The 37-year-old has said producers wouldn’t let her go home until they had filmed an altercation between her and Cavallari, even though she and Brescia were no longer romantically involved and she had moved on with someone else.
Patridge opens up about her experiences on the MTV show, which ran from 2006 to 2010, in her new memoir, Choices: To the Hills and Back Again.
“It’s funny to think about how that could only happen before social media,” she wrote about the famous fight, per People.
“Today, you would see pictures of me on Instagram with a new boyfriend while still acting like Justin and I were together on the show. It could never happen!” she wrote. “I had moved on from Justin and was already dating someone else, but the producers wanted to keep that off-camera and have my continued focus on Justin as a romantic interest.”
Patridge even revealed that “producers wouldn’t let me go until I had that confrontation with Kristin over Justin” and that she and Cavallari eventually agreed to just go though with a fight so that they could go home.
“There really wasn’t much for me to say to her. I was finished with Justin and I really didn’t care if Kristin and Justin were hanging out—especially because I knew it was just for the show,” she recalled.
“Still, production was adamant that we get an explosive scene. So adamant, in fact, that they blocked in my car with production vans and wouldn’t let me drive away until I fought with her. I was furious! This was way beyond anything they’d done in the past to get the scene they wanted. I literally couldn’t leave.”
Patridge added: “Kristin didn’t want to wait around anymore, so she was there trying to calm me down enough to just film the scene and get it over with. We laughed about it off camera but, on camera, we yelled and glared and made it work.
“I just wanted to move on, and I felt like Justin was still creating drama for me just so he could remain relevant. It’s not like he didn’t have a thriving career outside of the show. He still did hair, and his clients included some very well-known names, including Adam Levine.
“The producers were egging him on and wanted to get that drama however possible. What we wanted really didn’t matter.”
Her book goes into further details about the producers’ tactics, explaining that they “would cut the footage a certain way to manufacture more drama, or they would eliminate a redemptive moment for someone who’d finally spoken her mind.”
She added: “I get it; their job is to create dynamic, highly watchable television. I knew we had to meet in the middle to get the job done, but I also had to learn how to protect myself when my feelings got in the way.”
Choices: To the Hills and Back Again is out now
