Porsha Williams said her life ‘changed’ forever after getting arrested in Kentucky, during the Dec. 6 season premiere of ‘The Real Housewives of Atlanta’.
via: Page Six
On the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” premiere on Sunday night, Porsha Williams relived the life-changing experience of getting arrested while protesting the death of Breonna Taylor.
The “Real Housewife” — who was arrested in July and then again in August during peaceful protests — recalled the fear she felt.
“I am here, in Atlanta, peacefully protesting, and the police, who are here to protect and serve, are actually going to kill us,” Williams, 39, said in a confessional interview.
The reality star, whose grandfather was civil rights activist Hosea Williams, said she assumed a leadership role during the Black Lives Matter protests to “speak life into all of those protestors and let them know, ‘You choosing to be out here with masks on in this heat, we can hardly breathe, fighting for someone else’s life who we don’t even know, it’s the right thing to do.’”
Williams said she does not regret putting herself at risk of getting arrested, even though she claims the conditions inside the jail were unsanitary.
“There are spiderwebs, dirt everywhere. Nothing is sanitized,” she said on the show. “You’re inside of a jail, and it was probably myself and maybe, like, 30 women.”
“Love and Hip Hop” star Yandy Smith, who was with Williams, previously spoke to Page Six about the allegedly “inhumane conditions” of where they were held.
“The amount of humiliation is crazy,” she said. “The bathroom is just completely disgusting, like feces on the toilet. Feces on the floor. You would think there was a puddle of water, but it was urine.”
Louisville Metro Department of Corrections’ assistant director Steve Durham refuted Smith’s allegations, claiming that “small groups” of detainees are moved into “clean housing” that was “prepared to cohort protestors.”
While Williams’ account was similar to Smith’s, the “RHOA” star being locked up “changed” her life in a positive way forever.
“As disgusting as that place was, being inside that cage with them actually changed my life,” she said. “I’ve never shared my soul with people that I just met, and we were sharing it because a soul had been lost, which is so ironic about the whole thing.”
Williams added on “Watch What Happens Live” on Sunday that she felt “emotional” watching the premiere episode back.
“[The protest] changed me because I didn’t know what I had in me,” she said. “I always knew that my grandfather, who was a civil rights leader … I knew that I had a lot of him in me, a lot of his drive, a lot of his outspokenness, his encouragement to other people and to fight … but I didn’t know that it would activate the way it did.”
