Jeff Varner Does His Best In Facing Survivor Game Changers Controversy
Amid a torrid of (well-deserved) criticism of his decisions involved in Survivor Game Changers Episode 7, Jeff Varner spoke to outlets today.
It’s hard enough to talk about what went wrong on the path to a million dollars on a season of Survivor. The bitterness of defeat doesn’t get that much better when you stew on your loss ten months later. It’s even worse when you make a demonstrably poor decision like Jeff Varner did in the last episode of Survivor Game Changers, when he outed Zeke Smith for being a transgender man.
The exit interview, however, is unavoidable after you get voted out of Survivor, meaning that Jeff Varner had to face the music plenty of times with numerous outlets while recounting the horrific choices he made time and time again.
The rawest interview may have come from Entertainment Weekly, where Jeff Varner admits to the psychological damage this event has done to him and the steps he’s taken to right his wrong.
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"I will say that I have spent 10 months stewing in this awful, horrible mistake I made. I have been through I don’t now how much therapy with the show’s therapist, with a local therapist, I have met with and spoken to several LGBT organizations, I have joined the board of a couple of them, I joined a national study on outness. This has changed me drastically. But I don’t want to spend two minutes talking about my experience because this isn’t about me. This is about Zeke. And I can only profusely apologize."
Varner is right in trying to make the moment not about painting himself as the self-afflicted victim, but about the support Zeke Smith deserves. It’s just in the nature of Survivor Game Changers that he must face the press to talk about his time on the show. Little did he discuss his bad draw in tribe swaps or being the only player in Survivor history not to make the jury three times; it was about the mistakes he made.
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If you can bare to watch it, he also spoke in a live video chat on the official Survivor Facebook channel as part of their “Beyond The Buff” post-episode video series. It’s there that he makes the stunningly bizarre revelation that it didn’t dawn on him that he wasn’t out to the CBS production, as he thought that while his tribe didn’t know, America watching at home did. Remember, he hasn’t seen Zeke’s first season as of that tribal council, but he knew that America would have at home.
"I thought everybody knew. I thought his family knew. I thought his friends knew. I thought the people who had just watched his season of Millennials vs. Gen X knew. I thought Survivor had promoted its first – I thought Zeke was probably already a news item. We were at such a disadvantage at not being able to know who he was. So when I’m saying “I thought everybody knew,” I’m not talking about the six people there. I’m talking about the people at home. It never crossed my mind that I outed him. Never."
More from Season 34 Game Changers
- Survivor Game Changers wins GLAAD Awards’ Outstanding Reality Program
- Survivor Awards 2017: Best episode of the year
- Jeff Probst defends Survivor Game Changers’ outlandish idol count
- Big Brother 19’s handling of transphobia makes me proud of Survivor
- Survivor Game Changers: 5 Players we most want to play again
He then goes on to say he had a logical assumption (however flawed) that Zeke Smith wouldn’t go on a nationally televised show like Survivor and expect that part of his life not to surface. However, when he found out that assumption was wrong, that’s where it hit him that he had made a foolish, idiotic and ultimately dangerous mistake.
It’s clear that no matter whether it’s in the written word or in video format, Jeff Varner has done his best to own up to his mistake over the past months and that it’s clearly been eating him up inside. The amount of blowback he has received on a national level is considerable, and however malicious he may have been in the moment, it was out of ignorance that he performed these actions more than hate.
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What I mean to say, in a nutshell, is this; Jeff Varner will have to live with what he did. As harmful as his actions were to Zeke Smith, piling on him through social media isn’t justified, either.