If you haven’t seen Netflix’s Bling Empire, I’m telling you now, you have to. The cast are everything you could want out of reality TV, with unattainable wealth, fascinating feuds and beyond eccentric personalities. But one member has become notable for something much more sinister, his blatant toxic behaviour.
Andrew Gray, a 33-year-old actor otherwise known as the red power ranger in Power Rangers Megaforce, is on the show because of his relationship with self-made Kelly Mi Li, 35, whose fortune comes from founding and investing in tech start-ups in Los Angeles - as well as her ventures into talent management, merchandising, real estate and currently, film production. As you can tell, she’s achieved about eight lifetimes worth of career success in her mere 35 years, but the high standards she has for herself don’t seem to apply to her dating life.
In the first episode, Kelly describes Andrew ‘very passionate’ ‘honest’ and ‘with a great heart’. They’re shown to be desperately in love – the first scene is literally them kissing after a shower together – but when questioned what she sees in him by friends, her only reply is that he would never cheat on her, something she’s dealt with in the past. According to Kelly, trust is hard to come by in the Los Angeles dating scene.
Already, her low standards for men come across concerning – her friends pointing this out too – but it’s only when we see Kelly and Andrew go to Paris together with Kelly’s friend (and the absolute icon of the series) Anna Shay, that alarm bells truly start ringing. When Kelly leaves Andrew sleeping off his jet lag in their hotel while she and Anna go shopping, he rings her furious.
As a viewer, the tirade of abuse he pours on her is hard to watch. Swearing at her, telling her she shouldn’t leave the hotel without telling him, screaming down the phone so loud you can barely understand him, the level of aggression over something so small is jaw-dropping. (As Anna says, ‘There ain’t no dick that good.’)
But it’s Kelly’s admission that this is normal behaviour for Andrew that’s alarming. ‘If I start texting or calling him, it’s just going to be non-stop. Normally, he will want me to be stuck in a room with him till we work it out and sometimes it can take like eight hours,’ she says as Andrew continues to ring her phone.
At this point, you don’t have to have dealt with emotional abuse to know Andrew is exhibiting beyond toxic behaviour. Exasperating tiny problems as an excuse to verbally abuse your partner is obviously abhorrent behaviour, but it’s the reconciliation that shows just how scary these type of relationships are.
Andrew appears eerily calm, admitting he over-reacted (‘I exploded like a volcano’) and is unhappy with his behaviour, but that Kelly wasn’t ‘honouring the relationship’. He apologises, cries and says he’s ‘still learning’ and wants to learn with her. As soon as a tear leaves his eye, Kelly comforts him, later telling the audience ‘I stick it through with Andrew because I feel like his intentions are really good, I feel like he has a good heart. There are a lot of times I want to give up but I feel like Andrew only has me so I don’t want to abandon him. I know he wants to change, he just doesn’t know how to. But I think there is hope.’
Her response reads like the script of a Coronation Street storyline about domestic abuse, hitting all the notes so many who’ve been in abusive relationships would resonate with. The scenes, almost play by play, are a blueprint of what it’s like to date a man like that. Because, for those who might not understand abusive relationships, it’s not all assaults and cruelty all the time.
The guilt, regret and promises to change, specifically when shown through tears, are all an integral part of the cycle of abuse. The love-bombing and outlandish displays of affection (in one scene Andrew is seen kissing Kelly over and over repeating how much he loves her) are too. They are just as important for Bling Empire to show as the cruelty, because they indicate how easy it is for intelligent, secure women to stay in relationships were they’re being mistreated, through false hope that someday, the tirades will end and it will be all sunshine and rainbows.
In a later episode, Kelly and Andrew go to couples therapy where Andrew lays out his abandonment issues. While the choice to go the therapy is a celebrated one, the validation that Andrew is simply hurting and that’s why he acts the way he does only serves to tie Kelly to him further. Just like her belief that he has ‘good intentions’, it feeds into her idea that he is not the sum of his actions.
But ultimately, he is. Men who abuse and manipulate women in this way are complicated and need therapy, that’s for sure. But, when it comes to being in a relationship with this type of man, it’s important to remember that his ‘intentions’ are completely irrelevant. Whether a man means to enact harm or not, the fact is, he did, and his partner is the victim of that. He might be a victim of his own trauma, but he is choosing to make his partner a victim of his.
That’s where the lesson really comes watching this play out on Bling Empire. Kelly is like so many women, we fall in love and often, we choose to overlook how a man’s personal traumas or baggage is projected onto us because we want to believe they don’t mean to harm us. In a sense, we infantilise them, removing their agency from the decision to abuse us – be it emotionally, physically or financially - because it hurts more to think they meant to.
The outcome of the harm should always come before the intention behind it.
But actually, when we do that we do a disservice to ourselves. When we choose to overlook the harm that was done to us, whether it big or small, because they ‘didn’t mean it’, we overlook ourselves. The outcome of the harm should always come before the intention behind it, and that means we should always come before the partner that causes us harm. When you let go of whether someone meant to hurt you, or what caused them to do it, really, you put yourself first and only in doing that can women escape the cycle of abuse.
Bling Empire is a truly excellent show, no less because of this storyline. In fact, while we may get lost in the petty drama and designer shopping sprees, it’s parts of reality TV like that that make it truly worthy. Watching this show, there are so many women who might relate to Kelly’s situation and begin to understand, this is not normal behaviour. Relationships like hers are integral to help us learn what abusive partnerships can truly look like, and we just hope she gets out of hers before the finale.
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