The past five years or so pulled the curtain back on a lot of awful and damaging behavior that has taken place on TV sets, film sets, and many other tendrils of the entertainment industry. But it was still a massive shock to many when the news broke about Days of Our Lives’ co-executive producer and director Albert Alarr having been at the center of an internal investigation over allegations of groping, bullying, sexism, and more. Soap opera vet Lisa Rinna, who held the role of Billie Reed across various eras of Days’ decades-long run, responded to the reports by spilling a bit of tea about how “disgusting” things were the last time she reprised the role.
Following the report from Deadline laying out a litany of details about the nine-week investigation into the workplace behavior of Albert Alarr, Lisa Rinna took to her Instagram Stories with a screengrab of the report, along with a pair of messages. The first one read as follows:
Karma is a bitch.
Nothing much to misinterpret with that one. Rinna followed that up with a longer message slamming her latest experience within the Days of Our Lives universe, and namechecked Alarr without implicating him in anything beyond potentially negligence. In her words [edited for punctuation clarity]:
Well, this took a long time. Let’s see, when’s the last time I went over there and did that week on Peacock? I couldn’t believe the work environment. It was disgusting. I was shocked. I let many people know how I felt, Albert included, and they didn’t do a thing until now, it seems.
Judging from how she referred to things in her post, it doesn’t seem as if Lisa Rinna’s own complaints played into the investigation, at least not in a way where she was asked to follow up on any of it. Since she kept her thoughts rather vague, while still being damning, it’s unclear what elements of the environment sparked disgust. But if the accusations from the investigation are anything to go on, she may have witnessed a lack of female voices in power, sexist comments excused away as being jokes, actors and crew members being yelled at by directors, and other troubling incidents.
It’d be one thing if Rinna’s most recent Billie reprisal was ages ago, but it was just in 2021, when she appeared in the spinoff Days of Our Lives: Beyond Salem (currently available to stream with a Peacock subscription). According to claims made during the investigation, Albert Alarr’s behavior was long considered to be juvenile and off-putting — he joined the show in 2003, and then became part of the show’s production company Corday Prods. a few years later — but that things heightened greatly in 2015 when he was promoted to co-executive producer.
Rinna did return in 2018, but only for a brief arc before leaving once more. She didn’t speak to that time being especially troublesome, but it’d be easy for fans to speculate that BTS issues inspired her to leave. In any case, nothing was so bad that she didn’t pop back in for Beyond Salem.
The complaints against Alarr started to come in after layoffs took place, and a larger number of female employees faced cuts, while others were not being paid the same as their male counterparts, and the gender disparity is evident elsewhere in the show’s staff as well, from the writers to the directors to contracted actors. The investigation uncovered the problematic situation where the studio that Days of Our Lives films in no longer has access to a proper HR department, which was lost whenever the building was purchased from NBCUniversal by an outside company. Thus, complaints made by employees hoping to reach the HR reps at Sony’s Culver City headquarters had to go through DoOL’s production team, meaning Alarr was directly responsible for handling the claims being made about him.
The results of the investigation were confirmed to have been arrived upon by Sony, which passed them on to Corday Prods. However, said results have not been made public, and Alarr still maintains his co-EP and director duties, though he reportedly did have to attend at least one behavioral training session, and also received a written warning. Employees, perhaps understandably, are allegedly not pleased with those results, and it’s unclear how things will move forward, with the WGA writers strike and SAG-AFTRA strikes also complicating the production process.
Meanwhile, Lisa Rinna was most recently on the small screen with a role in American Horror Stories, available to stream with a Hulu subscription. She can also be found across multiple seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, though she left the show after Season 12, and didn't mince words when doing so.
