Top 10 Disturbing Reality Show Moments Because of What We Know Now

“Celebrity MasterChef” (2006-)
In 2015, a British man named Stephen Port was arrested for the murder of four men and other atrocities. His crimes shocked the nation. Soon after, it came out that the killer had actually graced television screens before. Port was a professional chef, and had appeared in numerous background shots of the UK’s “Celebrity MasterChef” spin-off. The episode is fairly standard if you know the show. Competing celebrities on the ninth season were tasked with feeding bus drivers. Port just happened to be working in the kitchen beside them. If we didn’t know who he was or what he’d done, he would just look like any other employee.

“The Biggest Loser” (2004-20)
Controversial from the start, this competition reality program featured contestants fighting to lose the most weight and win the grand prize. No moment typified the flaws in “The Biggest Loser”’s premise than its first season finale. Ryan Benson walked away having lost the most weight. But what had he won exactly? $250,000 is nice, sure. Yet Benson has since talked about how he regained nearly 30 pounds of the weight mere days after he was off the show’s punishing weight loss regimen. The program’s unrealistic, dangerous approach to diet and exercise was bad enough. But Benson also described how it set up traps for contestants, wanting them to fail on camera.

“Bachelor in Paradise” (2014-)
When it premiered in 2017, viewers knew that something shady had happened on the set of the hit show’s fourth season. News had already broken that filming had to stop for several days over a potential incident of misconduct. Contestants DeMario Jackson and Corinne Olympios were excused from the season as a result. The scandal and rampant rumors left a cloud over the series. While the two were sent home after and filming resumed with the rest of the cast, select footage showed the moments leading up to the off-camera incident. Though details were still murky, knowing what was coming made Jackson and Olympios’ heavy flirting uncomfortable to watch.

“Kitchen Nightmares” (2007-14; 2023-)
When Chef Gordon Ramsay and his crew came to Joseph Cerniglia’s struggling restaurant, the situation was dire. The “Kitchen Nightmares” host saw the writing on the wall. Cerniglia’s lackadaisical approach to running his Italian dining establishment was going to leave him bankrupt. His debts were on their way to becoming insurmountable. But one specific comment Ramsay made to the owner, about his restaurant swimming down the Hudson River, took on tragic significance three years later. In 2010, Cerniglia took his own life. The circumstances of his death had an eerie, but purely coincidental, similarity to Ramsay’s comment.

“Wife Swap” (2004-20)
Kathryn Stockdale appeared on an episode of the ABC show, and espoused her rigorous parental philosophy. Children in her home were heavily monitored. For instance, they were not allowed to go on dates, watch TV, or play video games. Watching her explain her strict parenting might have been uncomfortable enough for some viewers already. In 2017, these scenes of Stockdale with her family took on a very dark tone. One of her sons, who appears throughout the episode, murdered her and one of his brothers in cold blood. Regardless of his motives, seeing these glimpses of the family’s life after knowing their story is enough to give anyone pause.

“Cristina’s Court” (2006-09)
On an episode of her court show, Judge Cristina Perez pointed out that her bailiff, Renard Spivey, has been happily married for over 27 years. The litigant in the case insisted that Spivey didn’t look too happy about it. Everyone in the courtroom fell apart with laughter before Perez moved on with the case. In 2019, the moment was given a chilling counterpoint when Spivey was arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife. He and his lawyers claimed that the deadly shooting was accidental, and he was eventually acquitted in 2023. Still, the circumstances surrounding her death made the clip anything but funny.

“American Idol” (2002-16; 2018-)
Sandwiched between the sometimes painfully honest Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul was the ray of sunshine on the original “American Idol” judges’ panel. But when Paula Goodspeed walked in, it was a different story. Not only was Goodspeed a major Abdul fan, but it appears she even made an effort to look like her. Cowell got in some digs at the hopeful contestant before she was sent back home, and that appeared to be all there was to it. However, in an interview with Barbara Walters, Abdul said that producers knew the contestant had been stalking her and let her audition anyway. Goodspeed’s story ended tragically when she seemingly took her own life near Abdul’s home.

“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” (2010-)
At first glance, it doesn’t look like anything more than a typical “Real Housewives” shouting match. Of course, it also spawned the hilarious “woman yelling at a cat” meme. But the story behind the moment is heartbreaking. Taylor Armstrong’s oppressive marriage to her husband, Russell, had been outed on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Russell Armstrong took his own life between the filming and airing of the second season, but the true details of their marriage were still being revealed. The entire season was re-edited after his death, and Taylor’s tell-all book went into more detail than the show ever could.

“19 Kids and Counting” (2008-15)
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s expanding family of children led to one of TLC’s most successful programs. The long-running series followed the family through major life milestones. In its second season, the eldest Duggar son, Josh, got married. His wedding to Anna Keller was a major event in the show, featuring Duggar singing a song about being loyal to his wife. But the whole scene becomes deeply disturbing when you know what emerged about Duggar afterward. Not only was he repeatedly unfaithful to his wife, but he was revealed to have committed horrendous crimes. Then, in 2021, he was convicted for additional deeply disturbing ones, though we cannot go into detail about them here.

“Megan Wants a Millionaire” (2009)
This VH1 dating show saw Megan Hauserman entertaining the affections of several men. One of her hopeful suitors, Ryan Jenkins, initially appeared to be a fairly normal guy with a somewhat raunchy sense of humor. We never got to see how close he got to winning her heart, though. In fact, the first season never finished airing. After three episodes, the network pulled the plug when news broke that Jenkins was the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. The story only got more distressing from there, as he was charged but took his own life. “Megan Wants a Millionaire” was axed as a result, as was a scheduled season of another VH1 show Jenkins competed on.