Bozoma “Boz” Saint John is sharing more details about losing her home in the L.A. fires.
On the Jan. 21 episode of Watch What Happens Live, Saint John, 47, opened up to host Andy Cohen about how she found out her Malibu house had burned down. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills newcomer said she is still processing the loss.
“It’s a difficult time because there are so many people who have lost everything, and it makes me wonder about just how we can be resilient and how you can continue to go on when things like this happen,” she explained. “I’m trying my best.”
When she found out her house was in danger, Saint John said she was across the world in Africa, so she wasn’t able to prepare for the potential of total destruction.
“I was in Zambia and saw my house on Twitter and that’s how I found out that it was gone,” she shared. “It was devastating, and I felt so helpless. There was there was nothing I could do. You can’t send anybody to go get anything, so I just tried to make my way back as quickly as possible.”
Saint John, who also owns a home in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, bought the beachside property four years ago, but noted that she “worked 25 years to get it.”
“[I am] in deep grief,” she said. “I mean, I try not to compare grief to anybody else’s or anything like that, but the hard thing is that it was more than just a house. It was not just my home, but a home for my family and my friends. I had a keypad on the house, not a keyhole, so that people could just put in a code and go in whenever they want.”
“So we all lost a home,” she added.
When Cohen asked how Saint John’s 15-year-old daughter Lael was coping with the impact of the fires, which ravaged the Altadena and Pacific Palisades areas of L.A., she said she has mixed emotions.
“She’s doing alright,” the former Netflix executive said. “She’s trying. She had a few friends who lost homes as well, so there’s some community in that too.”
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Saint John confirmed that the natural disaster destroyed her home in an Instagram post on Jan. 9, just two days after the fires began. The post included photos of the house as she explained why it was “an unimaginable loss” for her and her daughter.
“This is the house I wanted. The house I prayed for. The house I worked in blood, sweat, and tears for,” she wrote in the caption. “The house that I put a keypad instead of a keyhole in the front door because I wanted all my family and friends to have a code and use the house whenever they wanted.”
“This is the house where I found peace after battling with racist neighbors and a community that made me have to buy it in a trust within a trust so no one would know that a widowed, single Black woman with a teenager was buying on the exclusively-held beach,” she continued. “This was my EFF YOU I’m here house. The house that I built a movie room dedicated to my sister so she could see her films in her own sanctuary. This is the house where I finally felt like I could choose to spend time … when I wanted to and how I wanted to.”
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