This was posted on Thursday, September 28, 2017 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
Former "Real Housewives of Atlanta" cast member and Rickey Smiley morning show co-host Claudia Jordan is looking for love on Patti Stanger's WE-TV show "Million Dollar Matchmaker" this Friday at 9 p.m.
At age 44, the former model and current actress has never been married and has attracted plenty of lying cheaters to her nest.
According to the WE-TV promo for Friday’s episode, “Patti goes to extreme measures to get Claudia to thoroughly vet guys to find her Mr. Right and calls the man who Claudia needs to confront in order to move on and find true love.” (As a promo video shows, that person is her dad, who was a philanderer in his day and is not in regular touch with her today.)
Jordan, who was on “Real Housewives” season seven in 2015 and was last seen on the short-lived TV One reality show “The Next 15,” said she had just gotten out of a relationship and knew friends who had worked with Stanger before. “I thought it would be fun to have someone else help me find a man,” Jordan said. “Why not let a professional intervene and kind of see what they come up with?”
She moved back to Los Angeles a couple of years ago after her brief time in Atlanta and said it’s hard to find decent dudes to date. She feels there are plenty of pretty women in town and potentially viable guys prefer to play the field rather than commit.
Jordan was also surprised how quickly Stanger dug into her past to find the roots of her issues regarding her father. “That was a real emotional moment,” she said. “I left it drained. I wasn’t expecting to go there. I thought it would be more surface. But if I was going to do this, I was going to respect the process. Trust her and go for it.”
She said she has a tendency to seek validation in the men in her life, seek their approval. “I give people more credit than they deserve,” she said. “I’m very trusting until I see otherwise. I’m not a private investigator. I don’t want people to Google me. There’s a lot of fake stuff about me out there. Unfortunately, not everyone is as honest as Claudia Jordan. I’m straight up with people. But so many folks will pretend. They’re nothing like what they seem on the surface.”
But despite getting burned, Jordan said hasn’t given up on finding the right guy. “It hasn’t hardened me,” she said. “I’m still a hopeless romantic.”
Since returning to Los Angeles from Atlanta, she has partnered with a company to sell Just Peachy wine and another one to start a cosmetic line called Celphie Cosmetics.
She also began taking acting seriously and booked several movie roles, including "Jason's Letter" about police brutality starring Vivica A. Fox.
And she said she is also in another movie starring Columbus Short and Brian White called "The List." And with her radio background, she has been doing a podcast called "Unstable'D" with Mike Hill, Guy Torry and Steve Wilson where they discuss comedy, news, sports and entertainment.
“Once I stopped standing in my own way, things have been happening,” Jordan said. “Now I’m getting more calls for more roles. I love it!”
TV PREVIEW
“Million-Dollar Matchmaker,” 9 p.m. Friday, September 28, 2017, WE-TV