Paradise Lost
The public-shaming mob moves to reality TV
LAST week, a scandal surfaced on the reality TV show “Bachelor in Paradise.” The details were fuzzy, but apparently a producer felt uncomfortable during filming and accused one participant of sexual misconduct. ABC hit the brakes on the show — and the story hit the news.
DeMario Jackson and Corinne Olympios were the two contestants involved. Reports indicate Olympios believes she was too drunk to consent to a sexual encounter with Jackson. On Thursday, we learned the allegations cost Jackson his job as an executive recruiter.
Now, no tapes have been released, no charges have been filed and few details have been offered by anyone involved. Warner Bros., the show’s production company, has launched an investigation. Yet, someone has already lost their job due to an incident wholly unrelated to their work.
Jackson is adamant that his name will be cleared. He released a statement to US Weekly: “It’s unfortunate that my character and family name has been assassinated this past week with false claims and malicious allegations. I will be taking swift and appropriate legal action until my name is cleared and, per the advice of legal counsel, will be seeking all available remedies entitled to me under the laws.”
This isn’t the first time the consequences of a reality-show contestant’s actions were felt in real life. In an April airing of a “Survivor” episode, Jeff Varner outed fellow participant Zeke Smith as transgender. Survivor’s motto is “outwit, outplay, outlast” and features many of the contestants doing downright ugly things as they compete for the $1 million prize. But Varner’s outing of Smith was so beyond the pale that his tribe didn’t even hold their usual private vote, choosing instead to unanimously and openly boot Varner from the show.
Varner accepted his fate. But did he deserve what happened next? After the episode aired, Varner was fired as a real-estate agent in North Carolina. The News and Record newspaper reported that his firm, Allen Tate Companies, released a statement that their business was “built on core values of honesty, integrity and respect” and that Varner had violated those.
But of course he had. That’s the point of the show. There’s little integrity or respect during the cutthroat game of “Survivor” and certainly no honesty. What Varner did was despicable, even by the standards of the game, but let’s not pretend that any contestant on any season of “Survivor” passes Allen Tate’s values test.
Of course, this isn’t brand new — it’s an extension of the phenomenon’s online phase. We’ve seen this type of thing happen again and again on the Internet: Someone says something dumb, the mob descends and they get fired. Jon Ronson covered this well in his book “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.”
We’ve known for a long time that anyone with any sort of prominence — politicians, celebrities, CEOs and so on — have to really watch what they say in public. But now it seems that any Joe Schmo could lose his job over a stupid remark.
Justine Sacco was no household name when she made an awful joke about AIDS in Africa while on a plane there and her career was over by the time she landed. Elizabeth Lauten was an unknown Capitol Hill staffer when her personal Facebook post stating that the Obama daughters should have more respect for their roles went viral. And she was fired — after being dragged through the mud by a pack of wolves in the press.
Last week, The Post reported on a New Jersey sheriff who had been suspended without pay when her past work as a dominatrix came to light. A judge reinstated her and let her graduate from the academy, but she could still lose her job at a June 22 hearing. Why is her job on the line for something she did years ago that has zero to do with her current profession?
It’s not just employment, either. A few weeks ago Harvard rescinded its admission offers to at least 10 prospective students for posting racist and other offensive images online. Gross, of course. But who hasn’t pushed the envelope as a teenager? Watching teenagers horseplay in a park recently, my mature 7year-old marveled, “They’re like half grown-up, half 2-year old.” Of course they are. Even the ones going to Harvard.
This isn’t a First Amendment issue. The question usually isn’t whether these employees can but fired but if they should. We’re becoming a society that harshly punishes people for social behavior that should be forgivable. We need to stop living in glass houses and chucking stones at each other.