Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth: She’s Back, and She’s Still Shameful

No sooner had the most recent episode of The Apprentice (and you can catch my recap of it here) aired than my inbox was flooded with emails from readers. They all asked the same question: Omarosa has already been inducted into the Reality TV Hall of Shame once, but doesn’t she deserve a second mention for her shameful behavior as one of Kwame’s employees?

The answer, of course, is unquestionably yes. Let’s take a look at why.

After Kwame and Bill were made the final two candidates, Donald Trump had them choose a staff to help them complete the final task. Kwame was in charge of organizing a Jessica Simpson concert at the Trump Taj Mahal. For his team, he selected Troy, Heidi, and Omarosa. The team immediately set out to work, Kwame divided up responsibilities, and Omarosa was excited to be the one handling logistics. She told Kwame, “We’ve got to make sure that you shine.”

One of my readers suggested to me that what Omarosa must have meant was, “We’ve got to make sure that you shine Mr. Trump’s shoes by the end of this task, because that’s the only job he’s going to give you after the way I plan to botch this.” Indeed, that was the last moment Omarosa did anything positive for Kwame.

That night, Team Kwame was having dinner when Omarosa got a phone call from Diane, who works in the Taj Mahal’s transportation office. Diane told Omarosa that it was very important to make sure transportation from the airport for Jessica and her band was arranged. Omarosa told Diane she was in the middle of dinner, and asked her to take care of it. She then hung up the phone.

Diane obviously anticipated that there might be some transportation problems, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of tracking Omarosa down at dinner to tell her about it. And if it was a problem that she could have solved herself, as Omarosa asked her to do, again, why would she call Omarosa in the evening at a restaurant? Why wouldn’t she have just taken care of it?

The simple fact of the matter was that Omarosa didn’t want to have her dinner interrupted to deal with this potential problem. She decided it was more important to have a nice meal than to do her job.

Maybe her “concussion” was acting up again. We all know that Omarosa’s “head injury” demands nice meals.

But it got worse. When Omarosa returned to the table, Troy asked her what the call was about. Wouldn’t you want to know? Omarosa not only refused to tell him, but chose the nastiest possible way to answer, “I’m not going to have that conversation.” Troy persisted, but Omarosa still wouldn’t answer.

By refusing to tell the rest of Team Kwame what the phone call was about, she was not only rude, but also irresponsible. Omarosa should have told her boss about this potential problem. Just saying, “Oh, Diane is worried about transportation, but I’ve taken care of it,” would have been a sufficient answer. But instead, Omarosa chose to hide the problem from Kwame.

The next day, a panicked Diane called Kwame. The Taj Mahal had sent a van to the airport to pick up the band, but they were nowhere to be found. Diane told Kwame that she had called Omarosa the night before to talk about this potential snag. Omarosa got on the phone with Diane, wondered how this “misunderstanding” occurred, and hung up with no plan in action to solve the problem.

Kwame asked Omarosa if Diane had called at dinner the night before. Omarosa evaded the question by saying that she had tried to call Diane before dinner, but that she wasn’t in her office. Kwame pressed further: what was the phone call she took at dinner? Omarosa told him that it was Diane’s office saying she’d left for the night. There was no emergency.

So, Omarosa, when confronted by her boss about a problem that was her fault, lied to avoid responsibility. Without question, Omarosa’s conversation at dinner was with Diane herself, and Diane certainly never implied in any way that the issue was no big deal. She was concerned, and was concerned enough to track Omarosa down to talk about it. Because Omarosa did absolutely nothing to solve the potential problem when Diane alerted her to it, that potential problem blew up into a crisis. And because Omarosa didn’t tell her boss Kwame about the issue, he was unable to make the decision to handle it differently.

The logistics problems didn’t stop there. The following night, Omarosa got another phone call from Diane. Jessica Simpson herself was nowhere to be found. And how did Omarosa handle this problem? Did she get to work doing her job of ironing out the logistics? No, she gleefully interrupted Kwame’s meal and ordered him to “report to the office.” The very fact that she demanded that her boss report to her shows an incredible disrespect for Kwame. But it got worse. When Kwame arrived at the office, Omarosa told him that the logistics were a disaster, and that it was up to him to solve the problem. Later, Omarosa blamed the crisis on the fact that Kwame wasn’t a more hands-on manager.

Remember when Omarosa was the project manager for the Charity Auction challenge? She thought that the negotiation with Isaac Mizrahi went badly because of Jessie’s incompetence and asked her, “Weren’t you the lead? Don’t you want to take responsibility?” I’d like to throw that question right back at Omarosa. She was in charge of logistics. How is it Kwame’s fault that the logistics are a huge problem? He especially can’t be at fault because, as we saw, Omarosa buried all potential problems instead of telling Kwame about them. And if she had done her job, Kwame wouldn’t have needed to micromanage her.

Several people have emailed me asking why Kwame doesn’t just fire her. Again, I can only point to what Kwame said in an interview: “If I were running the show, I’d fire incompetent people, but I don’t have the luxury of doing that.” It looks like for better or worse, he’s stuck with her.

Omarosa’s behavior was so bad that several readers wondered if it was deliberate sabotage. Maybe Omarosa was a mole, challenged by the producers to cause trouble to see how Kwame would handle a crisis. I don’t think that’s the case, and I’ll tell you why.

First, Omarosa has proven herself in the past to be incompetent. In the aforementioned Isaac Mizrahi challenge, Omarosa knew that she didn’t know how to pronounce the designer’s name and vowed to learn it before she met with him. She didn’t bother to do it, and upset Isaac by butchering his name. She spent the apartment renovation challenge sitting on the floor complaining of a headache… until she left the apartment to play basketball with some kids. In the Trump Ice challenge, she was supposed to let Amy handle the selling, but she constantly interrupted Amy and undersold the customers. And in the art challenge, she claimed to know how to sell fine art, but didn’t bother to teach her techniques to the rest of her team and only used these alleged skills to sell one lousy painting.

And Omarosa’s record of incompetence has shown to have stretched beyond her stint on The Apprentice. People magazine recently reported that Omarosa’s time working at the White House was extremely unstable. During her two years there, she was banished from four different jobs and was eventually shipped out of the White House and to the Commerce department.

More importantly, we have to keep in mind that The Apprentice is more than just a game. The Jessica Simpson concert was a real event that was held in the Trump Taj Mahal. If Omarosa actually succeeded in sabotaging the concert, Donald Trump would have lost a lot of money in the deal and would have damaged his and the Taj Mahal’s reputations in the process. I don’t believe for a minute that Trump would have agreed to that. Omarosa is not deliberately sabotaging Kwame at the producers’ request. Her incompetence is right in line with the bad job she did not only on The Apprentice, but also in her outside work experience. And Donald Trump would never allow an event with his name on it to be botched so badly for a TV show that, at the time, he didn’t even know would be a hit.

The conclusion that we have to draw, then, is that Omarosa is still engaging in shameful behavior. She avoided work, hid a potential problem from her boss, lied to his face when he confronted her about it, and then, when the whole thing blew up, blamed it on him. She is lazy, disrespectful, sneaky, dishonest, rude, and refuses to take responsibility for her actions. And that is why Omarosa graces the Reality TV Hall of Shame once again, and why we’re saving more space for her here in anticipation of next week’s show.

Betsy is the Associate Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached with any comments at betsyw42@hotmail.com.

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