Warning: This post contains spoilers for Season 4 of Traitor.
What you need to know
Traitors’ Candace Dillard Bassett and Tara Lipinski are opening up about how they balanced motherhood and the show.
“The Real Housewives of Potomac” alum Candice, 39, and Olympic figure skater Tara, 43, told PEOPLE that they were able to check in with their kids while filming Season 4 of reality competition series “Peacock” in Scotland over the summer. (Candice has a 15-month-old son, Jett, with husband Chris Bassett, and Tara has a 2-year-old daughter, Georgie, with husband Todd Kapostasy.)
“My son was 8 months old when I left home, and I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?'” Candice recalls. “The show was very supportive of the moms in the group, and they were able to go home and talk to their kids. There were about 20 pictures of Jett on the wall. But you’re so invested in the game that you don’t miss it that much.”
Tara added that “saying yes to the show was a difficult decision” because she had to part ways with Georgie.
“That was the only reason I could say no,” she says. “After a while, we got set up where we felt like we could check in and FaceTime Georgie. But it was hard to leave. She was only a year and a half old at that point.”
Tara Lipinski/Instagram
Tara also left her home while her family was rebuilding it after it was damaged in the Pacific Palisades fire in January 2025.
“So much happened last year,” she says. “Looking back, it was really good for me. It wasn’t a mental break or a vacation, because it was like mental torture in the castle. But it was a bit of an escape, to be able to step away for a minute and give myself a bit of a break, and then go home and figure out what to do with our living situation and everything.”
In season 4, Tara is loyal but Candace is a traitor. Through the show, both of them hope that people will know more about them.
“Even though I was the villain (as a traitor) on the show, I really loved most of the people,” Candace says. “A lot of people are dedicated to misunderstanding me in the housewives world, and my hope is that by expanding my reach and exposing myself to different microcosms of people, people realize, ‘Oh, she’s not a bitch,’ and maybe understand that black women as a whole aren’t monolithic. We’re stratified.”
Tara, on the other hand, says the show was the “most vulnerable moment I’ve ever been in.”
“I’ve never done reality before,” she says. “I went into this with a jock mentality, and I just wanted to do my best while not hurting anyone’s feelings. You know what I say? I may be biased, but we have the best cast of traitors ever.”
New episodes of Traitors Season 4 stream on Peacock on Thursdays at 9pm ET.
