Gawker's Woman of the Week Is... Katie Maloney!

Every Friday throughout the month of March (Women’s History Month), Gawker will be awarding the prestigious Woman of the Week (For Just One Month) title to the female who has made the most significant contributions to nubility, fertility, and maidenhood in the past seven days.

Last week’s Woman of the Week: Amanda Seyfried

To quote my requested funeral song — an interstitial musical cue to transition between scenes in the Vanderpump Rules episode 11 season 7 — “Boy, you are a boy, you’re not a man…We need to talk!”

And that’s exactly what long-time Pump Rules ensemble player Katie Maloney Schwartz did this week, announcing her separation from husband Tom Schwartz, whom she’s been with for 12 years. She’s a woman who once fell through a skylight with the absolutely badass Instagram handle of @musickillskate who never got around to starting that record label she dreamed of in season 1; he’s an aging imp in a muumuu who once woke up at the wrong hotel in Mexico while filming a reality show, and we never spoke of it again.

I don’t particularly like either of these people, or at least the versions of them I see on my once-favorite reality program, but it was painful to watch the light extinguish from the orbs under Katie’s thick brow as Tom failed upward, mostly due to his “boss” and executive producer Lisa Vanderpump play-acting that she wanted to fuck him (once she stuck her bra in his suitcase as a prank). I contend that all the people in this equation, including Lisa, are romantic asexuals, but that’s a different theory for a different time — I’m here to congratulate Katie, not give the much-lauded editor emeritus of Beverly Hills Lifestyle magazine another award.

The split must have been an excruciating decision for Maloney Schwartz, seeing as her relationship, employment, and all of her friendships are tied up in the Vanderpump Rules universe and likely contingent on her continued association with Tom. Katie was never the star of the show, but as long as she had those things, she was good as gold. Katie’s been waiting in the wings, being “extremely judicious” with her drinking, but now it’s her time. Open that sandwich shop, girlie! Start an Etsy store for your knit goods! Reboot your web property Pucker & Pout, last updated June 2017, as a Gawker sister site!

See you in Valley Village, Katie. Shall I bring tequila to your new-build modern farmhouse, or would you prefer bringing Adderall to my identical new-build modern farmhouse?