Meghan King Edmonds Goes on the Viall Files and Cries on the Roof

Meghan King Edmonds goes up to her rooftop and cries. She just told Nick Viall this on a podcast, completely unbothered. Not as a confession, not as a breakdown, just as information. That is, roughly, her entire brand: here is the thing, here is how I feel about it, you can take it or leave it. It works.

She’s in the middle of a divorce from her former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder husband, flying between St. Louis and LA with three kids under four, and launching a new podcast about sex with Brooke Burke. All at once. She describes this situation as an ‘energetically weird space,’ which is doing some very polite heavy lifting.

I really think that by bottling up emotions we make ourselves sick and I need to release that.

The rooftop crying is her system. She goes up, gets some air, lets herself feel angry or sad, and then, crucially, wraps it up with gratitude. It sounds almost annoyingly tidy, but she sells it because she’s not pretending the anger isn’t real. She’s just learned to hold both things at once. A lot of people on television talk about emotional intelligence. She actually seems to have it.

The Instagram Slide Tutorial Nobody Asked For, And Yet

At some point Viall decides to teach Meghan how men should slide into her DMs, by literally pulling up her Instagram feed on air and scrolling through it in real time. It is exactly as awkward and strangely charming as that sounds. The lesson: avoid photos with her kids, avoid obvious thirst traps, find a neutral photo, and comment on something weird in the background. Viall claims he once opened a conversation with a woman by asking about a blender visible in the back of a shot. It worked, he reports. It went nowhere, he also reports.

Meghan’s actual DMs, she says, contain men from Boston and San Francisco asking her out with earnest sincerity, which she finds ‘weird but also kind of sweet,’ and at least one man who opened with ‘I would love to be there for you.’ That one she found ‘violating.’ The bar for sliding is apparently: be normal, be specific, do not announce your emotional availability to a stranger.

I’m not seeking it out but like I wouldn’t say no if it hit me.

The Cancer Storyline She Actually Investigated

Late in the episode she walks through the Real Housewives storyline where she suspected a cast member’s boyfriend was faking cancer to promote a juice product. Her theory, stated plainly: he was going to claim the juice cured him. She thinks one of her co-stars knew and went along with it. Her problem with the whole thing wasn’t the drama. It was the ethics of peddling false hope to sick people on national television.

This guy is going to promote something to a national audience that isn’t real and I really struggled with that with the ethics that go along.

This is the version of Meghan King Edmonds that her fans are loyal to. Not the one crying on the roof, though that’s real too. The one who does the research, sits with the discomfort of being right, and says it anyway. She went to Ole Miss, tried modeling in Milan, hated it because she felt used for her looks, went back to school and graduated early. She likes gossip and pop culture and being silly. She’s also the person in the room who figured out someone was faking cancer. The box people put her in has always been the wrong size.