Editor’s Notes

No one would ever expect them to be friends, yet as soon as the cameras started rolling nonstop, Stephanie and Evie became best friends. Viewers would be able to spot it a mile away if they had an IQ higher than a pickle’s. I could at least see what was happening the moment we started to try to truncate 128 hours of filming into a two-part pilot. Stephanie was your typical alpha female. Though she was pretty, she had a mouth that could drive even the most gullible person away. Evie was similarly pretty, and had spent most of her introduction bragging about her popularity then had the nerve to wonder why no one liked her. Once they met, Evie clicked with Stephanie solely because she was pretty, though the side she was on was almost immediately blurred.

We watched the footage while clutching cups of popcorn and taking notes. We had to fill seven roles and push the girls into them one way or another. Evie made her role very clear. The first night, when Stephanie got shitfaced and ended up passed out in her underwear in the foyer, Evie had gone with a few of the other, less compatible girls up to the rooftop. Liquor was still flowing but I noticed that Evie was sipping on her drinks rather than guzzling them down like the other girls. She had said that Stephanie was pretty but had no brain behind that pretty face. We all let out audible “ooh”s when we saw that and made notes of the time to ensure that that was in the final reel.

Later, goody-two-shoes Allyson went back to Stephanie with the memory of the night fresh. Be careful who you make your friend, the youngest girl in the house had warned. We made a note to dub her the good guy of the pilot until further notice. Being who she was, Stephanie cornered Evie and tried to talk to her. She was rude but not disrespectful. I thought you were my friend, bitch, but apparently, you’re talking shit behind my back. What’s up with that? Evie had backtracked, claiming to be drunk when she said that and assuring Stephanie that she didn’t mean it like that. Stephanie, being trusting, decided to give Evie another chance.

As the first week went on and later the next, the dynamic between them became chiseled in stone. Stephanie and Evie would talk shit about the other girls that they were forced to share a house with (some insults were facetious and some insults were genuine) then Evie would tell her friend Fredericka what was said after Stephanie went to bed (casually leaving out what she said), and the game of telephone slowly turned the girls against Stephanie. By the seventeenth day in the mansion, the girls had a plan to get Stephanie kicked out. Evie agreed to take Stephanie to the club the next night to let the girls prepare to ambush her.

We watched anxiously as Evie and Stephanie (along with Allyson since she was actually a neutral person and we planned to portray her that way) got ready to go clubbing. Stephanie was talking about her boyfriend or something that feigned as being chitchat when it was really rather deep. Hearing this girl talk about her how ex had driven her to the house where she got jumped for the first time by his sister and a few cousins made us want to intervene sooner than we did. But, this was just the playback, so all we could do was watch and regret our decisions.

One camera crew followed Evie, Stephanie, and Allyson while two others stayed behind and watched the other girls plot. They started with her bed. Every season is the same. Her mattress was covered with bleach and itching powder and tossed over the balcony. We had intervened before they put bleach on her clothes but not before some of her stuff was tossed in the pool, used to clog the toilet, then torn and ruined. The girls then went to work writing “liar” and “fake” all over her profile page. We watched for two grueling hours while they ruined everything this girl ever claimed to be hers.

The most painful part though came when the three got home. Allyson, being a rather likable (though spoiled) kid, came in and was clearly stunned by the destruction. She was followed by Stephanie, who almost instantly went ballistic, and Evie, who wore her signature devilish smirk. Stephanie raced up the stairs, saw her room, and went charging like a raging bull outside. There, the opposing four girls seized her and began to mercilessly pound on her. Allyson, hearing the commotion, ran out and jumped in it, but Evie just stood back and watched.

Security raced out and the shit really hit the fan. Security did more damage than good by tackling the huddle, sending them all into the pool. This gave them the opportunity to try to drown her which meant sending out more security to physically pull apart each girl and get them all safely out of the water. At this point, the head security officer had called me at three in the morning, screaming and hollering and cussing like he’d lost his damn mind. I had to go see them.

The scene was gruesome then but watching it back was hard. Stephanie was leaking blood and sputtering since she had been underwater for at least a minute before enough security guards could get there to separate them. Once they did, our medical team came to assess her. All of the girls had wounds (except Evie who’d only got involved to save face) but Stephanie had it the worse. She had gotten water in her lungs, which immediately sent her to the hospital, but she also had a broken hand, a bruised tibia, a cracked rib, and an unsightly gash on her head that needed stitches. We had to cut filming her short, especially when she tried to threaten to sue despite the terms in the contract, and sent her home.

We had given the girls a severe verbal lashing the next day for the brawl and cut everyone but Allyson, Evie, and Stephanie’s pay severely for sending Stephanie to the hospital. Yet, watching it back filled me with such rage. The whole time, we had been rooting against Stephanie for her mouth. We called her fake, chastised her for talking shit, and had typecast her as being the bitch for this season. But it wasn’t her. The girl may have been a loudmouth who never bit her tongue, but the real bad guy was the snake in the grass, and the fact that none of us caught that until the very end made me sick.