Carl Radke was gifted a bottle of wine, despite being sober, in the hours after he broke up with ex-fiancée Lindsay Hubbard.
“Part of the conversation at the end was, ‘Well, what are you going to do here?’” Carl, 39, recalled on the Thursday, May 30, episode of the Summer House after show. “I said, ‘I’m going to take some space, give her the apartment,’ and so I got a hotel room that night down the street.”
Carl noted that “oddly enough” he had stayed at the same hotel when he and Lindsay, 37, previously had a “serious conflict.”
“[I] walk in [and] front desk guy’s like, ‘You alright?’ And I was not alright,” Carl added. “I was crying and just disheveled. He’s like, ‘You know, so sorry you’re going through a tough time,’ [and] gives [me] my room key. I go up to my room, two minutes later, knock on the door. ‘Mr. Radke, so sorry, you’re going through a tough time. We have a fresh bottle of wine for you from the front desk.’”
Carl, who has been sober since 2021, had called off his engagement to Lindsay several hours earlier. The August 2023 breakup occurred months before their planned wedding, and Lindsay claimed the split conversation was out of the blue. Carl, meanwhile, asserted that he did not blindside Lindsay given that they had been fighting throughout Summer House season 8. (Carl has since expressed remorse for how he handled the situation.)
Carl was initially in shock when he was handed the wine bottle.
“In that moment, I was like, ‘I don’t drink’ and just closed the door,” he recalled on Thursday. “I very easily could have taken that bottle and just closed the door and no one would have ever known. Thankfully, I did not and I got home to Pittsburgh for a few days to try to let things just simmer down.”
Carl has been a cast member on Bravo’s Summer House since 2017, two years before giving up alcohol.
“I basically got sober from March [2020] until the middle of June. Going into the season, I was feeling really good,” Carl previously told Us Weekly in February 2021. “I learned a lot about myself; I don’t have to drink to be fun or to be the cool guy. … And I certainly had some other things I was working on personally and it’s just better to work on those when you’re sober. So, I went in this summer thinking moderation was going to be my friend. I felt really good about that. I will say, it’s hard being in the house with everybody and having all these different things going on.”
Carl further claimed in a Friday, May 31, New York Times profile that the cast used to get “so drunk” during the first two seasons of the Bravo hit.
“With the volume of drinking, only we decided to do that,” he said, denying previous reality stars’ claims that they were encouraged by the network to drink. “We loved to party. I’m telling you, they took drinks out of our hands.”
Since getting sober, Carl credited the show for “saving [his] life.”
“I’d like to think the show saved my life — seriously, I don’t know if I would have ever seen myself behave,” he told the newspaper. “I always thought that it was, like, fun, people being around me, but over time, that wasn’t the case.”
When Carl started dating longtime friend Lindsay, she made sure to support his sobriety. However, things came to a head in season 8. In a March episode, Lindsay claimed that Carl had acted like he was “on cocaine” during a blowout fight.
“After watching back this week’s episode, I wish I had used better wording,” she later said in a social media statement. “I was emotional and hurt by what had transpired earlier in the night, and what I said was meant to be a private conversation at home with one of my best girlfriends. I have never questioned his sobriety before this moment and from day one, I was his biggest supporter.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
