Eliminated 'Survivor' Player Weighs in on the Cheating Scandal

Ahead of this season of Survivor, two players were pulled from the game only hours before filming began and replaced by alternates. There has been no secret about why. The two players committed a major Survivor no-no: They purportedly attempted to collude before the game even started.

There has been speculation online and in the Survivor podcast world that the conversations between the two players were not isolated and that players have had conversations before the game starts in previous seasons. This apparently was one of the more egregious examples, and Survivor and Jeff Probst made an example out of the two who cheated and ousted them from the game, not just because they cheated, but to send a message to future players that pre-game strategizing is absolutely verboten.

There has also been speculation that the two who were booted from the game were not the only ones conspiring ahead of play. That speculation, as far as I can tell, seems to have been drummed up online without any actual evidence to support it. But the speculation was so far-reaching that a player on this season of Survivor has weighed in.

The rumors — and again, despite online figures insisting that it was an “open secret,” there is no actual support for it from anyone on Survivor or from the players — are that there was a third cheater who didn’t get sent home, and that the third cheater may have been Sophie Segreti (or Yellow Sophie, as she’s referred to on the show). That rumor got so out of hand, apparently, that MC — one of the two alternates who came into the game because of the cheating scandal — took to Twitter to shut down that rumor, at least inasmuch as it concerns Sophie.

If you’re curious about the context for the rest of that Tweet exchange, there have been other rumors (unfounded and kind of silly) that Sophie S. has been “purpled” (or given limited screentime or fewer confessionals in the edit) because, in an earlier episode, she complained that the reward for an early-season reward challenge was only fruit. “This is diet food! I want to see a carb or a protein. This is snack food. This is not going to give us that extra oomph,” she said.

That’s a doubly ridiculous assertion because if production was actually irritated by the comment, they wouldn’t have included it in the edit. That said, Sophie S.’s screentime was so limited in the first half of the season that it probably wasn’t until the sixth or seventh episode that I even recognized her as a player. But that’s mostly because she played very little role in the gameplay since she was on a tribe that never faced elimination prior to the merge.

That said, the first half of this season of Survivor was so dull that I understand why the online fan community would drum up speculation. They just wanted to keep things interesting. They are finally interesting again. Better still, on a podcast episode this week, Jeff Probst also seemingly responded to online chatter about the lack of villains on Survivor by saying that he’s interested in bringing them back. Personally, I don’t think he necessarily got rid of villains — there have been <>potential villains on the last two seasons who were just eliminated before they could show their true villain colors.