Marlo Hampton surprised NeNe Leakes in Miami with the other girls on last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but it didn’t take long for Marlo to complain about the hotel’s room size. And it didn’t take long for her new co-star Eva Marcille to throw some shade.
But who is Marlo, who has been part of The Real Housewives of Atlanta family for years without ever filming the show on a full-time basis?
According to her personal website, Marlo Hampton explains that she may best be known from The Real Housewives of Atlanta and I Dream of NeNe, but there are plenty of things that fans don’t know about her.
Hampton was born in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1976, making her 43 years old. However, she didn’t have the best childhood.
She explains she grew up in the foster system because of her mother’s drug addiction and abuse. Marlo doesn’t mention her father, but she explains that she would cope by focusing on fashion and style.
Even though she hasn’t talked about her experience on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, she reveals that she has a Bachelor of Arts from the College of Arts and Science in 2003 from the University of Southern Florida. Here, she focused on Social Work and Interdisciplinary Science.
She would move to Atlanta after she graduated. In 2008, she opened a high-end fashion boutique, but Bravo reports that the store has since closed.
However, Hampton has a desire to open another kind of boutique, something similar to a fashion house where clothes can be pulled for you and you can be styled using rented pieces.
Throughout the years, Marlo Hampton has also worked with charities, forming her own charity called Glam It UP! Here, she works to encourage young girls aged 13 to 17 who are in the foster care system.
She does this by encouraging them to go beyond their situation with the hopes of giving them a better future. Marlo also leads the Simply Giving initiative, which helps provide meals and gifts to people in need around Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Fans of The Real Housewives of Atlanta wondered how Marlo made her money when she first filmed the show, as she had an impressive shoe and bag collection worth thousands of dollars.
Some of her co-stars even alluded to her accepting gifts in exchange for intimate relationships. However, she has denied this.
In an interview with CocoaFab, Marlo also explained that she’s no golddigger. This was a label she received when she first filmed with the ladies on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, so she felt she had to set the record straight.
“A man is always going to do what you allow him to do. You have to set the standards of what you’re gonna tolerate in life,” she explained.
“Diana says I just sleep with such and such for my lifestyle. It’s not that sweetie, I just have standards,” she said. “I can do bad by my damn self.”
“When you look like money, you attract money. Hang out at nice locations where you will attract nice things,” she explains. “I’m a five-star chick and I’m gonna hang out at all five stars.”
Marlo also has a troublesome past, as she alluded to on her website. Unlike some of her co-stars, she’s been arrested seven times over the span of four years – and there are mugshots to prove it.
She’s talked about her first arrest briefly on the show, revealing that she had a fight with another woman over a man, a fight where they had knives.
She explained that the woman’s knife dropped, but she held on to hers, resulted in her disfiguring the other woman. For this, she was hit with a first-degree felony.
Marlo would later be hit with four parole violations, causing her to spend even more time in jail. She has also been arrested for trying to pass a fake check, possession of a firearm, and even spent 30 days in jail for violating her parole again in 2003, but the arrest report didn’t reveal what she did to violate the parole.
Hampton has been a friend of the wives since 2012, but she has never filmed the show in a full-time position. According to Celebrity Insider, she will never get that full-time spot on the show, partially due to her homophobic slur she uttered years ago.
The Real Housewives of Atlanta airs Sundays at 8/7c on Bravo.