When Reality Gets Real

I think in one of my first posts I blogged about my stupid fascination with reality shows, mostly the VH1 ones. Mainly, these are easy to keep on and listen to while you're gaming as you can get a good sense of what's going on without having to really pay attention. I've become growlying annoyed with each new one, but they do have entertainment value and under that guise I began to watch a new one called Megan Wants a Millionaire. This show featured Megan (duh) Hauserman(pictured to the left), a reality veteran who you may have seen on one of the shows she was on or from her tussle with Sharon Osborne on stage at a reunion show. I caught her a little bit from Rock of Love and she was more reserved than she was on subsequent shows where she turned into the alpha princess thus landing her a show of her own. The premise of the show has been, gather 17 millionaires who will vie for Megan's love through competitions and by shelling out cash on her for gifts and extravagant dates. Each guy's net worth is shown below them as they talk. By pattern, each week people are eliminated then they go to some island resort where she'll pick from 2 or 3 remaining contestants. The show has only aired 3 times and on the very last show you saw Megan on a private date with one of the millionaires Ryan. Ryan paid for all the extra's for the date, the pricy restaurant, the pricy meal, the pricy Aston Martin sporster to take her out. Episode 4 was to have aired this past Sunday night.

Last week while doing other things I overheard Robin doing the news on Howard Stern. She mentioned the death of a model that was so brutal they could only identify her by the serial numbers on her breast implants. This model was Jasmine Fiore. Turns out that Fiore was married to Ryan Jenkins, the Ryan from Megan's show and that he had reported her missing prior to the police finding her stuffed into a suitcase with her teeth pulled out and finger tips cut off. Jenkins quickly became a suspect and over the course of last weekend led police and Canadian Mounties on high speed boat chases on the NW coast of the U.S. until finally giving them the slip and dissappearing. Reportedly, he showed up to a motel with a young attractive woman who checked them in and subsequently left him in the room alone all weekend. He was only seen stepping out to smoke a cigarette, but otherwise wasn't recognized due to a scruffier apperance. When it came time to check out the owners of the motel found him inside dead. Apparently, he had hung himself with his own belt.

VH1 has since issued statments distancing itself from the production company of the show and cancelling the rest of MWAM, where Ryan was a finalist for Megan and another show he appeared on I Love Money 3 where he supposedly was the winner of the $250,000 prize. It seems that the production company, 51 Minds, does background checks on all the contestants but due to some technicality Ryan's previous brush with the law was not on his normal record and didn't show up. And this isn't the first time reality contestants have passed checks and have been found out to have a past uncomplimentary to whatever show they were on. Apparently our Ryan has a history of anger and female abuse. From reading the story on Wikipedia, which has a very thorough account surprisingly, apparently he met and married Jasmine within 2 days after he was on the MWAM show. They had a rocky relationship, she may or may not have had a wandering eye, there's even a text from him to her where he attempts to sweet talk her to coming back to him which she sadly did. In the coming weeks we may learn more about what sent him over the edge, but this is a sad and gruesome story. How it will affect future reality shows remains to be seen, these types of characters make the shows due to their raunchy and lewd behavior. Will someones brutal death be cause to tame these shows, will they fade out or will they stay the course and profit from the exposure? Certainly the stock on the remaining MWAM shows as well as the I Love Money 3 shows has just gone up and how long will it be before these shows are put out there so we can watch a psychopath in his normal environment? Will VH1 dump 51 Minds and employ another company to lease shows from? Time will only tell.

You can read more about all of thie by going to Wikipedia.com and searching Ryan Jenkins. It's an scary sad tale.