backhand that Stassi threw at her the instant after that. The revelation that Kristen (Stassi's best friend) and Jax (Stassi's ex) had had sex while Sandoval (Kristen's current boyfriend and Jax's best friend) slept in the room next door was legitimately shocking. It was the one time that a reality soap ever approached the drama of an actual soap opera. Gendered insults and women-on-women violence are the scourge of reality television. This moment should not be celebrated. And yet! It's shamefully compelling television, even if Stassi does go for the less creative line, a choice that keeps her out of the top five.

5. "F*ck yourself with a f*cking cheese grater, f*ck you, you f*cking suck, you're disgusting, and I wish nothing but the worst f*cking shit that could ever happen to a person on you." — Ariana Maxid to Rachel Leviss

Obviously, the Scandoval was going to make it onto this list at some point. This blistering tirade, from the final part of the Season 10 reunion, was a blast of furry directly from the bowels of Ariana's pain and sense of betrayal. After Rachel (née Raquel) tried to clarify some portion of the timeline of her affair with Sandoval, Ariana had enough equivocation and blew up. The imagery was ugly, the profanity was excessive, and the sentiment was imbalanced ("the worst sh*t that could ever happen to a person" is quite a bit worse than having an affair). But that's exactly the kind of vibe that the Season 10 reunion was marinating in. Giving Ariana a platform to purge her anger onto Tom and Rachel was the advertised attraction, and Ariana delivered.

4. "Talk about how your d*ck doesn't work either." — Katie Maloney Schwartz to Tom Schwartz

In retrospect, any expectations that Katie and Tom's relationship would get less verbally snippy after they got married was probably naive. The root of this particular insult was the same root as a lot of their arguments: Katie went off on someone or another, and instead of backing her up — as is the sworn duty of a boyfriend and especially a husband — Schwartz instead told her to cool out and let it go. So Katie stormed off and, casual as you please, called out her husband's dick for not working. If she was making it up just to say something mean, that's one thing. If Tom was really struggling with impotence or infertility, that's a real jerky thing to say. Schwartz, predictably, defended the functionality of his dick. The world may truly never know the truth.

3. "You're not important enough to hate." — Lisa Vanderpump to Stassi Schroeder

This one is blunt and sad more than anything. The titular rules of Vanderpump Rules have never been enumerated, but if they were, the first one would probably be "check whose name is on the sign." You can go up against a lot of people on this show, but not Lisa. So when Stassi started to badmouth Lisa in the press — in the midst of lashing out in all directions after she'd been blackmailed over a revenge porn situation — you knew that sitdown was not going to end well. Lisa let Stassi dangle on the line for a while until she was ready to walk out, at which point Lisa told her to sit down in the most pitiless way possible.

2. "He's gonna get bored of you, and he's gonna move on to the next pretty blond." — James Kennedy to Lala Kent

The rest of this argument got a lot more attention, because it was the famous "it's not about the pasta" argument, a two-way tirade between best pals (and frustrated former lovers) Lala and James that became the signature fight of Season 6. But inside that fight was James, who'd had his feelings hurt when Lala seemed to laugh at his new girlfriend, lashing out at Lala and her sugar-daddy boyfriend situation. It's the meanest thing anyone had ever said to Lala, and there were just enough kernels of truth in it to make it really hurt. But the worst part was that James and Lala were actually friends, meaning this was Lala hearing what her friend really thought of her. The harshest of harsh.

1. "You're worth nothing. And I want you to feel that, deep in your soul." — Ariana Madix to Tom Sandoval

The second Scandoval entry is Ariana's bone-deep assessment of Tom Sandoval's bankrupt character. Saying she wanted Tom to die was the one that got all the attention, but "you're worth nothing" is hitting Tom where it hurts: his ego.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.