What’s the Reality Behind Netflix Hit Selling Sunset? - Vanity Fair

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After retiring before 40, tech entrepreneur—and MIT grad?—“Christian Richard” has a new gig as a reality-TV star in the high-flying world of luxury real estate. But the show withholds his real name, says Netflix, for “privacy reasons.”

By William D. Cohan

August 28, 2020

It’s no surprise that Selling Sunset is one of the most popular reality TV series on Netflix these days. When you pack your show with stunning and fashionable high-end Los Angeles real estate agents trying to sell some of the most expensive, and equally stunning, homes in the world, you can get people to watch. Toss in a pristine late-model Rolls-Royce, with suicide doors, a private jet, killer views, and the requisite feuds, and, well, you have a show that feels very late Trump–era delish. According to Radio Times, the series has “already gripped millions of viewers across the globe and it seems everyone who’s binged the three series is wanting more.”

But where does the reality of Selling Sunset end and the fiction begin? Good question. Take, for instance, the first episode of season two. It starts out typically enough with three of the agents doing a walk-through of a home in the Hollywood Hills listed for $43.9 million. Each room is more breathtaking than the one before. The agents dream of living there at the same time that they imagine how impossibly rich the eventual buyer of the home would have to be. Then, they wonder, where is Christine? Another good question. Christine is Christine Quinn, described by House Beautiful as the “queen bee” of the Oppenheim Group, the real estate agency for which the women work. She is one of the breakout stars of the series—and a bit of a troublemaker. “The Texas native is notorious for starting drama with the other girls,” House Beautiful wrote.

Christine is just back in town, having been on a whirlwind, global vacation with her “new man,” Christian. Before her round-the-world trip, she had sold a $6 million home and decided she needed a little break. Together, Christine and Christian went to the Maldives, Capri, and Bordeaux. “I was traveling the world doing my Eat Pray Love thing but in five-star resorts always,” she said on the show. We meet the happy couple on the tarmac, coming down the steps of—product placement alert—a Silver Air private jet and getting into their—product placement alert—Rolls-Royce, equipped with a camera to capture Christine complaining to Christian that they are not so poor that they can’t turn on the car’s air conditioning. Duh.

While on their sojourn, Christine and Christian have become engaged. The camera focuses on her massive diamond ring. According to House Beautiful, Christine, 31, had been engaged three times before but had broken each of them off, and, as a Catholic, she does not believe in divorce. Christian is Christian Richard, a 41-year-old retired software engineer, who, Christine says, “went to MIT.” How very unexpectedly highbrow. According to her costars, Christine met Christian while showing him properties, eventually selling him a Hollywood Hills home owned by Crystal Hefner, the widow of Hugh, for $5 million. We hear that Christian had apparently been dating someone else when he met Christine and she worked her magic. Uh-oh, says Chrishell Stause, another star of the show, “If somebody cheats for you that means someone would cheat on you.” It’s a prescient remark, having nothing to do with Christine and Christian. (I won’t spoil why.) The finale of season three is the blowout wedding of Christine and Christian. And then comes the telling, and surprising, slip up—which did not make it into the actual episode—where the fellow presiding over the wedding tells the guests to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Christian Dumontet. (The clip is in this trailer, found, thankfully, on Decider.com.) What, wait, wasn’t his name Christian Richard? Shouldn’t it be Mr. and Mrs. Christian Richard? What is this Dumontet stuff?

Let’s pull on the string together, shall we? A little digging revealed that there is no Christian Richard. His real name is in fact Christian Dumontet. And in fact, Christine met him months before she sold him the Hefner home, she explained in June on the British talk show This Morning, when a girlfriend of hers had gone on a date with him, decided he was not for her, and suggested Christine, who was still single, might want to date him. They clicked, had been dating for three months, went house hunting together, and landed on Hefner’s 6,500-square-foot house, which had been listed for $7.2 million and then as a $32,000-per-month rental, before selling to the happy couple for nearly a 30% discount. “That was amped up a little,” she told This Morning. “I’m not going to lie.”

It turns out other details had been “amped up” as well. Dumontet did not go to MIT, for one. In search of answers about the mystery of Christian Richard, I turned to the streaming giant. “We can confirm the marriage and relationship between Christian and Christine is very much real,” a Netflix official wrote in an email. “However, for privacy reasons, we do not use Christian’s real full name in the show. I hope that clarifies things a bit on why there may not be a name match.” Hold on, a guy who agreed to be on a show like Selling Sunset suddenly craves privacy? Mind. Blown.

I thanked the Netflix rep for his help, and then asked him about Christine’s claim that Christian went to MIT. For that kind of detail, he wrote, I would have to speak with Eda Kalkay, the publicist for Christian and Christine, in New York. I had a brief conversation with Kalkay. She said she was Christine’s publicist, not Christian’s, but she could get some answers for me about Christian.

In two breathless emails, Kalkay shared Dumontet’s story. “Christian Richard quickly appears on Netflix’s hit show Selling Sunset alongside his glamorous wife, Christine Quinn,” she wrote. Aside from a recent People story about their “secret gothic winter wonderland wedding,” Kalkay wrote, “Christian Richard remains relatively anonymous.” Ya, because he doesn’t exist. On the other hand, she continued, in researching “our response” to my questions about Dumontet, she learned that “he actually has a pretty interesting story.”

Dumontet grew up “middle class” in Middletown, New Jersey, which is just south of Staten Island, hard on the Atlantic Ocean. (In a November 2016 press release naming Dumontet as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, he is referred to as a “Boston native.” He was also a finalist for the same award in 2014.) Kalkay wrote that in middle school, Dumontet attended the Center for Talented Youth program, which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and identifies gifted students and tries to nurture their special talents. “He didn’t attend a prestigious institution,” she wrote. Instead, Dumontet graduated from the College of New Jersey, in 2000, with “a major in computer science and a perfect GPA,” she wrote. Neither Dumontet’s public LinkedIn profile nor the numerous press releases reviewed about him and his entrepreneurial successes cite where he went to college.

So, no MIT after all? Kalkay explained Dumontet’s “affiliation” with MIT. “He was employed as a computer scientist”—his LinkedIn page says he was a software engineer at Cisco, from January 2001 to March 2007—“as part of a team including both a prominent MIT professor and well-known MIT cryptography researcher,” she wrote. She explained further, “The worlds of programming methodology and reality television couldn’t be any more different, so you can understand why it was easier for his wife, Christine Quinn, to say that Christian ‘went’ to MIT rather than attempting to explain what he worked on while there. She never said that he graduated from MIT.” Thanks for clarification, Eda. (I also thanked her for her “deft” handling of my question. She responded that she would hang my email on her fridge “next to the one where Star Jones tells me to go F myself.”)

In 2004, Dumontet cofounded Foodler—while still working at Cisco?—described as “one of America’s fastest growing online ordering and delivery services that bridges the gap between consumers and restaurants,” along with Edin Arslanagic, who went to University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and John Jannotti, who did go to MIT and has three degrees from the school, including a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science. Jannotti and Dumontet both worked at Cisco after Cisco agreed to acquire SightPath in 2000 for $800 million. According to Kalkay, Dumontet and Jannotti spent “years on-campus [at MIT] together.” (Jannotti, who did not respond to an email seeking comment about Dumontet and Foodler, is now an adjunct assistant professor at Brown University. He had a role in three patents, which have been assigned to Cisco.)

According to Kalkay, Foodler offered online ordering from 12,000 restaurants in 48 states “with Christian personally writing the majority of the software.” In June 2017, GrubHub agreed to buy Foodler in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed amount. “The founders never sought any funding and enjoyed an all-cash exit,” Kalkay wrote. “Prior to their acquisition, Foodler had generated $500 million in food sales.” (In its press release about the deal, GrubHub said that Foodler would add more than $80 million in “annualized” food sales to GrubHub. But whatever.)

The good news, according to Kalkay, is that Dumontet was able to retire before he was 40. He then “traveled the world before COVID,” she continued, “and today, he is working on a new FinTech venture with his former team.” At one point, Kalkay offered me an “exclusive” interview with Dumontet. Finally, I thought, I would be able to get to the bottom of his “interesting” backstory. But it was not to be. “Good morning!” Kalkay wrote me on August 20. “Christian has respectfully declined your interview request.” (But you offered….!)

In case you were wondering, season four of Selling Sunset, while not yet confirmed by Neftlix, appears to be on the way. “God help me, the only thing I want right now is Selling Sunset season four,” read a recent Esquire headline. Phew. Now that we have cleared up the mystery of Christian Richard, er, Dumontet, we can return to our regularly scheduled programming about the pandemic, the economic depression, and the seeming end of our democracy.

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What’s the Reality Behind Netflix Hit Selling Sunset? - Vanity Fair

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