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By Emily Nussbaum
Nine months into the pandemic, Nick Thompson, a marketing specialist at a Chicago tech company, won a message on LinkedIn inviting him to apply to appear on a Netflix reality show called “Love Is Blind. “Shy smile, he didn’t really watch much TV, even though he had seen a bit of “The Bachelor,” so maybe he signed up for a betting consultation at his office. He was a fan of W. W. E. wrestling, so much so. who had once trained to become a wrestler. ” For about a day,” he laughs. He broke his ankle and then stopped.
The form of “Love Is Blind” seemed far-fetched: Fifteen men and fifteen women gathered in Los Angeles, where they settled into individual “groups” and flirted with strangers through a wall. After just a few days of quick courtship, the contestants fell in love and, surprisingly, some got engaged, unseen. The show’s producers, who worked for a company called Kinetic Content, emphasized that “Love Is Blind,” despite its premise, isn’t a seedy blame on emotion like “Temptation Island. “It’s a heartfelt experience of human intimacy: participants were subjected to a “digital fast” designed to free them from all distractions, adding physical appearance, so they could form a deeper, more lasting bond with a partner. The manufacturers weren’t looking for influence hunters, they were looking for emotionally mature adults, other people who were willing to engage in marriage, really.
Thompson, passionate about psychology and self-help, seduced through the concept. By the time he did the casting, after a background check, months of interviews, and an online mind check, he had already noticed Season 1 and enjoyed it. The concheckants were secluded in cozy mini-lounges with couches and nap blankets, much like the bottle of “I Dream of Jeannie. “Between the dating segments, the audience was treated to a heady view of those “casulae,” which were nestled face-to-face, a golden honeycomb brimming with romance. Days later, the concheckants have visibly fallen in love, especially this season’s star couple: Lauren, a warm and concerned black model, and Cameron, a soft-spoken white scientist. After a dramatic “reveal” in which the couples met face-to-face, the bride and groom went on vacation to Mexico and eventually returned to their shared hometown. (In Season 1, everyone in Atlanta. ) The couples met, lived together for several weeks, and planned weddings.
In the end, not all couples said “I do,” but the few who did seemed convinced, and for Thompson, who was thirty-five, the display was like a welcome break from the ugliness of dating apps. “undramatic” person; He was proud of the stability he had achieved as the first member of his family circle to earn a school degree. After thoroughly reviewing his contract with Kinetic, he stuck to the producers’ mantra: “Trust the process. “
In Los Angeles, Thompson found the isolation surprising: making the exhibit less like being in a genie bottle and more like a casino, with no windows or clocks on the wall but with copious amounts of alcohol. The first weekend, he was confined to a hotel room, unable to speak to other cast members, a prestige known as “on ice. ” Thompson’s phone is confiscated; there is no access to the web. This is all part of the virtual fast, he understood, but when the ten days of filming inside the capsules began that Monday, the hours were incredibly long: the actors had to be able to film at 8 in the morning and not back down. . to their hotel rooms until 2 or 3 a. m. (Date nights were optional, but there were strong incentives to do so: if you failed to “make a connection” or if the manufacturers lost interest in your story, you might be expelled. ) They worked up to twenty hours straight each morning, the manufacturers They gave a magazine to write in, as well as a calendar of “dates” with other contestants and a list of questions to explore, with a topic for each day, e. g. sex or family, sometimes they flirted in the capsules while the robotic cameras filmed them and they drank drinks from the passables on the screen; Other times, they sat in a common “living room” to film conversations with same-sex contestants or met privately with manufacturers to. “On the fly” interviews. There were only a few breaks, along with brief bathroom breaks and, once a day, a time when union team members were swapped.
And then Thompson fell in love. After a few slight flirtations, he felt a serious spark with Danielle Ruhl, a twenty-nine-year-old associate marketing director. In his diary, he surrounded Ruhl’s call with hearts. When Thompson described those days to me, his voice had a dream: “We had a lot of fun. I deepened the dynamics of our family circle, all of that. I just listened, I laughed, I cried. . . It wasn’t forced. And it stayed like that, in the capsules.
On the ninth day, Thompson proposed to Ruhl. (In the final cut, it appears that their engagement came together a few days before the others; in fact, all the proposals were filmed on the same day. ) He felt dizzy, in a fog of romantic bliss. Then, the pairs were sent out. to a hotel in Cancun, for the vacation sequence, and things began to change. In the clips, Ruhl had spoken to Thompson about his anxiety issues, a topic he also discussed during casting. The couple now shared a room and the fog was beginning to lift.
On the first day at the resort, filming was delayed due to a covid outbreak, and the couple had fun, got drunk, ordered room service, and swam in a pool just outside their room. The next day, at 6 a. m. , a crew arrived to film a “makeup” scene in the shower. Thompson and Ruhl reluctantly complied: intimate moments like this were built into the program, requiring sensitive collaborations with the team. Then Ruhl started vomiting, all in all, probably due to an abdominal problem. Although she tested negative for Covid, the manufacturers refused to let her attend a “couple’s barbecue” that night and suggested to Thompson, who wanted to stay with her, to stop by alone. After the event, he arrived at the door of his hotel room, where the team surrounded him, in shooting position: Ruhl was inside, and they asked him to tell them about the party, sitting as close as possible, since she wasn’t there. He took the microphone.
Thompson did not know that in his absence, Ruhl had fallen into a panic attack, the first he had had since he was a teenager, when he attempted suicide. “I felt like swords were swimming in my veins. My center hurts,” she told me. I lost my hearing: everything sounded like womp, womp, womp. Desperate to escape the production, she drank a bottle of wine and locked herself in her closet, sobbing, paranoid that the room would have hidden cameras. (A member of the group The Team showed Ruhl’s account of his anguish. )She refused requests to turn on her microphone and then told her manufacturer that she wanted to leave and that she wanted to kill herself. (Kinetic has denied that Ruhl expressed suicidal intentions to the production team. and says it follows “rigorous protocols” to ensure the “well-being” of participants. )
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None of this was aired. Instead, the public saw the couple sitting rigidly on their bed, having a tense argument during which Ruhl sullenly told her fiancé that she didn’t accept “anything as true right now. “Both sides agree that it was their concern that the production team had upset them. Once Thompson learned he had been trapped, he got rid of his own microphone and threw it away. To the audience, however, it felt like a dramatic lovers’ argument: Ruhl was jealous that Thompson was talking to other women at the barbecue.
Four years later, after the couple said “I do,” they appeared, probably satisfied, in a casting reunion episode and a “After the Altar” special; after Ruhl filed for divorce, after months of fighting; After the two contestants were quoted in a Business Insider article on “Love Is Blind” calling the display “hell on earth,” Thompson couldn’t help but think about that night in Cancun. If the producers figured their fiancée might have covid, why?Didn’t they think he could spread it too? In hindsight, he wondered if he and Ruhl had been separated to provoke conflict, and then manipulated rather than supported a terrifying crisis of intellectual fitness. Given the crisp sound quality of the streamed version, I even wondered if, after all, there had been microphones in the room. It was hard to tell what was genuine once inside the casino.
Thompson had come to see the exhibit he had once followed in a new way. Their romantic affair now seemed like a ruthless trick, an unethical exercise in which officials used isolation, sleep deprivation, and emotional manipulation to control their subjects. Even a “good edit,” like the one the producers had given to their script, didn’t protect you. But most importantly, Thompson claimed that he had been naïve about the project he had been tasked with, and that he did not understand that it was a task at all.
The truth television genre has been around for seventy-five years, with roots that go far beyond “Survivor” and “The Bachelor. “Shortly after World War II, radio networks began airing what were then called public participation programs, programs such as “Candid Microphone” (the beta edition of “Candid Camera”) and “Queen for a Day,” provocative and popular formats that emphasized audience participation. The elites saw these displays as crude tricks, but the rulers swallowed them. They were low-budget and strike-proof: a way to tell stories without having to pay annoying writers or actors.
In the current era of the truth television boom, where these types of screens are less a novelty than a behemoth, manufacturers’ calculations haven’t replaced much. Most Truth TV crew members work tough schedules for low pay, no benefits, on the fringes of Hollywood. In recent years, progress has been made for editors and camera operators (a subgroup of which has organized through the International Alliance of Theatrical Workers), but most producers and crew members remain necessarily independent. For the people they film, the situation is more dramatic: there has never been a coordinated work movement for reality TV actors. Part of the reason is that, like Nick Thompson, most people don’t consider being on a reality show to be a job. In the eyes of the unsympathetic, and even in the eyes of some sympathetic ones, this is just another category of behavior: gonzo volunteering, or an audition for fame, or some kind of excessive sport, in which other people agree to get involved. themselves. risk, emotional or physical, of an affair or the possibility of long-term opportunities. If something bad happens to reality TV stars (like in porn, the cast members are “stars”), they literally sign up. The popular contract makes it unlikely that actors will complain, or even communicate how the show was made.
In terms of painting, real TV actors are in a strange limbo. They are not the subjects of documentaries, who sometimes agree to be filmed on their own but who have some control over the hours of painting and the access they offer. They are not professional actors who memorize scripts, nor do they communicate with show hosts or news anchors, who can talk out of nowhere. Instead, according to the code netpaintings of the SAG-AFTRA syndicate, which was first negotiated in the 1950s, when the maximum number of TV shows were broadcast live, they occupy a more modest niche: they are “true amateurs,” appearing on screen without any industry protection. Castings for “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “Celebrity Big Brother” are covered through sag-aftra; the castings of “The Apprentice” and “Big Brother” are not.
In the wake of #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the W. G. A. And after the strikes, there were jolts of change, with press releases of a so-called truth check, much of it directed at Bravo, the network of the “Real Housewives” franchise and its various content tentacles. Bethenny Frankel, the hard-eyed former housewife who introduced the Skinnygirl logo for low-calorie wines and spirits and whose good fortune encouraged an accommodation to the truth contract known as the “Bethenny Clause,” allowing Well Done for Taking a part of the cast. Member earnings. – She has become a fantastic Norma Rae. In July 2023, she published a video titled “This is a Union”, in which she advocates for a new style of employment for truth television stars with fair salaries and residual payments, and opposes solidarity between women famous for their slander and betrayal. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Bravo field manager, maker and host Andy Cohen dismissed the idea: “You’re not being cast on ‘Real Housewives,'” he said, arguing that “TV stars from The truth is they regularly have other jobs. ” » and convert television exposure into successful businesses.
Since Frankel made his video, lawsuits have been filed one after another on the Bravoverse. But it’s a rather wet firework, which has made headlines (for institutional racism or neglect on set), but has had little effect on public opinion. For viewers, such revelations can be hard to distinguish from the drama on which Bravo’s logo is based, the fake changes of scenery and genuine bankruptcies that characterize the channel. It’s the dead-end ending of any truth soap opera: Even valid court cases in the office feel like spilled tea.
“Love Is Blind” sold itself as an older version of the truth. Created by a former Truth TV agent named Chris Coelen, and co-hosted by former boy band heartthrob Nick Lachey, an O. G. The real star of MTV’s “Newlyweds” and his wife, Vanessa, “Love Is Blind” has been a ruinous hit for Netflix. It was lucky to debut in February 2020, with a format that eerily reflected the loneliness of quarantine. Interracial lovebirds Lauren and Cameron struck many viewers as soothing counter-programming to B. L. M. uprisings. And although the show is not the first to broadcast live weddings (The Bride and Groom did so shortly after World War II), there is an air of unfalsifiable spontaneity to its bottled displays of courtship, a thrill of authenticity that generated, or at least less intensified, through the synthetic environment. Natural moments were framed by sillier moments, such as a hilarious series in which a technician attempted to use eye drops to simulate tears, only to be reported by editors and then vilified for not being present on the TV show Crime Truth . show “for the right reasons. ”
Television hits, like favorites, fade. Four years after its launch, the show has become a launching point for a burgeoning work movement for reality stars. These efforts have taken multiple forms: first, lawsuits against Netflix, Kinetic and Delirium TV, the other production company of the series, to which charges of false imprisonment and abuse were added; second, the creation of the Unscripted Cast Advocacy Network (ucan) through two dissident “Love Is Blind” alumni, Nick Thompson and his season 2 castmate Jeremy Hartwell, as well as a friendly psychologist; and, finally, an attempt to redefine being at a truth show as a full-time job worthy of the protections other staff members enjoy, adding the right to publicly complain about mistreatment. All of this activity takes place under the shadow of tough confidentiality agreements: contractual clauses that make it legally dangerous for reality TV stars to speak about any facet of the production. However tentative and untested such ploys may be, they constitute the first genuine efforts to present gamers as more than fodder for the guilty enthusiasm commercial complex.
The first case opposed to “Love Is Blind” was a proposed class action lawsuit filed in June 2022 through Hartwell, which accused the production of “dangerous and inhumane” conditions, adding to the deprivation of sleep and food, in addition to multiple violations of the hard work law. Hartwell, the head of a Chicago loan company, like Thompson, was not a viewer of actual television before he became a candidate, and was also recruited online, in his case on the dating site Hinge. Raised through a fundamentalist Christian parents, he was also the first in his family circle to earn a bachelor’s degree and had a deep interest in “self-optimization. “But, as Thompson made his way down the aisle, Hartwell stumbled a few days after filming and left early; He shows himself up a bit, making a fool of himself during the series of capsules about getting excited when he’s hungover.
When we first spoke in February, Hartwell was unclear about what exactly happened during filming: his N. D. A. It remains in force and, as he made clear, there is a legal difference between talking about abuse and revealing “patented industrial secrets. ” But Hartwell said that during his short time on the show, he felt “caught in the flow” of the groups: the time when participants would have marathon, vulnerable conversations with strangers, fall in love or be rejected, or rarely both. . Hartwell did not leave of his own free will, he said; At the same time, he felt trapped, knowing that there was a fifty thousand dollar fine for quitting without the producer’s consent, a provision that was in the contracts at least until season 5. (Coelen said that Kinetic had never won that amount). . ) Hartwell described to me what sounds like depression: Before this week, he considered himself a “stoic, level-headed, cool, happy” person; Afterwards he was left traumatized, angry and confused. There was a twelve-hour period in his hotel room that he couldn’t explain: “The most productive way to describe it is confusing, dark shadows of despair. ” »His psychologist told him that it was as if he had entered “a fugue state. ”
Hartwell, convinced that Kinetic would need to avoid these outcomes for cast members in the long term, contacted the company but was ignored until he said he was looking for a lawyer. Then Kinetic’s lawyer told him to “fuck you. ” (Kinetic did not respond to repeated requests for comment. ) It took a while for Hartwell to widen his lens, to avoid ignoring what he had experienced as “an oversight,” an accidental challenge limited to his season or exhibition. “It was all truth television,” he told me. “And thousands of people have experienced this, many of them in a much worse situation than me. ” The genre itself was a sleight of hand, “created as a profit mitigation strategy. ” The mental manipulation techniques used by the makers closely resembled those used by cults, which also separated other people from the world. But no one took those misdeeds seriously, because no one took Truth TV (or the other people who starred in it) seriously. The legal factor seemed especially serious to Hartwell, namely an arbitration clause included in the contracts that required that any claims opposing the exhibition be resolved privately. As a result, audiences never knew when something was on set, allowing them to settle with on-screen strategies as normal.
Hartwell’s lawsuit said the cast of “Love Is Blind” was paid well below minimum wage: $1,000 a week, for up to 20 hours of filming a day, seven days a week, or $7. 14 an hour. He also made an ambitious argument about hard work. , founded on a new California law, AB5, which requires corporations to classify many gig employees as W-2 employees. Hartwell believed that since the actors were under the “substantial and excessive” control of their producers, they had been misclassified as independents. Contractors. Their complaint demanded unpaid wages, reimbursement for lost meal breaks, damages for unfair industrial practices, and civil consequences for violations of the hard labor code. (After the complaint was filed, Kinetic responded that there was “absolutely no basis” for Hartwell’s lawsuit. )
In April 2023, Hartwell, in combination with Thompson, incorporated UCAn as a non-profit organization, creating a with the motto “Cast members are people. There are NO live props. The reality alumni had vented privately for decades, through text chains and email threads. , however, UCAn aimed to build something more sustainable and powerful: a self-help organization that would also serve as a clearinghouse for legal and intellectual resources. Hartwell hoped to teach prospective applicants about gender before signing contracts. He also sought to teach enthusiasts about how their favorite displays were made, to inspire them to be allies and not voyeurs.
Later that year, news emerged of another lawsuit, filed through season five cast member Tran Dang, whose contestants were from Houston. She alleged that during the couple’s vacation in Mexico, her fiancé, Thomas Smith, groped her, exposed himself and attacked her. When she shared what happened with the manufacturers, they attributed it all to poor communication. In Houston, where Dang insisted on leaving the show, she was forced to film a final scene in which she confronted hostile producers who insisted that she talk about the need for forgiveness. “They made me repeat my lines over and over again until I stumbled in desperation and gave them what they wanted,” Dang wrote. Many alleged cases of abuse were filmed, she claimed. Dang accused Smith, Kinetic and Delirium of assault and battery; She also accused the production companies of negligence and false imprisonment, and argued that they were guilty of Smith’s misconduct because he was an employee. Smith, through his attorney, has denied the allegations. Dang’s attorney, Benjamin Allen, told me in an email that he was confident Dang would prevail, but that she couldn’t reach me. Although Dang had the legal right to sue, her right to speak to the press was less clear, “and as you know, those corporations like to sue their former participants. “
This is a clear reference to Renee Poche, another actor from Season 5. Like Dang, Poche had filmed the series only to realize that their relationship hadn’t made the final cut. When she began telling her story publicly, Kinetic sued her for $4 million, $1 million for both of her public statements; It’s like a warning to one and both actors. In response, Ucan noted Pocket as two of Hollywood’s most no-nonsense entertainment lawyers in just one day. It’s a “proof of concept” for the organization, Hartwell told me, noting, “If she had been prosecuted three months earlier, she would have been just another silent victim. “
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In the spring of 2022, Brianne Newman, a twenty-eight-year-old Houston resident, learned of a production assistant gig on the fifth season of “Love Is Blind. “her sister is “totally addicted” to the program. On set, Newman was assigned to a team that followed one of the couples, Renée Poche and her fiancé, Carter Wall. From the beginning, he adored Poche, a thirty-one-year-old man. veterinarian of Cajun descent who inspired her as warm, funny, and intelligent, “a professional woman in her own right” who owned a beautiful space and a Porsche. Wall, on the other hand, considered her a ruined alcoholic with anger issues. Newman was puzzled that Kinetic chose him; In fact, it didn’t look like a wedding curtain to him.
Based on the testimonies of 8 members of the team, in varying degrees of production, Newman’s opinions of the couple were very divided. Poche has been described to me in tactics as “wonderful, with an intelligent head on her shoulders”, “a very sweet young person”, “simply a human being without a doubt the best” and “television gold!” team members as gifts (including a modern nude self-portrait that she had taped to her refrigerator; after a non-public meeting The assistant congratulated her and she gave it to him, which infuriated Wall. Poche cooked for the team and was what). charismatic enough that many cast members, and several cast members, assumed she would be the star of the season.
Few people liked Wall. I chewed tobacco compulsively; On set, rumors circulated that he had used slurs, adding, “. “One team member described him as “a racist, bigoted mountaineer who didn’t give a damn. “Many other people speculated that he was looking for “a piece of candy” and that he was also looking to become famous. But they claimed that he wasn’t alone in his quest for fame, especially from season five onwards: when a demonstration of truth became a hit, the actors’ motivations weren’t so simple. , if they ever were. The purpose of “Love Is Blind” was still to get married, but the exhibit also presented a trail to a glamorous life, from Instagram mentions to jobs in Hollywood. It was conceivable – and it really made sense – that actors would dream of more than one thing.
Poche, who grew up in an RV park in Louisiana, was a politically liberal animal lover looking for an equal partner, someone with whom she could raise a child. Wall came from a more bourgeois background. At first, in the groups, their dates seemed lighthearted, probably because their verbal exchange wasn’t deep. During dates, they drank and flirted, building a playful but superficial relationship. Wall simply mirrored what Pocket said about her, telling her, among other things. things, that it was a relief to meet a fellow atheist. One thing Wall, a Texan, was transparent about was that he was unemployed, which had discouraged other women in the groups. Pocket was okay with this, as long as Wall agreed to locate a task when they returned to Houston.
After the “revelation,” things started to go downhill. In Mexico, Poche and Wall, now engaged, met, but it was sweltering hot in their hotel room and they couldn’t go out. While filming a shower scene, Wall threatened to slap the cameraman. According to an account Poche later gave in a podcast, he blew up with another team member for not letting him spit soaked tobacco into his water bottle.
When they left the resort, the couples retrieved their phones. Wall is dead, abandoned for non-payment. After his resuscitation, on the flight back to Houston, Wall showed Pocket his screen: He had less than $200 in his bank account (he expected to live off the $1,000 weekly salary from the program and didn’t sign up for Kinetic). automatic deposits. ) In Texas, Poche discovered that not only was Wall unemployed, but he didn’t have a consistent address. . . As a palliative, he crashed at a friend’s house. In an apartment Kinetic had provided for Wall and Poche, he drank heavily, skinned Adderall, and spent more time partying and fishing than working on his resume. They went out to dinner, and Pocket suspected that he had hardened the waiter.
When Newman, the AP, saw “The Bachelor” in high school, he wondered if the scenes were scripted. But the conflicts he witnessed between Poche and Wall struck him as unpleasantly authentic. “We would hide in the dark rooms while they fought for hours,” he told me. After eating fried fish as a couple, the two men had a massive argument, with Wall insulting Poche with ugly names and adding “thot,” for “that bitch over there. “Later, at the apartment, Newman saw Poche “come out sobbing, with his bags packed. “He would return to his own home and continue to appear in photo shoots.
Why did Poche keep filming? Maybe he was still looking to save the relationship. Maybe he was hoping to get clever editing or, with so many sequences in the hands of the producers, maybe he was afraid of bad editing. Maybe he was just looking to complete the relationship’s narrative: walk down the aisle and say no to a bully, for the world to see. Here’s how reality TV production has worked: Managers rarely had to threaten applicants with their contracts, because the atmosphere on set did the job. Bachelor”, manufacturers called this phenomenon the Bubble: the screen has become all over the world, its values are its own. Its makers looked like friends or therapists, sharing personal jokes, guiding you in your decisions, hinting at love or future. glory; They knew all about you, as they had been informed of your mental letter and had read your newspaper every night.
Sometimes, however, manufacturers gave particular instructions. In Houston, Wall bought pupfish from Poche and then ignored them until they died. For Poche, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back: he annulled the marriage. As a crew member glared angrily at a producer, John (J. P. ) Paul told Pocket and Wall that they couldn’t stop filming now; They had to get to the driveway and then finish it. He gave Poche a word he thought she might utter as a threat: “I’ll see. “You at the altar!
As one member of the “Love Is Blind” team described, Poche “forced” the season to end, despite his misgivings. There’s a sinking error in this total story: if your story was never told, what’s the point?
Toward the end of the Houston shoot, the couple’s producer, Paul, drove Wall and Poche home after a date. Wall, who was in the back seat, exploded when Poche reprimanded him for spitting chewing tobacco. The team hummed rumors about the incident, adding that Wall had hit the back of Poche’s car seat. Newman, who told me that she had come to think of actors as “her little babies,” felt “petrified” by Poche. That day, his team took a new approach: never leave the couple alone.
Other members of the team also felt involved for Poche’s safety, and he added Khadijah Forte, whose task was to compile “hot” summaries of plot themes from a live audio feed. He heard Wall warn Poche, “You’d better be good to me,” more than once. “I don’t know what he meant by that, but it sounded threatening,” he said. One day, the couple fought over Wall through insults and robberies of another actor. When Forte recorded the fight, Paul asked him to remove it from his synopsis.
Wall’s account is backed up by a cast member, Maris Prakonekham, who left early, never having played a game, but who invited through the producers to the couples’ barbecue. After a few drinks, he lay down across from Wall. “I insulted him!” She told me. I was horrified by the way he spoke of Renée: “That complaint doesn’t deserve me. She’s a whore. ” It’s crazy that he’s comfortable talking that way.
When I recently got on the phone with Wall, he was driving to his job as a bouncer at a strip club. His editing of occasions in many tactics matched the stories he had heard, he denied yelling or being abusive. (He hadn’t fought since third grade, he said. ) He had worked short-term in construction, on a fishing boat, and as a conduct assistant at a “children’s prison,” but ran out of paints when someone from the “Love Is Blind cast” contacted him on Facebook. “At the time I was a professional drinker,” he told me. “Maybe I’ll just hang out with the adults. ” In the modules, he fell in love with Poche, “my barefoot little Cajun girl,” only to see her walk away after looking at her bank balance. Wall told me that he felt “hurt” by her judgment, considering it hypocritical, in part because of anything she had said to him in confidence, off-camera, in Mexico: she had once had an Onlyfans account, which she had later deleted.
As we spoke, Wall vacillated between praising Poche (and admitting that he ruined the date due to his own immaturity) and making disparaging comments about him. (She was “a ‘nipple-free’ type girl,” “in the ninety-ninth percentile for libido and income,” “a rich, strange woman!”) She denied hitting the car seat, and ready. a dinner and an errand, she stole anything, said racist things, or acted in a threatening manner. He admitted to calling Poche a “fool” and telling him to “shut up” at the barbecue, while he was drunk. He also used the word “faggot” but said it was a joke. Additionally, he admitted to trying to sneak a woman into the Houston apartment he shared with Poche, which he justified as revenge for her rejection of him, only to get caught up in the crew and cast members. When I asked Wall, who said he had recently discovered God, if he regretted signing up for “Love Is Blind” in the first place, he said he would do it again, unless this time he found an assignment. He then replaced his mind with: “No, I probably wouldn’t settle for that. The concept of people knowing things about me. ArrayArray” his voice fell silent. “I think he was looking for attention. I don’t need attention.
If you’ve watched the fifth season of “Love Is Blind,” you’ll know that none of those events came to fruition on the show. The wedding rite in which Poche rushed to end his date with Wall for Smart didn’t end either. only glimpses appear on the screen, a star-turned-Hereo: he makes jokes in the pod lounge, and later, in Houston, he sits on a couch while looking at the wedding dress of another woman, known as a member of the “Pod Squad” and mysteriously dressed in white. The wall is slightly present. The decision to cut the couple’s story was made around April 2023, the month Business Insider’s exposé appeared. By then, the initial edit was complete, and throughout September, many of the team members were tuning in, eager to see their favorite character, Poche, tell her story, only to realize that she’s gone.
According to interviews she gave after the season began airing, Poche found out about the resolution herself in August. She didn’t listen to the explanation she received, namely that the script was cut for time: the fifth season had 11 episodes, while the others had at least fourteen, and that Kinetic hoped to save her from having a bad experience again. During this time, Kinetic also informed him that he had not participated in a spin-off dating show, “Perfect Match,” a game show featuring former Truth TV stars.
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Wall had another explanation for the deletion of his story, one that matched what most people I spoke to had heard: One of his close friends had called Kinetic to warn him that he would commit suicide if the season aired. Wall had been suicidal (his friends had overreacted to his drinking, he said), but admitted he feared he would be noticed as a loser on the show.
Another thing that arguably would have influenced Kinetic’s decision not to air the uncomfortable story of Poche’s relationship with Wall was the sexual assault lawsuit filed through Tran Dang. Shortly after the start of Season 5, Dang’s lawsuit, filed fourteen months earlier, became the subject of press attention. Poche read an article in People in which Chris Coelen, the author of “Love Is Blind,” called Dang’s false accusation of imprisonment “absurd,” saying the environment was a supportive environment and insisting that Dang had never expressed any consideration for safety. Poche, who was one of Dang’s friends in the capsules, was furious and started talking.
After Poche gave two interviews on the show, he got stop and desist orders, which he ignored; Many members of the cast of “Love Is Blind” had given interviews without being prosecuted. In a third interview, he spoke intensely about his concern about the Wall, starting with that shower scene in Mexico. In Houston, he said, the production would cut the scenes short when he got angry. “I think they were just as scared as I was,” he said. Finally I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to be alone with him. I mean, I’m going to film, finish whatever we want to do. ArrayArray I still won’t be staying in the apartment and possibly wouldn’t even be there that day. The manufacturers agreed to this, she said, but no one stepped in to protect her. Give the get advantages of the doubt. When she told Wall he was scaring her, he made her feel guilty by saying she had hit rock bottom: “He said it made him unhappy that I had that idea. “But he’s six feet tall and weighs 1300 pounds, a huge guy with a very bad temper!
While Dang’s lawyer was hard at work in Houston, Ucan created Poche with Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman, tough Hollywood entertainment lawyers who had connections in the television industry. Freedman had negotiated exit deals for many celebrities, adding “Bachelor” host Chris Harrison and “America’s Got Talent” host Gabrielle Union. Geragos was a regular character on cable news. Years earlier, Freedman had represented United Talent Agency in a dispute with Chris Coelen, who had recently left the company. (Freedman has his own legal history: While reading at the University of California, Berkeley, a teenage girl claimed he sexually assaulted her; she denied that anything nonconsensual had happened and that it was part of a forty-year ($1,000) settlement.
Geragos and Freedman had begun to build a large legal case against the truth television industry, attracting clients, adding Bethenny Frankel and other Bravo litigators. None of the lawyers have seen many truth shows, yet the situations unfolding in the industry have impacted them, even for Hollywood. ” There are other people who sign contracts that are not only illegal: they cancel the entire contract!There’s an ecosystem where other people bring therapists onto set, and then those therapists break the confidentiality and the percentage. data with executives and manufacturers, and even with the firm’s lawyers. I mean, it’s amazing.
In January 2024, Poche filed a countersuit alleging that she signed up for an exhibition that boasted of men with “red flags,” only to find herself engaged to an unemployed serial liar who was “homeless, violent, separated from his parents. “It is actively dependent on alcohol and amphetamines. (Wall denies that he is violent or estranged from his parents. )Now, the company she claimed had put her in jeopardy was suing her for telling the truth. Geragos and Freedman’s purpose was to cancel Poche’s contract. – which, they said, contained multiple illegal clauses, all popular to prove the truth – and blow up this prohibitive N. D. A. If this were to be declared illegal, a piñata of revelations about the industry would erupt. “If that doesn’t appeal to you as a lawyer, you deserve to sell oranges on the side of a road,” Geragos told me.
For decades, truth-telling stardom has been the paw of a Hollywood monkey. You were known worldwide but absolutely broke: one last name, harassed by enemies, no clients for a career in entertainment. The Kardashians, who number two thousand, blazed a new trail, and shortly after, Instagram blazed a trail for everyone. When “Love Is Blind” began airing, many ordinary people had “followers,” and the fame of the truth was more of an intensifier, like an accelerator of the flames of social media. Even low-level stars can simply strike logo deals; It’s possible for the biggest stars to make a fortune as full-time influencers, like Season 1 couple Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton, who run a YouTube channel where they posted a sponsored vow renewal for their fifth birthday at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It’s possible that the stars simply moved from one token of truth to another, waiting for a recast, and the more star force you gained, the better you were treated. In the dream scenario, it may simply present a series of truth and be recorded in sag-aftra.
In Hartwell’s eyes, those benefits amounted to “past handcuffs” as effective as any nondisclosure agreement. They kept former applicants tied to corporations like Kinetic, fighting for privileged status. “I wouldn’t possibly make calls, but a lot of the actors, before the movie aired, were angry and critical of the way they’d been treated,” Hartwell told me. “But here’s the problem: This feeling is rational! If you participate in one of those exhibitions, you don’t get paid anything. You go through all this trauma and all of a sudden you have the opportunity to make money from it. . . Who knows, what I would have done.
There were actors for whom the experience was worth it. Among them was Season 3’s Alexa Lemieux, whose experience resembled Nick Thompson’s, but with a happy ending. She also signed up on a whim, in the middle of the pandemic, after fainting in front of Lauren and Cameron’s formative “I Love You. “She also temporarily fell in love, in her case with a sales manager named Brennon Lemieux. They have become the “stable” couple of the season and were some other crossover. cultural couple: they came from a lower-middle-class rural Christian family; He came from an Israeli-American family in Dallas who had become wealthy. Alexa Lemieux told me that she didn’t find the experience in the cult of capsules simply “emotionally intense. “To her, the décor had seemed almost luxurious. , a haven where his orders (a Martini coffee, sushi) were taken care of through team members he trusted.
The competitors, he argued, were all adults who had chosen to accept a bet. No one was forced to drink. She had remained friends with her Kinetic manufacturer and was particularly close to Colleen Reed, her wife that season; Only the actors really understood the experience, she said. Both women had Instagram accounts where they showed themselves sporting attractive products and, in Lemieux’s case, maternity jumpsuits. She and Brennon were expecting her first child. For Alexa, the only problem with “Love Is Blind” was viewers, who sent anti-Semitic death threats and mocked her tall frame (on Instagram, she posted amused claps for critics). None of this would have been worth it. It would be if she hadn’t met Brennon, she said. But she never would have met him without the show.
There’s still another monetization option for Shapeers cast members: publicly discussing the screen they were on. That’s the path followed by Deepti Vempati and Natalie Lee, who starred alongside Thompson and Hartwell in Season 2. After Vempati’s fiancé rejected her because of her appearance, she turned her humiliation into a fiery phoenix symbol. In the fall of 2022, she published a memoir titled “I Choose Myself. “The following March, she and Lee hosted “Out of the Pods,” a podcast in which they interviewed cast members of modelers, touting “exclusives” and “accusations” among intellectual fitness commercials. According to Fortune, they made everyone quit their day jobs and made part of a million dollars in nineteen months. “Out of the Pods” was a twinkling star in a galaxy of reality TV gossip sites, TikToks and podcasts, a form of investigative journalism that functioned as complementary intellectual content for enthusiasts of the reality TV genre and as a way for participants to have their own experience. say.
When Poche spoke publicly about “Love Is Blind,” those platforms were waiting. In October 2023, she did an upbeat interview on “Reality Life with Kate Casey”, in which she remained positive and hinted that Wall had shown signs of volatility. On the online website PopSugar, he described “an emotional rollercoaster. ” ArrayArray, which I will get into, but not now. However, in “Out of the Pods” he opened up, flipped through his magazine, and traced his confusing feelings, from playful flirting with Wall in the pods to “farting” in Mexico, where he ignored the symptoms of trouble. I got to the ugliest dynamic in Houston, when “all the lies started to rise. ” She told the hosts: “I fell in love with a fake person. ” She and Lee have become friends and lament how difficult it was to resist or even identify emotional abuse while trapped in a television show. One detail Poche shared was particularly damning: Producers had asked her to make sure Wall couldn’t access a gun he kept in his car for security reasons. Poche also weighed in on Dang’s lawsuit: She described her former co-star as a kind, shy woman who, when she tried to quit, was forced to continue filming. “They don’t need me to tell my story,” Poche said of Kinetic, adding, “It’s my story, it’s up to me to tell it to people. “
Throughout the fall of 2023, she posted on social media, employing hashtags such as #releasethereneecut and posting a photo of herself on set, wearing her wedding dress. Online, she has stifled selective narratives, such as the rumor that she was married before. appearing in “Love Is Blind”. (She later married another man, of whom she didn’t mention casting for “Perfect Match. “)At one point, Wall, whose friends had prompted him to respond, posted a video with the caption “Breaking the Silence,” revealing the truth. Wall, dressed in a camouflage shirt, said, “It’s time to tell you what happened between old Miss Renee and me and answer some of those fucking rumors that are crazy. “With a depraved smile he added, “And tell yourselves everything you don’t know about old Miss Renee. “After a pause, he said, “Soon,” and then left the screen.
Poche stomped on this scoop: she reposted Wall’s video, adding a clown emoji, and then announced the news herself, as matter-of-factly as a text message: “I’m going to say I’ve only had one fan since I scolded him. At the time, Poche posted a photo of herself and her friend Taylor Rue, another cast member, dressed in sexy tank tops and expressions of concern, under the words “We wonder where our men were on January 6th. “Wall deleted his video and reposted fishing photos. Poche went on to convey a diversity of interesting content, from a slideshow about his travels to Cuba to a video titled “A Day in the Life of a Shelter Veterinarian. “It also promoted products such as eyelash serum and vegan deodorant.
Members of the “Love Is Blind” team have been following those trailers closely, some more sympathetically than others. A cameraman told me about the other people he filmed: “They’re crazy. “Another member of the crew, who felt enormous empathy for the mental strain the cast members were subjected to, nevertheless found it frustrating to expect to be treated like Hollywood stars: “It’s not malicious, it’s just the way things were done!If you had only done an unforeseen job, you would have not thought about it too much. One production manager found the actors’ court proceedings frustrating for some other reason: They were “spoiled” compared to the crew, he said. Yes, the applicants filmed for incredibly long hours in tense situations – for six weeks. He had worked the same hours – and more – throughout the year, betting on asymmetrical gigs with no chance of getting rich on Instagram.
No one was closer to the actors than the manufacturers. John Paul, who worked briefly with Ruhl, on the pod sequence, and with Wall and Pocket in his season, was in Vietnam when I approached him, where he was running in a show about middle-aged women looking for a fresh start. A promising athlete in college, he had turned to entertainment after breaking his leg, and spent fourteen years rising through the ranks of P. A. all the way up to manufacturer and director. He told me he likes to mix things up, from emotionally draining displays like “Temptation Island” to skill formats like “MasterChef. “
Dating exhibits presented their own challenge, she explained, requiring makers to play different characters, from the “funny girl” to the “wise adult. ” In “Love Is Blind”, where he was hired as a specialist in running with “difficult actors”, his role was that of “brother or father”, a guy passionate about sports and affectionate with workers. the actors felt comfortable sharing their confusion about women with him; with the candidates, he said, “I feel like I know how to ask them questions, because they’ve abandoned me so many times!” But I know how to touch their emotions, open them and make them cry. He described himself as a true believer in the series’ mental complexity. “Love Is Blind” presented him with a greater artistic challenge than other truth displays he had worked on: Instead of telling other people what to say, his task was to artfully create scenarios that elicited original responses, such as a scene from “ meet the parents. ” . Array “We can’t just pressure them to come to the altar,” he told me. “But you can get a woman to talk about it, pay attention to her and see how she feels, then see how the guy feels and then help her talk about it on camera the next day. “It was hard work, 24 hours a day, he says: “For a while, it will be part of your life. »
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Paul couldn’t go into detail about what had happened between Poche and Wall, however, he told me that his story began as a fairy tale about “a handsome vet who cared about the world” and “an undeniable guy who fished and worked with him. ” children and it was very promising. In Houston, the task has become more difficult. “I cried with them,” she said. I’ve wasted, you know, years of my life dealing with them. My beard doesn’t grow anymore because of it! But he was very close to the two of them. And with all the trials that have taken place, I see both sides. And it’s a difficult position to fill.
The truth is that the TV makers I’ve met are willing observers, gifted at getting strangers to open up. (Their career has nothing to do with that of journalists. ) But they also portray the inside of the Bubble, hone skills that seem much cruder to outsiders, add competitive interview techniques that, in jest, of a contestant of “Love Is Blind” were like “therapy, albeit bad. ” therapy!” The producer’s task is to create connections with the actors while judiciously exploiting the conflicts between them, transforming raw feelings into storybook rhythms. Some cajoled him, others were intimidated. Key to compartmentalization. Michael Carroll, who spent years as producer of “The Bachelor” and now works in hospitality, told me that, in his heyday on real television, “every two seasons he had the ethical moment of coming to Jesus. Then he came back, to make money, but also because the paintings were interesting. After leaving the industry, he now sees the situation from a different perspective, he said, but organizing castings would be the most complicated because of the way the industry viewed the other people he filmed: “For us, like. Array manufacturers for a long time, were just a cog in a machine. – were assets, to be honest.
In mid-March, Netflix aired the cast reunion episode of the sixth season of “Love Is Blind,” filmed at a Los Angeles studio. It had been an asymmetrical season, with only one marriage. Perhaps to compensate for this bad luck. However, Kinetic had assembled a consistent group of couples from past seasons, who functioned like a Greek choir, including Alexa and Brennon Lemieux. (The Hamiltons had been invited, but they had made it. Cameron’s Instagram bio read, “Yes, I’m still a scientist,” but he was looking for a Hamilton-style romantic retreat in Italy. Cost: $4,590 depending on your child. )
To informed observers, the meeting, arranged through Nick and Vanessa Lachey, seemed like a coded reaction to all the public allegations. The Lacheys began by touting the exhibit’s impressive rate of good fortune (nine out of 11 married couples were still together) and kept emphasizing one point: “Love Is Blind” is not a taste of the truth, but something deeper, an exploration of human closeness directed and designed to be observed through the natural of the heart. It is a privilege to be selected through Kinetic, a Privilege you betrayed at your peril. This theme culminated in the ambush of Trevor Sova, a handsome boy Prince Charming who, in Season 6, had come across as a great guy on the debilitating side of a love triangle. Now, Nick confronted Sova with evidence to the contrary: highly specietic texts he’d sent to an ex, before and after filming. The texts had been leaked to the media, which published them some time before the reunion was recorded.
As Lachey read the texts, Sova froze like a trapped butterfly. He stammered, mumbled incoherent apologies, confessed to his “toxic” behavior, said he had participated in the series for “good and bad reasons” and needed “real therapy. “”The Lacheys watched in amazement. Then Nick gave his verdict. Being in “Love Is Blind” is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said. He denounces the kind of actor who seeks fame or fortune, or who hides something from producers, or even dared to call the exhibition “entertainment,” as a stupid contestant from season 6 had done moments earlier. “For other people who come here for ulterior motives, we have to call you,” Nick said. “So, Trevor, I know you. ” If they asked you to leave, you can leave now, man. “
Sova broke down after telling his romantic capsule wife that he had been honest with her and would apologize, albeit alone, off-camera. In April, she explained in an Instagram post that she had had a panic attack in mid-air and now sees a “real therapist. “Soon after, his Instagram account disappeared.
This brutal confrontation suggested a philosophy on the part of the leadership: I am rubber, you are glue. In Kinetic’s eyes, the real exploiters of “Love Is Blind” were bad actors, not puppet producers. Not only was “Love Is Blind” not destructive to the intellectual fitness of its subjects, but it was in itself a kind of remedy for intellectual fitness, if the procedure was trusted. Ideally, it served the same purpose as it did for the viewers: “Seeing the exhibit is like therapy,” Brennon Lemieux said. , which describes how the couple used the screen to help them solve their own problems. When the Lacheys invited the actors to name what they missed most about the filming of “Love Is Blind,” they responded enthusiastically to the crew and food.
As I watched those events, I kept thinking about those cups with their thick gold coating, pretty cheesy for a pirate movie. The mugs appeared not only in the capsules, but also at barbecues and during family visits, replaced by a team member with the same old space glassware. Like everything else on set, the glasses had a use: since you might not know how much alcohol they contained, an editor could simply cut a scene in any order; If the point went up or down, you might not let it go. I know. This is the nature of all reality television shows, no matter how fun they are to watch: the strength is in those who design the experience, who have thousands of hours of footage of actors, who confess or show very private stories. that the company owns and is legal to transmit or not, at any time and in any order. Actors have their own options: they can accept the example of the producers, resist them or try to avoid them. Just like Vegas gamblers, everyone has a system. But space always wins.
When I spoke with Hartwell a few weeks after the special aired, he seemed calm but also frustrated. It was the first anniversary of the founding, and he had struggled to secure funding: philanthropic activities had other priorities. After a year of informal work, he sought gainful employment. Inspired by union advances at places like Starbucks, he was introduced to the movement in its infancy. While he expressed deep appreciation for Bethenny Frankel’s video gesture, he also joked that he’s like Michael Scott from “The Office” in announcing, “I’m pointing out bankruptcy”: “You can’t just stand up and demand a union. “He had big plans, for example, he hoped to cast a lead actor and in a lively Instagram post, he suggested that Kinetic collaborate with his organization, a concept that seemed to me the ultimate in long-term projects. He had a breakthrough: He announced that his class-action lawsuit had been settled for $1. 4 million.
Earlier this month, sag-aftra, which had not commented on the emergence of ucan, sent me a message of support for the organization and its goals. He said that “Truth TV performers deserve the union’s protection, as do other Hollywood employees in the industry. “This was a significant turning point given the history of the truth genre, which has at times pitted unscripted artists against scripted actors.
Of course, unions are just one means of achieving office justice. Ukraine’s intellectual health director, Isabelle Morley, described another model: an outdoor watchdog in real programs, something like a privacy coordinator or guardians who oversee the treatment of animals and children. young people on movie sets. All of these concepts answered the fundamental question: Is it imaginable to create a larger, real television office for cast and crew members? Or does gender depend on general control? The last time I checked Kinetic’s website, which indexed ads like “The Ultimatum: Queer Love” and “Man vs. Bear,” I saw something unusual: a page titled “To All Potential Participants. ” It suggested contestants “consider the imaginable discomfort and demanding emotional situations they might face before, during and after filming,” and there were detailed sections on diligence during casting and what might happen on screen. According to the Wayback Machine , this page was first captured on August 2, 2023, when Poche learned that she had been mostly removed from “Love Is Blind. “
For now, Hartwell sought above all to get actors to communicate with others, to recognize that they had rights. A lot of the trauma of being at a demonstration of truth comes from realizing that you were vulnerable to manipulation in the first place, anything. that only other people who have experienced this can understand.
In March, Renée Poche’s case ran into a problem: Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bruce G. Iaki rejected the complaint and denounced Geragos and Freedman for their “fierce rhetoric. “Poche’s lawyers were preparing a request for an injunction, which is similar to an appeal. But, if that is unsuccessful, his case will go to personal arbitration, and the ruling will rule that there is “absolutely no evidence” that handling the case in secret could harm Poche. “The court is stuck with the contract. That’s the contract,” he said bluntly. The N. D. A. resisted, for the time being.
But promising news came from a courtroom far from Los Angeles: The Tran Dang case, which took place in Texas, had won a victory. The Texas Court of Appeals for the First District had upheld an earlier ruling that Dang’s claims were sexual. Sexual Assault and Harassment Forced Arbitration Act of 2021. When your case goes to trial, it will be public and available to the public. It would be a sight to behold. ♦
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