The only time someone would actually want to be a loser — and the biggest one at that — would be while competing on NBC’s “The Biggest Loser.” From 2004-2016, obese contestants competed to lose the most weight for a cash prize. Almost a decade after it went off the air, those associated with the show are speaking out. And what one Black contestant is saying has everyone clutching their pearls.
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Joelle Gwynn, a Black female contestant from Season 7, appeared in Netflix’s three-part docuseries, “Fit for TV: The Reality of The Biggest Loser.” It’s been 16 years since her explosive on-air confrontation with trainer Bob Harper, a white male trainer, and she’s now revealing how the “abusive” exchange still haunts her.
In case you missed it, in one episode Harper instructed contestants to run on a treadmill for 30 seconds, but Gwynn struggled to do so. Harper, who Gwynn called a “little country bumpkin of a man,” seemingly grew frustrated, berated her, and told her to “Shut the f*ck up!” He shouted at her, “What the f*ck, Joelle? Every single time at 20 seconds, every time, what is it?”
Things escalated into a shouting match, with Gwynn telling Harper how she wasn’t “trying to quit” and Harper replying, “Well then do it, Joelle! Stop saying all these words… I’m sick of just words, words, words, talk, talk, talk! Shut the f*ck up, just do it!”
Gwynn recalled how she went “out of body. And everything went really slow motion and I was like, ‘Is this happening?’” She also alleged how she had “bruises from working out” and had “never seen someone get abused like that. It was very, very, very, very embarrassing.” She said the exchange “brought me back to home. I’m there because I would get sh*t like that at home and eat. So you cursing me out doesn’t help me.” Gwynn admitted she does “not care for Bob Harper” and had a final message to him: “F*ck you, Bob Harper.”
Harper shared his own recollection of what went down.
“It wasn’t about the treadmill,” he said in the Netflix doc. “It was — the picture was bigger than that. It was like her committing to something and finishing it. It wasn’t one of my proudest moments.”
Folks took to X to share their thoughts.
“They treated [Joelle] so poorly,” one person tweeted before saying the trainers “had the God complex. Imagine thinking you know more than a licensed doctor.”
Another called Bob “trash, but Joelle was a quitter.”
“Joelle seems like a cry baby to me. Bob didn’t do anything crazy to her,” one person commented.
Aside from her exchange with Harper, Gwynn’s issues with the series turned legal in 2016 when Dr. Robert Huizenga, the show’s medical consultant, filed a libel lawsuit against Gwynn and The New York Post. Gwynn alleged to the outlet contestants were given illegal drugs to help with weight loss and compared it to “rape.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, a judge later dismissed the case, ruling that Huizenga couldn’t prove the claims were published with “actual malice.”
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