Mr. Bachelor Spoiler, Reality Steve (Steve Carbone), has been in the news lately after breaching his agreement with ABC. Steve even had to pull all his Bachelor Pad 3 spoilers! And in a twist of amazing irony, all the bloggers and magazines that copy Reality Steve spoilers will now be able to print them while Reality Steve will not! (Disclaimer: We occasionally source Reality Steve on stories, but only on non-spoilers. WE HATE THE SHOW SPOILERS!)
Steve was sued in December for approaching contestants from The Bachelor cast and crew, which I think indicates some serious hubris and and a bit of a clue about who the source behind the spoilers may be.
Bachelor producers have been desperate according to ex-contestant/winner Jesse Csincsak, winner of The Bachelorette Season 4, to find out who Reality Steve’s source is. Apparently Mike Fleiss’ production company, Next Entertainment, offered him $30K to investigate the leaks, but Csincsak couldn’t crack it.
Initially, I thought it may be someone in the airline industry, since The Bachelor doesn’t sequester contestants the way other shows do, since you can’t lie about your name when flying. But I quickly dismissed that theory because the informant always has way too many details–especially about what happens on every episode.
I know there is some speculation it’s editors of the show, but I don’t buy it. I just don’t think they’d risk their jobs like that. Not to mention they all sign a $5 million dollar non disclosure. They know how much effort Fleiss has put into investigating the source, and they know there is a serious bounty on their heads, so an editor would have to be scared of any kind of electronic communication with Carbone as well as of receiving payment…all for what?
Steve may make decent money now, but back when the sources started coming to him he didn’t make anything to share with them. Plus, he gets details that an editor would not get like that Arie was texting several girls during the taping of the show and the fact that a certain person has for sure inked a deal to be the next Bachelor.
I never thought the informant was someone who worked on the show or even in Hollywood for that matter. In fact, my hypothesis is this: I believe that Reality Steve’s “source” may be in the NSA (National Security Agency) or a private contractor attached to NSA and immune from wiretapping laws.
Let’s start by looking at what we know about Reality Steve. And let’s just stick to the parts that could give us clues, because honestly we aren’t all that interested in his full bio.
Could he have connections in the NSA? (Incidentally US Courts just confirmed warrant-less wiretapping is legal. So, if this is how he is getting his information, then it would be considered “legal,” as Reality Steve constantly professes his means of acquiring spoiler information are).
These excerpts are from a 2010 interview with Zap2it. They show that Reality Steve is basically a dude and seemingly wouldn’t watch a chick show like The Bachelor by choice.
He started as a sports broadcaster in the Bronx and supposedly got to know some people in the entertainment industry in L.A.. He told HairBoutique, “I have friends” and “people who know people.”
(Which I think is a complete red herring to throw people off the truth. Does anyone really think there are people in the Entertainment Industry that just randomly started going to this guy who made no money on his reality website to give him spoilers? Why would they do that?)
He moved back to Dallas Texas in 2006 — long before Jason Mesnick’s season. He started his reality TV blogging back in 2003 with the huge flop / Bachelor knock-off Joe Millionaire. And he started blogging about The Bachelor in 2003 during Trista Rehn Sutter’s season of The Bachelorette.
So here are some key questions in Zap2it:
Where do you get your scoops?
“The [Jason/Molly/Melissa] news fell into my lap, this information came to me. They find me. They know I’m an independent party here, I have no affiliation with ABC and I’m willing to expose the show.”
Really, Steve? So they came to you of all people on the planet? It’s not like these people were whistleblowers blowing the lid off a pedophile ring, they are revealing Bachelor spoilers. If they have this precious info to share, they are gonna go to someone who will pay them.
What about this current season with Jake Pavelka as The Bachelor?
“Going into the Monday, Jan. 4 premiere I had nothing on this season. The only thing I knew was about a group date in Hollywood at the comedy club. Then around 3 o’clock that afternoon someone came to me and basically told me the whole season. It was completely out of the blue, someone I had never spoken to before, a completely different source than someone who gave me the Jason/Molly/Melissa stuff.”
(Pah—lease!!! There is a line of Hollywood insiders coming to Reality Steve — putting their amazing Hollywood jobs on the line and breaching their $5 million dollar non-disclosure contracts to share spoilers with this guy??? Spoilers they don’t share with anyone else?)
You have multiple Bachelor sources?
“I have more than probably five sources. More and more people are coming to me with tidbits here and there. I can tell if somebody’s lying to me. But I was so confident in my sources this year … I had no reason to doubt them, they had no reason to lie to me.”
(Again, NO WAY!!! NO WAY are there 5 people working in Hollywood dishing out details to Reality Steve, especially knowing how intensely he has been investigated by ABC. Way too risky… and what’s the upside? Reality Steve gives you $1,000 bucks for a scoop? If these 5 people had a valuable scoop, they’d go to The Enquirer, or almost anywhere else, first!)
How do they contact you?
Most people email me. Some people contact me on Facebook first.
(No way. Not true! I don’t believe it for a split second. People are just coming to you on Facebook and leaving an electronic paper trail so they can be sued? This story is so ridiculous it is laughable!)
So if there aren’t Hollywood Insiders coming to Reality Steve, then how does he get so many salacious and true details? As much as we dislike Reality Steve, he is right almost 100% of the time, unlike gossip mags that are right occasionally and obviously would pay a source way more. And the information is so detailed and comprehensive it couldn’t be from 1 or 2 rogue employees on the show.
So this brings me to my theory and it’s pretty simple: Steve must have a friend that works for an NSA private contractor. And as insane as that may sound, consider the tsunami of stories about unethical behavior by government agencies.
Look at the Secret Service prostitution scandal, the endless SEC porn scandals, the Office of Mineral Management cocaine and bribery scandal. Not to mention the big NSA wire-tapping scandal where NSA workers were listening to random conversations of American citizens!
There is an ENDLESS list of stories of government employees grossly abusing their power in amazingly dumb and immature ways.
And even after that NSA story came out nothing changed…warrant-less wire-tapping is still legal and is still happening.
Keith Olbermann reported a story with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein who said:
“The US Government used AT&T’s cooperation to spy not only on overseas communication but to vacuum up virtually all of America’s use of the internet for years — email, Googling, websurfing, phone — thanks to AT&T secure rooms like 641A in San Francisco, accessible only to those cleared by the NSA. The company used splitters to send room 641a a duplicate of every fiber optic signal routed thru its facilities and involved not just AT&T customers but every internet and telecommunications company and virtually all email and web traffic in the country without a warrant, without any mechanism for separate domestic from overseas without separating suspect from citizen.”
So you can see it would be quite easy for someone in these NSA listening rooms to pick and choose conversations to listen to — having nothing to do with national security.
Reality Steve has also said time and time again what he’s doing is “legal”…. well guess what? Warrant-less wire-tapping is totally legal, confirmed Tuesday August 7th: “The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.” In the secret rooms, NSA taps into U.S. communication networks to record all transmissions, domestic and international, including voice, data, email, Internet searches, etc. The data is sent to:
- NSA Georgia at Fort Gordon, Augusta, Georgia
- NSA Texas at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
- NSA Hawaii, Oahu
- Domestic NSA listening posts
- Overseas listening posts
- Satellite communications captured by the Aerospace Data Facility at Buckley Air Force Base, Aurora, Colorado
Warrant-less wire-tapping was made legal by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008 which made intercepts legal and allowed telecoms that agreed to allow NSA to tap into their communications, immune from prosecution and lawsuits.
So why would a buddy of Reality Steve’s give him salacious details about a reality TV show? It probably started as just a fun thing where his buddy randomly came upon this info, and then Steve really started making money. Then he probably struck a deal with the friend, or maybe with multiple people at these NSA contracting companies, to get this info and they’d share the profits. (Keep in mind NSA is all just private companies, private contractors and they are immune from lawsuits).
His source is clearly someone that does not feel they are in anyway vulnerable to getting caught so they are probably part of an NSA culture of employees listening to conversations in an unethical manner. If “everyone’s doing it,” why worry?
Apparently, it was Erica Rose that turned Carbone in for contacting her and discussing details of Bachelor Pad 3. But Erica does not in anyway appear to be a “source”. Steve Carbone wrote that he was “informed by the lawyers for the production company of the Bachelor franchise that they believed a breach had occurred in the agreement I signed,” a reference to his settlement.
Looks like Erica and Steve took their relationship off-camera according to CNN/Entertainment Weekly. Carbone claims that his relationship with Rose was based on “non-Bachelor/ette/Pad related stuff, and someone that, up until recently, I thought was a good friend. Boy was I wrong.”
Ha! Sounds like Erica was a Honey-Pot from ABC. Bravo ABC! Bravo!
“She turned over a few of my texts — taken out of context — to the producers of the show, which led to the barrage of tweets from Fleiss and a demand letter from lawyers for the production company of the Bachelor franchise,…In their letter, they stated that they wanted me to do two things. No. 1. Take down all Bachelor Pad spoilers that I’d already posted or were about to post about this season. No. 2, pay a fine.”
Steve claims he did both, but it will “NOT prevent me from spoiling the finale of this season that they go back to film later this month, nor future Bachelor or Bachelorette seasons. It’s just that because communications continued with Erica Rose which they feel was a breach of the agreement that I signed, even though I don’t, it’s smarter to just do what they say in this instance and chalk it up to a lesson learned.”
Rose tweeted this response: “I was just doing what I needed to do to protect myself legally. I wish that it did not have to happen because we were friends.”
I mean the sheer audacity of Steve indicates to me that this “source” is way above the heads of ABC and has nothing to do with Hollywood. He never backs down in his belief that what he is doing is “legal”. If I were ABC, I’d investigate this angle. Who are his friends in Texas and what companies do they work for?
We’d love to see an end to his spoilers!
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