Entertainment

Frankel-y, my dear, you lied!

Bethenny Frankel

Bethenny Frankel (WireImage)

Bethenny Frankel, the light-hearted queen of “keeping it real” in reality TV, is looking more and more these days like the Princess of Darkness. As the star of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New York City” and “Bethenny Ever After,” the 40-year-old mom-mogul has been dogged by vicious detractors. They say she’s Machiavellian, manipulative and a straight-up liar, charging that she distorted facts about the sale of her Skinnygirl liquor company, staged being lost at sea, engineered the firing of fellow “Housewife” Jill Zarin and planted false stories about herself dating Alex Rodriguez.

In the last season of “Housewives,” Frankel waged psychological battle on Zarin, refusing to speak to her unless cameras were rolling and letting a petty grudge fester into a full-blown war.

“Everything she’s done, from what she did to Jill Zarin on the show with behind-the-scenes torture to what she’s doing now, is pure Bethenny,” says one insider who knows Frankel well. “Her whole game plan was to pull Jill down, and she did it and Jill got fired. Bethenny had her own show” — “Bethenny Getting Married?” — “so she said to the producers, ‘You have to make me look good because otherwise no one’s going to watch my show which you are vested in.’ ”

Frankel declined to comment to The Post, but deflected the growing controversy around her personal brand when she told “Access Hollywood,” “We were bound to piss someone off and everyone loves to try to tear down a success. This is a non-event. I haven’t lost even a wink of sleep.”

“What’s that expression from Shakespeare? ‘The lady doth protest too much’,” says the insider, who watched Frankel rise over several years into a millionaire whose reputation is to use people and then dump them when they no longer help her get ahead. “Every single person in her life is someone who is on her payroll, including her husband, Jason Hoppy. Bethenny’s whole agenda has been to keep it real, and none of it is real. It’s all planted stories and her trying to bury her enemies.”

But Jo Piazza, the author of “Celebrity, Inc.: How Famous People Make Money,” out in November, says of these critics, “I think that Bethenny is making a lot of money in order to face barbs like that. It’s the price of fame. She’s traded it for a loss of privacy and for people to attack her personal life. It’s not fair to call her inauthentic. Reality TV is inauthentic. It’s not real.”

Those in the media who have witnessed her rise to dominance observe that she carefully manipulates reporters to meet her goals. Early on, she called gossip columnists to plant items that were either exaggerations or blatantly false, such as the rumor that she dated A-Rod. One story has her recording an entire date on her iPhone, sending it to a writer and asking that it be attributed to an observer. Several gossip editors instituted a “Bethenny ban” because her calls were so frequent.

“She had done a reality show, with Martha Stewart’s ‘The Apprentice,’ before any of the other housewives, so she was always 10 beats ahead,” says a media observer. “She dated WireImage’s photographer Kevin Mazur and made sure to get pictures on the red carpet before anyone knew who she was. She is the best publicist-marketer-hustler I’ve ever seen. She is PT Barnum. But the sad thing is the amount of people she’s thrown under the bus to get to where she is.”

Indeed, Piazza points to two models of reality TV success: the Kim Kardashian fast-track and the Paris Hilton burn-out. In Hilton’s case, she burned so many bridges that she couldn’t last. But Kardashian carefully cultivates every person who has helped her so that she doesn’t leave enemies lurking in the shadows.

“One of the lessons that Bethenny could stand to learn is that a lot of times when she doesn’t have a use for someone, she lets the relationship fall by the wayside and then they burn her,” Piazza says.

Not all of those she’s dropped, however, feel ill will toward her.

“It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to launch a brand,” says former castmate Zarin. “I hope she sees [the bad press] as a mere bump in the road and chalks it up to a lesson learned. Everyone makes mistakes but it is how you handle it that defines you.”

In that case, Frankel may want to tone down some of her most abrasive behavior.

“Being around her is like having chest pains,” says the insider. “She is a horrible, horrible screamer. Every person around her is feeling the anxiety. She goes from 0 to 60 in a second. You open the door, and you have no idea. It could be a storm, it could be a dozen roses.”

Frankel is “quite a troubled soul,” according to her former co-star Simon van Kempen. Still, he thinks she’s being unfairly criticized.

“Bethenny and I have certainly had cross words back in the three seasons when she was on ‘Housewives,’ ” he says. “She’s a very forceful woman, very opinionated. But it’s a bit cowardly for people to come out of the woodwork now when she’s had some bad press and kick her when she’s down.”

If she has one great protector it is Bravo chief Andy Cohen, who has sheltered the hottest commodity on his channel. To get better treatment than the other Housewives, “she pulled Andy’s strings like a master puppeteer,” according to one gossip columnist. But even those close to Frankel know her time is limited.

“The minute she stops being viable for Andy and making money, he’ll walk away from her just like he walked away from everyone else,” says the insider.

Frankel graces the cover of next month’s Parenting magazine with her 17-month-old daughter, Bryn Casey Hoppy. Just three weeks after Bryn’s birth, Frankel posed in a slinky red swimsuit for Us magazine, flaunting how little motherhood had affected her physique.

“That’s hilarious that she’s on the cover,” says the insider. “During her pregnancy, her doctors begged her to eat. I’m sure she loves her child, but I feel horrible for that kid.”

And even those who make a buck off of Frankel’s brand have grown tired of her constant “More, more, more, mine, mine, mine” shtick.

“I hate to say it, but as one of the producers from the show told me: ‘We’re just hoping it’s going to be, “Bethenny’s Getting a Divorce?” says the insider. “Because how long can this go on for?”

March 2008:Frankel is cast in “The Real Housewives of NewYork City,” but is not an actual wife, much less a housewife. She tells friends she “stalked” the producers, but later implies that she didn’t ask to be cast.

April 2009: Sources say Frankel planted a story that she’s been seen out with A-Rod, and when asked about it, uses the Bethenny tactic of “neither confirm nor deny.”

July 2009: Frankel announces that she is engaged to Jason Hoppy,who works in real estate. Fox News reports he has no real estate license and is actually a personal trainer who sells pharmaceuticals. Three months later, she tells People that she didn’t actually accept his pproposal until Oct. 8.

August 2011: Because Frankel’s supposedly all-natural SkinnyGirl cocktail line contains preservatives, Whole Foods takes it off shelves. She responds by saying, “I’m not making wheatgrass here.”

October 7, 2011: Towboat operator Tim Russell says that Bethenny was never lost at sea but staged it all for a yet to be aired episode of “Bethenny Ever After.” Frankel goes on “Today,” says Russell now has a gag order against him and then deflects by talking about Giuliana Rancic having breast cancer.

October 11, 2011: Reports come out showing that the sales of Frankel’s SkinnyGirl cocktail line are exaggerated. The report is corrected, but dispute remains that $120 million is hugely inflated. Bethenny tells “Today,” “The number is irrelevant.”