One of the stars of Netflix‘s Selling Sunset has backtracked on comments she owned an entire California town.
On the fifth episode of season eight of the reality show about high-end property realtors in California, Alanna Gold and her co-stars traveled to Pioneertown. Before heading there, she told them she owned a “little Western town in the desert.”
“I’m (the) sheriff of the town, yeehaw,” she said. When one of her bosses, Jason Oppenheim, asked what it would cost to buy the town from her, Gold replied, “You guys don’t get to know that. You can’t have it; it’s ours.”
Residents of the town, located about 125 miles east of Los Angeles, responded to the episode on Monday with a statement on Instagram, calling her claims “baseless” and saying they “undermine 78 years of internationally celebrated film, arts and cultural history.”
“The claim that she owns the ‘entire town’ is verifiably false,” the town’s statement concluded, calling for Gold to apologize.
“Selling Sunset” stars (L to R) Alanna Gold, Mary Fitzgerald, Nicole Young visit Pioneertown in season 8. Gold apologized to Pioneertown residents for saying that she owned the town.
Courtesy of Netflix
Pioneertown Explained
The historic town is an unincorporated community with more than 400 residents and is privately owned by more than 100 different parties.
Established in the 1940s, the town was built as a permanent film set for Western-themed movies and TV shows. More than 50 movies and TV shows were filmed along the 1880s-style false front facades, frontier stables, saloons, and jails.
It remains a working film set to this day, but its Mane Street area is open to tourists and features many commercial establishments, including a gas station and Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneer Palace, a restaurant frequented by celebrities.
The Selling Sunset star and her husband, Adam Gold, have “a small minority non-controlling interest in an entity that owns six of thirty five parcels in the Mane Street area, constituting less than 1% of Pioneertown’s total 640 acres,” according to the Pioneertown statement.
Newsweek reached out to Gold’s representatives by email for comment.
The Toronto-born reality TV star issued a letter of apology, saying she got carried away while talking about Pioneertown to her co-stars because she loved the town so much.
“I want to reach out to personally say I am so deeply sorry for the confusion I have caused,” she wrote per People. “I certainly do not own Pioneertown, I never should have said that and I apologize for doing so. I want you to know that I did not mean any harm, I absolutely love Pioneertown and I simply got too excited talking about it.”
Gold revealed she and her husband had their first date in Pioneertown and were also married there.
“We wanted to become part of the community, so we invested in a home and other properties there,” she wrote. “Again, I am so sorry to the people of Pioneertown, I would never want to disrespect the town’s history or any of the people who make it such a wonderful place.”
