‘The Surreal Life’ alum Janice Dickinson talks feud with Omarosa

When former America’s Top Model star Janice Dickinson looks back at her time on The Surreal Life, she can’t help but think of Omarosa Manigault Newman, the Apprentice alum she infamously butted heads with in the fifth season.

“It makes me feel like a used puppet,” Dickinson said in Tuesday night’s episode of Vice’s Dark Side of Reality TV. “Producers can be devils, and they set these competition matches up. They script the whole thing for themselves, and then we just have to be these puppets that play into their master scheme of much-watched reality show. But I signed up for it. I knew what I was getting myself sort of into.”

Each season of the series featured a group of celebrities thrown into a house — Real World style — and filmed in every interaction. Sometimes it resulted in romantic relationships, as was the situation with Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen (and their Strange Love spinoff series), and sometimes it brought out negative emotions and even outright hate. That was certainly the case with Dickinson and Manigault Newman, who’s known simply as Omarosa.

In a house that also included Bronson Pinchot, Caprice, Salt-N-Pepa’s Sandra “Pepa” Denton, Carey Hart, and Jose Canseco, Dickinson said she knew immediately that she needed to “be the protagonist to get more air time.”

And she got plenty. As journalist Lyndsey Parker remarked, “it just became the Omarosa and Janice show. And it wasn’t fun.”

The women, who both had big personalities, were paired as roommates, but they didn’t get along at all. For one thing, Omarosa continuously attributed Dickinson’s erratic behavior, such as flashing someone on a golf course, to drugs. Dickinson denied it.

“Someone was giving her a consistent supply of these drugs,” Omarosa said on Dark Side of Reality TV. “Let me tell you how I know: She was my roommate. So the first encounter I had where she went a little cuckoo, I’m, like, looking in drawers. And there’s just a drawer full of things: pills and, you know, a mirror with residue.”

Dickinson said that, if Omarosa found anything, it wasn’t hers.

“I was probably still drinking alcohol back in those days,” Dickinson said. “But a drug addiction was part of my past. I was over that.”

Still, they clashed in high-profile incidents caught on camera. In one, the cast was doing a photo shoot, when Dickinson was given what she called a prop knife and told to stand by Omarosa, who believed then and now that she was in danger.

“Why would you hand a knife to a woman who’s clearly under the influence of whatever? Pick your poison. A very sharp, very real knife,” Omarosa said. She asked in vintage footage why the production would let “a crackhead play with a knife.”

Dickinson said use of that term “would really make me upset,” because she never did the drug.

“For her to pick a name, crackhead, and to keep needling me with this word, she did that to get my nerves up,” Dickinson said. “And it worked.”

Omarosa said the knife situation took her back to her childhood, where there was “this dangerous cocktail of poverty and violence and despair,” and she experienced “really difficult things.”

“Janice waving the knife in front of my face was a trigger,” Omarosa said. “And I’m so grateful that I didn’t react the way I was feeling inside, because if I reacted the way I felt, then it might have been a whole different outcome. A much more dangerous outcome than if I was just able to kinda pull myself together.”

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The situation was a painful one for the women, but the photos of Dickinson with the knife would become a symbol of the season.

“They ran that promo of Janice with that knife over and over again,” Omarosa said. “The posters for the show was that scene. The billboards were that scene. You know, they got exactly what they wanted.”

In another episode, she and Dickinson sparred after Omarosa said she was instructed by a producer to join the cast in a meal outside. What she hadn’t been told was that Dickinson was having a sensitive conversation, about having been abused as a child, with their costars.

When Omarosa heard Dickinson say her name, the two had an explosive argument.

“I mean, let’s just all take a step back and take a look at it,” Omarosa said. “Why was I sent out there at that moment? Why did they have me walk into the backyard at that exact moment? Just look how perfectly it was timed. You can’t even make this up.”

In the end, Omarosa, who pretended she didn’t even know who Dickinson was when she sat down for the new docuseries, shared kind words about her TV nemesis.

“I had no idea she was talking about what her father did to her or the harm that he inflicted on her. All I heard was her talking about me at that moment,” Omarosa said. “My heart goes out to her, because she was sharing with them, and I don’t think the producers wanted her to have a moment where she got to have an uninterrupted just bonding moment with those guys. That’s too bad.”

Dickinson was incensed that Omarosa had called her a bad mother in the moments that ensued. Still, it didn’t flatter her either.

“Shows that I can be nasty. That’s a nasty side of me,” Dickinson said. “She really did pull, pull that out of me.”

The Surreal Life ran for one more season before it was canceled in 2006, although it was later revived. The latest season, featuring Chet Hanks and Macy Gray, wrapped up this month.

Dark Side of Reality TV airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Vice. Future episodes focus on shows including Survivor, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and more.