Porsha Williams marked her return to The Real Housewives of Atlanta with some tears.
In the March 9 season 16 premiere of the Bravo hit — which saw Williams return to the franchise after a two-season absence alongside a rebooted cast — the Go Naked Hair founder got emotional as she opened up about her ongoing divorce from estranged husband Simon Guobadia.
“Life doesn’t always have a fairytale ending,” Williams, 43, said to viewers at the top of the show, as she noted she had filed for divorce from Guobadia a couple of months before RHOA cameras picked up.
Maintaining stability in their marital home with daughter Pilar Jhena McKinley, her child (who turns 6 this month) with ex Dennis McKinley, has been the priority. “Things are getting really stressful with the divorce, and I’m trying to figure out the way forward,” Williams said.
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Porsha Williams and Simon Guobadia in January 2023.
Paras Griffin/Getty Images
Williams and Guobadia, 60, began dating in April 2021 after meeting through her former Bravo costar, Guobadia’s ex Falynn Pina. The pair announced their engagement just one month later and said “I do” in November 2022 with two back-to-back weddings: one in Nigeria and the other in Atlanta.
Their split, which PEOPLE announced exclusively in February 2024, took RHOA fans by surprise. But as Williams noted in the season 16 premiere, things between the former couple were far from perfect.
“When you’re married, I’m old-school — you don’t go out and tell people what’s going on in your house,” she said. “I know it looks like to many people, ‘Oh, she posted this perfect life.’ But I look back and I can think to myself, ‘I definitely posted this knowing we’re not okay.’ “
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Porsha Williams and Simon Guobadia in September 2022. Paras Griffin/Getty
Explaining what went wrong, Williams said she and Guobadia had “serious trust issues” between them. “He just wasn’t the man I thought I was marrying,” she explained, as editors played video footage of Williams from a future moment this season asking, “Who the f— did I marry?”
Later, in a discussion with divorce lawyers Randy Kessler and Asha Howard, Williams shared more about how the romance fell apart.
“In my relationship with Simon, I felt like if I had him by my side, we could conquer anything,” she said. “However, I just started realizing a lot of different things that turned out to be untruths.”
Many of those untruths, Williams alleged, involved money. “He wouldn’t tell me what our finances were,” she said. “It’s not like I was sitting here like some dumb little wife and just enjoying some money. No, I actually asked my husband, ‘What is going on?’ “
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Porsha Williams at The American Heart Association’s Red Dress Collection Concert in January 2025 in New York City.
Astrid Stawiarz/Getty
Williams also raised concerns about Guobadia’s immigration status in the United States. In February, the Nigerian native was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) amid President Trump’s mass deportation plan.
According to court records obtained by Atlanta’s WSB-TV 2, Guobadia — who migrated to the U.S. in 1982 — has long been trying to become a U.S. citizen, to no success.
He was declared deportable in 1985 after overstaying his visa, the outlet reported. He repeated the problem the next year, when he returned to the U.S. on another work visa.
Guobadia was then deported back to Nigeria in 1992 following three arrests, including one in 1987 for alleged bank and credit card fraud, WSB-TV 2 reported. However, after less than a month away, he returned to America under an undisclosed identity and was granted permanent residency status.
In 2016, the businessman applied for naturalization — though, because his previous status was “unlawfully granted,” he was denied. He has made several complaints and appeals since then, with his most recent attempt denied in January.
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Porsha Williams and Simon Guobadia. Porsha Williams/Instagram
Throughout their time together, Williams said in the RHOA season 16 premiere, she had questions about Guobadia’s immigration issues.
She recalled asking him, “Why, when we go to the airport, do we have to stand in a secondary line? Why do we continuously have to go through these issues?”
“Just so happens, all of this information that I had asked him about and he had lied about, came out; about him not having a real green card and him trying to get citizenship,” she said, pointing to reports about Guobadia that were circulating in the press during their marriage. “For me in my relationship, I used to pride myself on us having great communication. When communication started to lack, it felt intentional.”
Filing for divorce, Williams said, was a choice she made in an effort to “protect assets” like their marital home, in which they have 50/50 interests.
“My back was so against the wall. The only way for you to really protect yourself at the end of the day if you have a prenup is to enforce it. And you only enforce it by doing a divorce,” she said. “I’m not going to let a foreclosure notice come to my house and I can’t pay it. So I wanted to make sure if it happens, I have the money to do what we needed to do.”
Since then, things have been contentious between the pair. Guobadia even took legal action trying to prevent Williams from filming RHOA in their home (a judge ultimately ruled against Guobadia, though viewers likely won’t see inside the property until the season’s end).
All of the fighting has prevented Williams from fully processing their divorce, she said. “I haven’t dealt with the emotional part yet. I’ve had to deal with logistics,” she explained. “It’s really weird. It feels really cold.”
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Simon Guobadia and Porsha Williams. Simon Guobadia Instagram
That’s when the tears started flowing, as Williams reflected on the status of her relationship with Guobadia at the time of filming.
“I reached out to him about two weeks ago, trying to just see where we could find some peace in this and now he doesn’t want to communicate at all,” she said, crying. “But I’ve just given up on that part, so now I have to become the person he’s saying. Now, I have to be cold, I have to just move forward in the court process.”
“I still love this person and I really, really hate all of this,” she also said in the episode. “Now I just want to be let go and I just want to move on.”
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Porsha Williams on season 16 of ‘The Real Housewives of Atlanta’.
Gizelle Hernandez/James Bianchi/Bravo
The vulnerable moment caused Williams to reflect on the good times in their marriage. “One of my joys was getting up in the morning and just thinking about what I could do to make him happy,” she recalled. “And I genuinely felt he was the same way about me.”
“I would have rode to the end of the world with this man. But the person I’m now mourning, he was not real,” she said of Guobadia.
“He’s a nightmare,” Williams concluded.