What happens when people stop being polite and start getting
really invasive with a toothbrush?
The answer, for MTV reality starlet Tonya Cooley, was to get a
lawyer. Cooley and MTV’s parent company Viacom just settled a
lawsuit in which the plaintiff alleged that two male cast members
of Real World-Road Rules Challenge: The Ruins had violated
her with a toothbrush after she had passed out.
Cooley’s suit claimed that producers encouraged bad conduct by
providing unlimited free alcohol and rewarding misbehavior with
airtime. Viacom responded that the “Plaintiff failed to avoid the
injuries of which she complains. For example, while she was a
contestant on The Ruins, Plaintiff was frequently
intoxicated (to an extent far greater than other contestants),
rowdy, combative, flirtatious and on multiple occasions
intentionally exposed her bare breasts and genitalia to other
contestants.”
Is that Attornese for “she had it coming”? The brief against
Cooley could read as an MTV casting call’s list of attributes
female reality-television aspirants should embody. It is as much a
description of Snooki as it is of Cooley.
Cooley can’t say she wasn’t warned. A Real World
contract obtained last year by the Village Voice
ironically stipulated that cast members must conform to “generally
accepted social practices.” The agreement continued, “I understand
that there are risks in any such interaction,” which include
“consensual and nonconsensual physical contact,” as well as
gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, and other ailments seemingly more
contagious to people who can’t spell them.
This isn’t the first time The Real World has morphed
into The Rape World.
In 2003, a disoriented guest at San Diego’s Real World
house awoke on a strange couch with cameras staring at her. A
police report noted that cast member Jamie Chung described how an
“unidentified person in the residence told her that they had seen
the victim lying naked on the bathroom floor. The same unidentified
person told her that they had seen [the alleged assailant] leaving
the bathroom and saying… ‘I just hit that.’” A medical examination
revealed numerous internal abrasions consistent with a sexual
assault. Bunim-Murray Productions neither called the police nor
cooperated with them, requiring investigators to obtain a search
warrant. Ultimately, the district attorney didn’t file charges —
and the show’s producers edited out any reference to the assault,
the investigation, and the stonewalling.
What viewers saw didn’t resemble the experience of the program’s
“seven strangers.” What editors left on the cutting-room floor
did.
Pregnancy, like rape, is too much of a downer for The Real
World. “I am not currently pregnant,” the cast contract reads,
“and I agree that I shall not become pregnant prior to completion
of my participation in the taping.” The document further
stipulates, “In the event I do become pregnant during the Program,
Producer shall have the right, in its sole and absolute discretion,
to terminate me from further participation in the Program.” In
other words, terminate your kid or we’ll terminate you.
That’s just what one cast member did in season two. And
immediately after the last episode of season three, housemate Pedro
Zamora died from a sexually transmitted disease contracted as a
minor. But that Real World of repercussions was back when
the show wasn’t a vehicle for voyeurs to live vicariously through
the indiscriminate hook-ups of the beautiful people.
Producers initially cast the occasional fatso or ugly duckling
— those people we see in the real world but not on it. What made
the first few seasons interesting is that participants, unlike Ms.
Cooley and her alleged assailants, generally held ambitions
independent from a career on reality television. The early alumni
include a DC Comics cartoonist, a Wisconsin congressman, and a Los
Angeles County cop.
There’s plenty of room on television for sex. There isn’t much
room for consequences.
If only the real world were more like The Real World,
intimate encounters would never end in social disease, unwanted
pregnancy, and creepy guys misusing a toothbrush.
