‘Below Deck Med’s Chief Stew Katie Flood Reveals Why She’s Been ‘Nice’ To Stew Lexi Wilson Despite Boat Drama
There’s always drama brewing on the high seas, but this season on ‘Below Deck Med’ Lexi Wilson is at the center and Chief Stew Katie Flood Is weighing In!
There’s no shortage of dramatic moments this season on Below Deck Med in the galley! Chief Stew Katie Flood, 29, has been pretty kind to Lexi Wilson, 29, despite the fact that her Stew seems to find herself at the center of all of the drama. “I was nice!” Katie laughed as she told HollywoodLife EXCLUSIVELY before last week’s episode on Aug. 31 during an episode of TVTalk on Instagram Live. “I think, yeah, it was a hard one. I never dealt with what happened this season before. Lexi was also going through a hard time herself.”
As fans of the franchise have seen this season, Lexi has kept to herself and had trouble making friends with anyone on the ship. Bosun Malia White, 31, has had several fed up moments as has Captain Sandy Yawn, 56, who’s pulled Katie aside a few times to mentor her. She’s even not pulled her weight when it comes to guests as we saw in last week’s episode when they were looking for help in the morning.
She also got into what was probably the most heated moment of the season to date. After drinking in the hot tub with her fellow crew members, Lexi was involved in a verbal turned physical fight with Deckhand Lloyd Spencer. The altercation left Lloyd in tears which prompted Katie being forced to have yet another conversation with her Second Stew at the time. Lexi was so peeved by Katie’s chat that she walked away and was subsequently demoted.
But what viewers didn’t know at the time was Lexi was dealing with a lot in her personal life with the passing of her father, a big reason as to why Katie has been kinder than some would think. “We found out she loses her dad,” Katie said. “I’m such an empathis. That was really hard for me because I don’t like to beat somebody when they’re down but at the same time, this girl can’t act this way. It was a real struggle to me to find that balance instead of being like, “OK sister, this is not all good,” but also, “Are you OK?” I did say that to her at one point. I don’t think they showed it. I said to her at one point, “I want you to think about this, Lexi. If you think this is the right environment for you. Your mental health is much more important than anything going on here and I will support you through that but I need you to be honest with me.” It was a tough one for sure.”
Although Captain Sandy’s decision not to fire Lexi has been up for question, she had a resolution by bringing in some assistance for Katie. While Katie was anxious at first, she’s glad she did it and wanted to make it known that Lexi wasn’t losing her role despite her missteps. “When Captain Sandy was like, “OK, we’ve got this girl,” and then I obviously didn’t jump on the bandwagon straight away,” Katie revealed.
“I actually wanted to think about it whilst we’re in the middle of a charter so there’s not a lot of time to process everything and then my main concern was I didn’t want Lexie to lose [it] again. I didn’t want her to act the way she did again that night and I didn’t know. She became really quiet and she didn’t really communicate with any of us where she was at, even just being OK with what she was going through,” she explained.
“She didn’t really talk to any of us about it, so I was really concerned. I was like, “This is going to go one of two ways. She’s either going to take this and be fine or not,” and I don’t know what version I was going to get so I was just trying to be really real with her. I was like, “Look, this is the situation. We have this girl,” she went on. “Obviously things are falling apart. Let’s get each of our hands on, but I don’t want you to think that I’m replacing you,” because that wasn’t actually the case. It wasn’t like Lexie got let go and Delaney was brought on. It was like, “Oh, this girl’s here, let’s just try it.”