Janet Caperna of The Valley Doesn’t Care if You Call Her a Fan—or the Villain

Janet Caperna knows what you’re thinking. It’s a good story, after all. Recently, the star of Bravo’s The Valley has been reading fan commentary about how, exactly, a sign-language interpreter from Ohio ended up friends with the entire cast of Vanderpump Rules, and she has to admit the theories are pretty entertaining.

“I think people really want this villain origin story or something,” Caperna, 35, tells me. “Where it’s like, she sought out this life of fame, and she came from nowhere Ohio to the big city to sneak into this whole thing. Honestly, someone should write that. It’s a movie I would watch.”

By “this whole thing,” Caperna is referring to the Bravo universe, which she joined as a castmate on The Valley eight years after befriending Vanderpump Rules star Scheana Shay at a Los Angeles pool party. The quasi-spinoff to the wildly popular reality show follows several former cast members of VPR—Brittany Cartwright, Jax Taylor, Kristen Doute—as they move into the next phase of their lives as parents, along with their gang of parent friends.

Caperna and her husband Jason are two of the new faces on the show, though both had appeared in VPR background scenes. But it’s only Caperna, who readily admits she’s been branded a “villain” by some viewers, who has faced scrutiny for essentially, in reality TV parlance, “not being here for the right reasons.” In her opinion, the explosive fights that have earned her this so-called “villain” label are actually proof that her relationships with Doute, Cartwright, and the others are genuine, not the opposite.

“I think in our group, because everybody’s been real friends for so long, it is complicated and there’s a lot of constantly evolving and changing relationships,” she says. “Kristen and I were very close for a long time, and we had a lot of love there. When you have a lot of love, you can also have a lot of hate. I see myself sometimes on the show, and I’m like, oh, I didn’t see myself doing or saying that. But you live and learn through it. The parts of me that I think are ‘villainous’ on the show, I do see how that came across. It was not a good move, and I try to learn and be better for it.”

Caperna is also unapologetic about the fact that she watched and enjoyed Vanderpump Rules and other Bravo shows before starring in one herself, a fact that leads Doute to call her a “fan” as an insult in an upcoming episode. The label makes Caperna laugh.

“What’s funny is, she’s like, you’re a fan. I’m like, you realize that it’s because of fans you get to do this fun job?” she says. “What’s weirder to me, I guess, is when I have people in my comments saying, you’re just a fan. I’m like, what are you? Obviously, if you watch the show and you’re in my comments, you’re also just as much of a fan as I was.”