Why Did Genise Shelton Disappear From ‘Married to Medicine’?
Published Aug. 28 2022, 2:43 p.m. ET
Longtime Married to Medicine viewers might remember Genise Shelton, the friend who recurred in the Bravo reality show’s fourth season and guest-starred in the fifth before disappearing from the show. So, what happened to Genise on Married to Medicine?
If you believe the online gossip, Genise got the axe when cast member Contessa Metcalfe came along, and apparently, she and Contessa used to be friends! Here are the salacious details…
Genise Shelton was reportedly dropped in favor of Contessa Metcalfe.
In November 2017 — around two months before Bravo aired Genise’s last credited episode on IMDb — AllAbouttheTea.com reported that Genise had been fired and even “backstabbed and replaced by [her] former friend.”
“Production fired Genise and replaced her with her own friend,” an insider told the site. “This friend is the new girl on the show. She took Genise’s spot and the whole thing is messy as hell.”
That purported friend was Contessa, who became a main Married to Medicine cast member in Season 5.
“Contessa test-filmed, and the producers loved her,” the insider said. “But she could have declined to come on the show when she found out she was in and Genise was out. They fired Genise and replaced her with Contessa.”
Contessa’s nanny, Renee Byrd, said she got Contessa on the show.
The insider also told AllAbouttheTea.com that one selling point for Contessa was that producers liked the nanny working for her, a nanny who who was “loud” and “rude” and “cuss[ed] like a sailor.”
That nanny turned out to be Renee Byrd — who happens to be the mother of Donell Jones, according to Reality Blurb — and she spilled the tea on her experience on the show in a March 2018 interview with AllAbouttheTea.com.
“[Married To Medicine production] told me that I was the one that got Contessa on the show. I was told I wouldn’t be on contract,” Renee told the site, adding that she hadn’t been Contessa’s nanny for a long time by that point.
“I told Contessa I would do one show, but it ended up that I was doing more than one,” she said. “They kept calling me to film several scenes, but no one was doing my make up and I wasn’t being paid. I’m doing everything for [Contessa] and getting nothing, so I started to feel used and abused.”
Genise is back to work at her real estate business and her nonprofit.
She may not be a Married to Medicine fixture anymore, but Genise is still hard at work. She’s the owner and managing broker of Genesis Realty Group in Atlanta, and she’s the founder of Our Children’s Keeper, a nonprofit organization that seeks to protect children and vulnerable individuals from sex trafficking.
“A lot of time, we wait until it hits home to act, but I had to ask myself why wasn’t anything being done to prevent this horror from happening,” Shelton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2017.
For help from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, call 1-888-373-7888 (TTY: 711), text 233733, or use the hotline’s live chat.