Bethenny Frankel Enjoys Beach Day with Niclas Castello in St Tropez

Bethenny Frankel was spotted frolicking on the beach in St. Tropez with the dashing German artist Niclas Castello, who used to be married to the ‘Dutch Victoria Beckham’ Sylvie Meis.

For her latest outing, Bethenny, 53, put her impressively willowy physique on display in a bright-orange one-piece swimsuit that clung flatteringly to her chiseled abs.

Letting her wet hair tumble over her shoulders, the former Real Housewife Of New York City added a splash of glitz to her look with a smattering of gold bracelets and a matching necklace.

Meanwhile Niclas, a 46-year-old pop artist who has drawn inspiration from his upbringing in East Germany, flaunted his toned physique by going shirtless over his swim trunks.

He slicked his salt and pepper hair back from his face and warded off the rays with a set of sunglasses.

Niclas reached new heights of notoriety when he became involved with Sylvie, a television presenter and model whose career is mainly based in the Netherlands and Germany.

Sylvie earned comparisons to Victoria Beckham during her previous marriage to the internationally celebrated Dutch footballer Rafael van der Vaart, which lasted from 2005 until their divorce in 2013.

She and Niclas exchanged vows in September 2020 at the Villa Cora in Florence, Italy, opting for an intimate ceremony amid the coronavirus restrictions, according to Hello! magazine.

They split over the summer of 2023, but they have remained so amicable that Sylvie wished him a ‘Happy divorce day’ on Instagram last month and added: ‘How great to still have a friend in you.’

Meanwhile it emerged this May that Bethenny had broken her engagement to realtor Paul Bernon, with whom she conducted an on-off relationship stretching back to 2018. 

Paul and Bethenny reportedly went their separate ways around March, but she nevertheless kept the estimated $1 million engagement ring he gave her, a source told Us Weekly. 

A friend of the couple said the relationship ‘just wasn’t going to work’ because Bethenny and Paul were ‘so different’ from one another – for example, because ‘he’s an under the radar kind of guy.’

Bethenny later revealed she ‘initiated’ the breakup because she ‘wasn’t happy’ and felt ‘something needed to change,’ but clarified that ‘nobody dumped anybody’ and the final decision was ‘certainly mutual.’

Paul, 45, rapidly rebounded with Olivia Culpo’s elder sister Aurora, 35, but they were together for only two months before news of their split went public in early July.

While Aurora and Paul were dating, Bethenny admitted she found it ‘brutal’ to hear Aurora gushing about the relationship on her podcast Barely Filtered. 

‘Hearing about your ex-fiancé committing to another woman shortly thereafter on their first date, and then being inside their relationship hearing about their sex and their gifts and meeting each other’s kids and the level of commitment,’ Bethenny recalled on her own podcast Just B. ‘It was gutting.’

She explained: ‘It regurgitated the continuous narrative that he is a very under the radar person who had now gotten serious with someone, had a girlfriend, met her family, met her kids.’ 

Paul and Bethenny first struck up their romance in 2018 and remained together for two years before they split near the end of 2020, only to reunite early in 2021.

The couple joyfully announced their engagement in March 2021, with Bethenny later revealing that Paul proposed at ‘Little Palm Island, a small private hotel on a Florida island in the Florida keys.’

Bethenny has a 13-year-old daughter called Bryn Hoppy by her second and latest ex-husband Jason Hoppy, with whom she slogged through a nearly nine-year custody battle.

Jason and Bethenny were married in 2010 and separated in 2012 – but only in December 2021 did he agree to end the ‘toxic environment’ of their years-long legal struggle.

During an emotional virtual family court hearing that month, a judge agreed to let Bethenny stop paying Jason child support, according to a report in Page Six.

Although the parents technically had equally split custody, Bethenny and her lawyer had argued that she was the primary guardian in practice inasmuch as Bryn stayed with her more.   

Bethenny had maintained that ‘I want her to see her father’ but insisted that her daughter ‘is a living, breathing thing and she won’t always go.’ 

She and her attorney said that the protracted custody battle had helped cause Bryn to hyperventilate, experience anxiety and break out in hives.

Jason was unrepresented at the hearing where he declared that ‘I’m removing myself of this fight – for Bryn and my physical, emotional and mental health.’

After he and Bethenny broke up at the end of 2012, they underwent a rancorous divorce process that included the ugly public legal wrangling over their daughter.

Jason, an entrepreneur, spent years fighting with Bethenny over her assets before a financial arrangement was apparently finally agreed upon in 2016.

However, the drama continued – Jason was arrested and charged with fourth degree stalking and second degree harassment of Bethenny in 2017, and she sued him for full custody of Bryn in 2018.

An acrimonious legal battle ensued, in which Bethenny sensationally confessed that she had called Jason ‘white trash’ and threw water on him as he slept.

Jason also questioned Bethenny’s judgement as a parent after her on-off boyfriend Dennis Shields died of a suspected opioid overdose in his Trump Tower apartment in 2019.

The divorce was only finalized in January 2012, which meant that the entire process took about eight years – four times as long as the marriage lasted before Jason and Bethenny separated.

Bethenny, who once had a yearlong marriage to her friend Peter Sussman in the 1990s, released a self-help book on love in 2016 in the midst of her divorce proceedings with Jason.

Co-written with Eve Adamson, the book was cheekily entitled I Suck At Relationships So You Don’t Have To: 10 Rules For Not Screwing Up Your Happily Ever After.