As if Chrishell Stause getting a divorce text from This Is Us’ Justin Hartley on Season 3 of Selling Sunset wasn’t enough, history decided to slightly repeat itself. The 2022 MTV Award winner for Best Reality Star similarly opened up about the relationship with her boss, Jason Oppenheim, during the show's latest season, only for things to crumble again before her and viewers’ eyes by the finale. Now, Stause is reflecting on the challenges of living and loving in the public eye.
Chrishell Stause and Jason Oppenheim went Instagram official with their relationship in July of 2021. By December, though, they announced that they had already called it quits because Oppenheim didn’t want to have kids like Stause did. Their arrival at the supposedly mutual decision played out in full on Selling Sunset, and Stause admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that it was the most difficult aspect of Season 5 for her:
My personal relationship with Jason. Obviously, that’s not the easiest speed bump. You’ve got the dynamics of everybody in the office, and he’s in charge. It’s just going to be a lot. And then, of course, as we all know, us breaking up and working through that, which is really difficult to walk that balance of wanting to be true to what’s really going on. It’s really hard to sometimes share such intimate things.
As fans will recall, the two had to navigate their fellow castmates’ reactions to the news. In truth, most everyone was happy for their happiness, except for co-star Christine Quinn, who implied in one scene that Stause might’ve been unfaithful in her marriage to Justin Hartley with Jason Oppenheim. Quinn has since claimed that the editors blatantly cut together sound bites to falsely achieve the comments they wanted. (Quinn even accused one producer of having a vendetta against her.) However, it was Stause and Oppenheim’s emotional heart-to-hearts that were the hardest to watch. Apparently, the hardest to film, too. Stause told the outlet:
It’s very weird to be having these moments and yet you have cameras there. Of course, they try to tuck away and be as unnoticeable as possible, but it is just one of those things that you can get nervous about, especially when emotions are running high. You don’t always remember exactly what you said, and so it also adds a level of anxiety until you see it yourself, too, which we don’t see until the week before [an episode] comes out. I don’t foresee myself doing this for a long time, but I think that as long as you’re still enjoying it, that’s the key. Right now, I’m still really enjoying it, and I really love the people that I work with.
The TV personality had said in the wake of her split that she was actually "proud" of how she and Jason Oppenheim handled things afterwards, in fact. This includes how they have moved on with other people. Chrishell Stause shared at the Selling Sunset Season 5 reunion that she was dating Australian pop singer G Flip. Given that the latter is non-binary, the reveal prompted a lot of questions about Stause’s sexuality and, when she addressed it, she had Oppenheim in the comments backing her up in support.
The former boyfriend and girlfriend remain coworkers/co-stars at the Oppenheim Group amidst the show getting picked up for two more seasons by Netflix. And even though Chrishell Stause suggested her last relationship was hard to document, it looked like having to work alongside Christine Quinn was even more challenging, given how often the two butted heads on-screen. It’s hard to tell, based on Quinn’s conflicting statements on her status, whether she is indeed returning for Season 6 despite exiting the notorious brokerage on the streamer to form her own company. But I’m still kinda of the opinion that Selling Sunset can’t survive without the touted villainess…
We’ll see how that and the post-breakup awkwardness between the two exes plays out in the future. For now, check out the premiere season of the spinoff Selling the OC, which drops on August 24 as part of the 2022 Netflix TV schedule.
