Please Cast Eric Adams’s Socialite Bestie in ‘The Real Housewives of New York City’

This week, Hell Gate launched The Eric Adams Table of Success, and we're highlighting some of the reporting we did for it. For more on Eleonora and the mayor's nightlife activities, head over to the table.

I spent a lot of time thinking about "The Real Housewives of New York" this year—I watched and wrote about the season 14 reboot for this very website, a frustrating task which brought me close to throwing in the RHONY towel forever. In my final "Housewives" recap, I swore to myself and to everyone who read those increasingly frantic blog posts that I would ignore season 15. I made my coworkers promise to not let me write about the show again, lest I finally slip beyond the brink of sanity and start watching "The Real Housewives of Dubai."

But there is one thing that could pull me out of retirement, and that's if Andy Cohen added Eleonora Srugo, an award-winning real estate agent, fabulous native New Yorker, and friend of Mayor Eric Adams (see Srugo's entry in the Eric Adams Table of Success) to the RHONY cast. 

Fans of the franchise have tossed around names for other possible additions, like Julia Fox, Ziwe Fumudoh, and Emily Ratajkowski, but all of those women are already famous, which makes them worse candidates for the kind of cursed, campy fame Bravo bestows on its stars. Srugo, on the other hand, is not quite a public figure—she'd just be really great at being one.

Let me explain myself:

She gives back (often with Eric Adams)

Charity events were a cornerstone of the original RHONY run. Those women could scrap at a gala or take over the mic at a fundraiser like it was their job (because it literally was). That dimension of the show has kind of been lost with the new cast members—the focus has been way more on their individual sob stories, much to my chagrin. 

But Srugo is involved in her community. According to one of her Instagram posts, she met Eric Adams through a mentoring program to prepare students from her alma mater, Stuyvesant High School, for the college admissions process, and they've continued to volunteer together. Scrolling her feed, you can also find photos of Srugo and the mayor bundled up in winter gear and volunteering together at food distributions. 

She's also been involved in pro-Israel activism—and, according to the mayor, Srugo influenced his own beliefs on the subject. In a speech at a Jewish Heritage Month reception in May, Adams thanked Srugo for teaching him about "what it is to grow up as a young Jewish girl in the city, from Israel." 

Srugo also happened to be in Israel at the same time Adams was there back in August, and the two friends met up there, via photos she posted to her Instagram story—in one, she was side by side with the mayor, and in another, she shared a shot of his security team with the caption "Has tlv ever seen a more handsome crew?! 🇮🇱 🇺🇸🗽."

She actually goes out (often with Eric Adams)

I'm not saying that you have to be a partier to be a RHONY cast member—but it definitely helps. Last season, whether it was a change in production values or just the challenge of dealing with a cast that included several non-drinkers (totally fine as a personal choice!), the activities the cast members did together took a turn for the bizarre. Hellish indoor minigolf? Rockefeller Center bumper cars? Give me a fucking break. 

Srugo, much like our hard-partying mayor, is someone who actually participates in the current iteration of New York City nightlife, posting photos from Marquee New York, Casa Cipriani, Little Sister, and Carbone's new private dining club ZZ's—places that you just can't get into on a regular basis unless you have the right connections. 

So it's perhaps no surprise that Srugo and Adams hit the town together. Srugo and the mayor went to a Drake concert with friends this past January, a night out memorialized on her Instagram feed in a carousel-style post that combines concert footage and a clip from one of the mayor’s speeches about the rebounding of city life. “This week a few good men did a few great things for our city,” she wrote in her caption. Adams and Srugo also posed together at his birthday party in September, right before the mayor spent a day looking haggard at flood-related press conferences. I'm sure Srugo, on the other hand, looked great the next day—as a real Real Housewife candidate should.

She knows the people who run those hotspots, too—just like our mayor. Their mutual friends include Johnny and Robert Petrosyants, twin brothers who are very close with Adams and run Osteria La Baia, the buzzy Italian restaurant where Srugo had her birthday party in 2022, and Scott Sartiano, the Zero Bond owner who also serves as Adams's liaison to the Met board. (Sartiano, Adams, and the rappers French Montana and Ja Rule all made it to Srugo's 2022 birthday party, further cementing why she'd be great for the show: She knows actual famous people who would potentially be forced to do cameos on it. French Montana on RHONY? Awesome.) 

She has an actual job

On Instagram, Srugo talks a lot about her life as a Douglas Elliman real estate agent whose listings are consistently attached to a seven-figure-plus price tag, which would bring an element that felt off-kilter in RHONY S14—the cast members frequently talked about working hard, but rarely seemed to be doing anything. Like, if I have to see more Ubah Hassan-branded hot sauce footage, see any more thinly veiled sponcon gift bags from Jenna Lyons, or hear anything else about how influencing is real work from Sai De Silva in Season 15, I will freak the fuck out. 

Casting Srugo on RHONY would be the first step toward bringing about my dream storyline onto the reboot: Housewives fighting at an event attended by Adams, forcing the mayor to do a talking head confessional where he has to take sides in the situation. (I think he would love Brynn Whitfield and hate Jessel Taank, by the way.) 

She and former cast member Leah McSweeney seem to know each other, based on the fact that McSweeney likes the majority of Srugo's posts, and Srugo was also photographed with current RHONJ cast member Melissa Gorga at a New York Fashion Week Event in 2022, which is to say that Bravo would be asleep behind the wheel of a semi-truck if they haven't already reached out to her. Unfortunately, I think Srugo may be too canny to actually pick up the apple. 

But if any Bravo producers—or anyone with Andy Cohen's ear, really—read this, please try to convince her otherwise. A friend of Eric Adams on RHONY would be a profound gift to the city, and to viewers everywhere.