For many trans viewers watching at home, it was hoped that There’s Something About Miriam would be a rare and welcome slice of representation. But it was anything but.
The 2004 reality dating show, aired by Sky One, centred around Mexican-born Miriam Rivera, as six British men competed for her attention in a sun-kissed Ibizan villa. Each week, the suitors would complete tasks and take Miriam out on dates, while the gorgeous model had to vote one man off after the other, whittling the list down to her suitor of choice. The lucky victor would win not only Miriam’s heart but a £10,000 cash prize.
The format perhaps doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the dating-focused shows that keep viewers gripped today, but the darkness lay in how Miriam’s gender was treated as a punchline. Miriam, who was just 21 at the time of filming, is often referred to as the first openly transgender reality star, however, her identity was deliberately concealed until the very end, when it was revealed as a shock ‘twist’.
In a montage in the first episode, glamorous Miriam, who passed away tragically in 2019, told viewers: “I try to be honest in everything I say but there is a secret that the guys don’t know. My big secret that I have is that I am not a real woman. I wasn’t born as a girl, I was born as a man. I am a transexual. I see myself as a girl because I have been living half my life as I am right now.”
Frequent crass allusions to Miriam’s genitals were made throughout the series, with narrator Tim Vincent describing her as ‘as much Steve as Eve’, declaring, ‘From the waist down, she’s a man’. In one humiliating cutaway, a doctor, confirmed he’d carried out a medical examination on Miriam and that she still had a male appendix.
As the weeks went on, the male contestants were left in the dark about Miriam’s gender identity, and their eventual reaction sparked shockwaves for years to come. As Channel 4 viewers tune into Miriam: Death of a Reality Star, we take a look at the most offensive reality show of all time…
The male contestants applied for a show which was initially snidely labelled Find Me A Man, and as one contestant, Aron Lane, explains on the six-part Harsh Reality podcast – which investigates the show – he was pitched, ‘three weeks in the sun, with a chance of winning £10,00 and dating a hot model’.
Unsurprisingly, There’s Something About Miriam was a total disaster. In the season finale, the Mexican model chooses 23-year-old lifeguard Tom Rooke over martial arts expert Scott Gibson, because the pair had built up a strong connection. Convinced he was ‘going to love me for who I am’, there were real emotions on the line.
However, things took a drastic turn when host Tim Vincent, of Blue Peter fame, asked the pair to stand back, informing the castmates of an unexpected ‘twist’. This is when Miriam is clearly told to say, ‘Tom, I am not a woman. I was born as a man’. The contestants then fall about laughing, and visibly upset she tells them to ‘shut up’. The star scene of the series ends with awkwardness hanging in the air after Tom agrees to go on a boat with Miriam and collect his prize money, but then u-turns his decision, saying, “I don’t want to spend a week on a boat with someone who deceived me.” He never saw her again after things went sour between the production and cast.
The show’s creator Remy Blumenfeld ended up escaping through a window to evade the men’s anger once filming stopped. Glasgow shrink Gareth Smith, who had worked on Big Brother, was called in 24 hours before the finale to talk with contestants and he immediately knew it would go wrong.
He explains on the Harsh Reality podcast, hosted by Hollywood actress Trace Lysett, who is also trans, that after the final scene, the men were so irate they threatened to murder the model. “It had the potential for absolute disaster,” he said. “They started with ‘that f**king bitch Miriam. I’m going to f**king kill her’. That was my worry that it would escalate, that they would wind each other up and it would turn violent.”
It was also claimed in the podcast that one of the men, a former marine, smashed up the villa in Ibiza where the show took place, and the burly bouncers hired to keep the peace ran away. The male contestants all brought legal action against Sky One and the production company Brighter Pictures. They alleged conspiracy to commit a sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury. The programme was broadcast after they had all been paid damages of an undisclosed sum.
While a lot of public sympathy at the time veered towards the men, who undoubtedly had not consented to take part in the type of show they were appearing on, Miriam was made into a laughing stock. This is indicative of a time when trans women were rarely featured on TV except as either the butt of a joke or playing a sex worker or victim. Even the branding of the show sought to ridicule Miriam, with the ‘O’ in the title designed with an arrow attached to symbolise a male. There was also a red button that appeared on the side of the screen during the finale for viewers to vote, asking ‘Could you tell?’
In 2017, the show’s creator Remy Blumenfeld told the New Statesman that the press and contestants were at fault, explaining, “I deeply regret the way her suitors, and subsequently the tabloid press, sought to deal with their own unresolved issues around gender and sexuality by making [Miriam] the joke.” He later added, in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s UnReal in 2022, that, “Our intention…was for viewers to watch it and relate to Miriam’s story. And to the question, ‘will they still like me, once they find out who I truly, fully am?’”
Despite the fallout from the show, Miriam did manage to get another role on TV but unfortunately, it was in the same old tired and offensive format. In 2004, the same year There’s Something About Miriam aired, the model was cast as a contestant on Big Brother Australia. Again she was hired to lie, given the fake name of Maria and tasked with withholding her ‘secret’.
Following on from these shows that were supposed to launch her career, and lead to her being accepted for who she was, Miriam’s life did not get any easier. In 2007 she was brutally assaulted in her New York apartment. Her friend Jeanett Ørtoft explained to Daily Mail Australia that “some masked men threw [Miriam] out from the fifth floor [of her New York apartment] and she broke almost every bone in her body.”
This version of events is backed up by another friend, musician Nikki Exotica, who explained on The Harsh Reality Podcast that Miriam was left unrecognisable after being hospitalised. “She was in a whole body cast, half her head was shaved, she had brain surgery, she had haemorrhaging, the whole front of her forehand was cracked open so they had stitches, she had her arms in a sling, she had her legs in a sling – she was badly messed up and she was in a coma for, I think, five days before I found her,” she said.
As a result, the charismatic beauty left America for Europe and shunned the showbiz lifestyle, but allegedly turned to sex work to pay bills which friends say took its toll on her. In 2019 they were shocked to learn that she had allegedly died by suicide in Mexico, which her friends and husband, Daniel Cuervo, emphatically deny, not least because her older brother had died that way but also because she had overcome the horrifying 2007 attack. Daniel previously told the Daily Mail he believed his wife’s death may have been ‘passed off’ as a suicide after she refused prostitution.
Speaking of the day she died, her husband said, “On the morning of February 5, Miriam called me [in New York] from Mexico, telling me she was feeling sick and vomiting blood, so I told her to get to the hospital. She called me again before leaving the hospital at 12pm and that was the last time we spoke.” Two hours later, Miriam was found dead in her home in Hermosillo, Mexico, and when Daniel found out he asked for her body to be flown to New York. He was told it was too late for authorities to perform an autopsy as she had already been cremated.
Although her reality TV career cannot be held directly responsible for how Miriam’s life turned out, it both reflected and fuelled society’s views at the time. Miriam dared to put her head above the parapet and unapologetically share with the world who she was and was met with laughter. For many young trans people watching at home, this was a message of rejection for them too.
Trace Lysette, the host of the Harsh Reality podcast, knew Miriam in the 1990s through the nightlife and ballroom scene in New York. She describes watching Miriam on TV with her roommate at the time. Trace says she was ‘so excited’ to watch representation on screen, but ‘upset that they were trying to make a joke out of desiring a trans woman’. In 2021 when her podcast investigating Miriam Rivera’s life aired, the actress took to Twitter to make her thoughts clear, writing, “Like many trans women from the 90s era and before, Miriam was a woman ahead of her time; a diamond in the rough that the world couldn’t appreciate in the way she deserved.”
The three-part documentary Miriam: Death of a Reality Star will air on Channel 4 at 9pm on April 29 and 20, and May 1.
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