Garcelle Beauvais Practiced ‘Tough Love’ with Son Oliver During Throes of His Addiction: ‘I Felt 1,000 Lbs. of Guilt’

Garcelle Beauvais and her son Oliver Saunders have come a long way.

On the Tuesday, Jan. 7 episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the reality star, 58, opened up about her relationships with her son while sharing dinner in her newly finished beach house. As she looked around at her happy family enjoying their meals, Garcelle admitted that things weren’t always so bright and sunny.

“My boys are doing great. My relationship with Oliver right now is really good. We’ve come a long way. Oliver was in a really dark place over the years,” she told cameras, revealing that Oliver once struggled with a drug addiction. “I had all kinds of emotions, sometimes all in one day — fear, guilt, what did I do wrong?”

“Especially when I had to practice tough love, and I knew he was homeless, and I knew he was in a bad place, and I couldn’t,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do anything.”

Garcelle shared that years ago, she and one of her girlfriends were hanging out at her home when they heard a noise late at night.

“I looked outside, I turned on the light and I saw it was Oliver,” she said through tears. “It was Oliver in the body form, but it wasn’t Oliver the way he acted, the way his eyes looked, the way he was so erratic, and he was trying to get into the pool house.”

Despite her pleas for Oliver to stop, he kept trying to enter the house.

“He was like, ‘Let me in. Let me in.’ And I’m like, ‘Do I call Mike? Mike has the boys. What do I do?'” she continued. “I’m like, maybe, let’s just be quiet. Maybe he’ll go somewhere else, I mean, and this is my son, right, that I’m not opening the door for.”

“I watched him walk away and I didn’t take him in,” Garcelle explained. “I felt 1000 pounds of guilt, not letting him in. This was the tough love that we had to do so that hopefully, that’s the thing that changes things. That’s the thing, if he can’t see his brothers, he can’t see us, he can’t come to the house. And I think for Oliver, it was that.”

“I am grateful, eternally grateful that he is in a great place. He’s a great dad. He had to do a lot of catching up on life,” she added.

Oliver has been open about his sobriety over the years. After struggling with addiction throughout his youth, he’s credited his wife Samantha Saunders, whom he married in May 2022, and their son, Oliver Jr., for giving him the motivation to turn his life around.

“For years, I had been trying to fight it. I had gone to rehab, I had talked to people, therapists, all type of stuff like that,” he told Confessional Magazine in 2021. “Even though I told myself when I felt like I was ready to stop, and I wanted to stop I could, but it was easier said than done. Then I swear, I swear, it was God, and my wife and my son, and it was just one day, none of that stuff mattered.”

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The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. ET on Bravo.