Olivia Frazer is home minding her mum’s dog one Saturday night when she notices something odd.
Warning: This story contains language that some readers may find offensive.
A car is crawling past her house. Then it stops, right in front. The doors open.
“Then I just hear four or five middle-aged women screaming, ‘Olivia, you’re a c***. Die, piggy!'”
She’s scared. She doesn’t know who these women are or how they knew where she lived.
This was just another in a long line of abusive incidents that Olivia has experienced since she appeared on Australia’s TV screens in 2022. But this one was much closer to home.
Olivia went on Married at First Sight to find love, but instead, she lost almost everything.
She’s been referred to as the most-hated reality TV star in Australia’s history. So, how did she come to wear this dubious crown?
Olivia says she got a “villain edit” — where the show’s makers manipulate the depiction of a participant to paint them as the bad guy.
Married at First Sight boss Tara McWilliams has previously dismissed claims of “villain edits”, saying participants “get the edits they deserve” and are not wrongly characterised.
Olivia says the trolling she received for her depiction left her suicidal, and that in pursuit of ratings, the show abandoned its duty of care to her.
Her allegations come as the reality TV industry has been rocked by a series of lawsuits abroad against some of its biggest names, which onlookers say could change how shows are made.
The industry is notoriously secretive, with cast and crew muzzled by non-disclosure agreements.
But Olivia is willing to risk legal consequences to warn others of the risks of becoming a reality TV villain.
So, do “villain edits” exist, and did Olivia get one?
Casting a villain
Married at First Sight, or “MAFS”, is one of Australia’s most-watched reality television shows. The premise is captured in the name — participants are married off to a stranger, meeting for the first time at the altar.
The show dubs itself a “social experiment”, following the couples from week to week and asking: can a manufactured marriage work?
But as the novelty of the experiment has worn off after a decade on Australian screens, audiences have increasingly come for the drama — not just between the couples themselves, but between contestants.
Olivia says when she saw the ads for the first-ever Australian season of MAFS, it felt like destiny.
“I always felt I had to do the show because I was going to meet the person that I was meant to be with.”
A few years later, she saw that they were looking for participants. She was a few wines deep, having just broken up with her boyfriend. It was her time.
By then, she was watching the show nightly — an exciting distraction during a difficult period studying for her teaching degree while caring for her dying father.
And now, a casting director had seen her half-baked application and wanted to hear more.
“I felt picked, for the first time in my life. And each time I got a callback, I’d feel more and more special.”
But there was a hitch.
“[They] said to me, ‘We’re worried we’re going to put you in the shark tank, and you don’t have a backbone.'”
So, desperate to get on the show, she told a story of a time she’d “had teeth”. During a distressing friendship break-up, she’d cut up her bridesmaid dress for a friend’s wedding and sent it to the bride.
It was the gold the program had been mining for.
“I think that was where ‘we’re going to cast her as a villain’ started,” she says.
Industry insiders say the casting of a TV “villain” can begin as early as the audition room.
“The thing that usually gets people cast as villains is when they say in their audition tapes, ‘I’m a no-bullshit person. I’ll just tell it as it is,” says a reality TV editor, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardising his job.
The editor didn’t work on MAFS but has wide experience across similar shows.
Olivia would ultimately interview three times before making it onto the show, and when she did, the bridesmaid story would come back to haunt her.
“I have to tell the story and it gets chopped and changed to make it look like I’m this psycho who’s super proud of this absolutely outrageous thing that I had done years ago.”
But she suspects that to cast her as a villain from the outset would have made for a boring story. She believes the program makers wanted to surprise viewers with a narrative arc, by introducing her as an angel.
“With Olivia, there is a sweetness and a vulnerability due to the fact that she’s recently lost her father,” said one of the “experts” that guide the couples throughout the “experiment”.
“She’s gone through a lot of heartache in her life — difficult times at home, self-esteem issues, even struggled with her weight.”
Olivia says she was bullied for her weight for years and underwent weight loss surgery at 22. She told viewers she’d accepted being mistreated in relationships due to her low self-esteem.
Her then-TV husband, Jackson Lonie, was appalled to hear this beautiful woman who’d selflessly cared for her father had been treated so poorly.
They instantly fell for each other.
“There’s potential for an incredible love story here,” the experts gushed.
And that doesn’t make for good television.
‘Not tuning in to watch a tea party’
According to the industry insiders, after casting, the baiting begins.
“You’re taking a bunch of normal people and putting them in an exceptional situation that’s going to push them to have intense experiences … that will then generate real emotional responses,” says the editor.
“Then … you exaggerate them.”
These shows need drama — and their filming conditions are ripe to deliver it.
But those same conditions struggle to stack up as a positive working environment.
Participants on reality TV shows are employees and can be paid around minimum wage.
And this workplace can feel a bit like Britney Spears’s experience of living under a conservatorship.
Program makers control most aspects of participants’ lives, including when they can see other participants, and what they post to social media. The show can even post to participants’ personal Instagram accounts under their names.
Olivia says for much of the “experiment”, she felt like a “naughty kid” being “reprimanded” if she strayed too far, and having her personal devices taken “as a form of punishment”.
Across most seasons, participants are forced to live for weeks with their new spouses, until recently complete strangers.
In Olivia’s season, COVID measures further restricted their movements and prevented them from seeing anyone outside of the production, leaving participants “stir-crazy”.
“We were basically inmates,” she says.
When participants got to see each other at a weekly dinner party, it was like being let out of jail — and alcohol only fuelled the cabin fever.
Olivia says while alcohol was originally capped at the dinner parties, towards the end of filming, those restrictions disappeared, and things went, as she says, “tits up”.
But such drama was welcome on set.
“One dinner party, we were all having such a lovely time … to the point where [a program maker] had to come out and be like, ‘Right, you guys need to start drama or we’re going to be here all night,'” Olivia says.
“Australia’s not tuning in to watch a tea party.”
Eventually, it was Olivia’s turn to snap.
The target of her frustration was another participant, Domenica Calarco. The argument spiralled. Domenica stood up to leave. And then, in a moment that has gone down in reality TV history, Domenica smashed a wine glass.
The cameras kept rolling.
“I was so intimidated and scared,” says Olivia. “And nothing was done to protect us.”
Olivia wanted to file a police report and leave the show: “I’m an employee, and I should be able to show up to my place of work without fear.”
Program makers talked her out of both moves.
“Things were brought up like, ‘No, [if police attend] then the footage will be subpoenaed and people will lose their jobs because of this,'” Olivia says.
“They start sweet-talking me: ‘You can’t go. You and Jackson are our only genuine love connection. If you go, we don’t have a show.’
“I just felt so immensely guilty thinking about leaving.”
Domenica told Background Briefing she received a warning from the program makers following the glass smashing.
Endemol Shine, which produces Married at First Sight, did not respond to any of Olivia’s claims about filming conditions, or that she was deterred from going to police. Olivia ultimately went on to report the incident after filming wrapped.
The infamous nude photo scandal
After the glass-smashing incident, a fresh controversy arose. For the program makers, it was storyline gold. For the women involved, the decision to play it to a national audience would have massive consequences — for their reputations, mental health, and careers.
How exactly events unfolded has been contested. According to Olivia, she relayed the glass-smashing incident to friends, who Googled Domenica to put a face to a name.
She says she was enjoying some downtime with other participants when her friends sent through a screenshot of a nude photo Domenica had posted to her own public social media accounts.
The image was advertising Domenica’s account on Only Fans — a platform where creators can sell adult content to subscribers.
Olivia maintains she showed the other participants in the room to question why Domenica was allowed public social media accounts, which were forbidden by their contracts.
She didn’t see an issue with showing the photo around, as it had been posted by Domenica for the purpose of advertising — “so there’s no privacy expected in that situation”.
The program makers prompted another participant to drop the bomb at the next dinner party.
Domenica was blindsided and devastated, but defiantly told the camera: “If it’s slut-shaming, I’ll wear it like a badge of honour, because ‘My body, my choice, b****.'”
Speaking with Background Briefing now, Domenica says the fact the photo came from her own public accounts is irrelevant: “I couldn’t care less where she got it, it’s what she then went to do with that photo — to turn people against me, shame me, all those things.
“Revenge porn … doesn’t have to be someone’s photo that was given privately, it can be done in a different way.”
Olivia knew as soon as it played out at the dinner party that she had “ruined her life”.
She says she was “crucified” by the show’s “experts” for showing the photo to other participants.
The next day, she “could not stop crying” and asked to see the show psychologist.
She says program makers told her that first, she needed to complete a task: writing a letter offering relationship advice to Domenica.
This was not an attempt by the program makers to mediate the conflict between the pair.
“They wanted me to write all these trigger words, to criticise Dom’s voice, and basically just incite more of a feud,” Olivia says.
When she did get to see the psychologist, Olivia says their professional advice was to spend the weekend with her TV husband, Jackson, so he could look after her.
But program makers had another plan. The couple was tasked with spending the weekend apart — and Olivia says they took her devices so she couldn’t contact anyone.
Left alone, she spiralled. Later that night, Olivia says she told a staff member her “life was over” and she wanted to “fling [herself] off a balcony”.
“I was definitely suicidal, and it was completely undermined and not taken seriously,” she says.
Endemol Shine did not respond to the claim Olivia’s devices were taken, but her mum, Sandy, says she didn’t hear from her until the next day.
“She wasn’t allowed to contact Jackson at all,” Sandy says.
“So the very thing that the psychologist said, ‘this will keep you safe’, was then taken away from her. And this is from a girl who said that she wanted to jump off a balcony.”
The show psychologist told Background Briefing they could not comment due to their non-disclosure agreement. Endemol Shine also declined to comment.
In the show, viewers are not told of Olivia’s breakdown. Instead, she is portrayed as a clingy girlfriend struggling to spend a night alone.
Crafting the monster
In the reality TV production process, after the casting of villains and the baiting for villainous behaviour, comes the editing.
It’s in the post-production suite that a villain edit can truly come to life.
It’s foreshadowed in the opening pages of Olivia’s contract, which Background Briefing has seen:
“You may or may not be shown in a positive light; You may be shown in a way you consider to be embarrassing or otherwise unfavourable; Your appearance on the program may result in others seeing or treating you differently.”
The reality TV editor who spoke with Background Briefing says these clauses give editors an “open licence”: “[Participants] have literally signed away their rights of reply or complaint.
“There are villains and there are heroes, and people will be cast into these roles, and then you’ll edit according to those roles.”
The editor says there are a few techniques to achieve these characterisations. The simplest one is being selective in what gets included.
“The lovable princesses might actually be really bitchy and say lots of mean things, but that’s not the character that we want them to be. So you won’t include their bitchy things and you just make them look lovable,” the editor says.
“And then you have villains who are meant to be really nasty … and sometimes they’re not, and you really have to push to try and make them villains.”
The editor remembers one time this felt “uncomfortable and ethically questionable”.
“We ended up just kind of bullying them — taking a bunch of comments about how weird they were and making fun of them in a way that didn’t feel particularly nice.”
The second technique editors use is amplification — finding a moment amongst what the editor calls the “boring crap” that can be boosted into a storyline.
In Olivia’s case, program makers seized upon a conversation about Jackson going to the gym five nights a week.
In the show, it’s spun as a major conflict.
And then, the drama is further enhanced with a technique called “frankenbiting”.
Like Frankenstein creating his monster, editors will mix together unrelated elements from the footage to make their own beast.
When Olivia met Jackson’s friends, they asked how she felt about his reputation as a party boy: “I don’t feel very good about that — he’s a grown man, not a frat boy,” she said.
In the show, Olivia’s answer is spliced onto the discussion of Jackson’s gym routine.
“Those two completely different conversations got meshed together so that I was saying Jackson wasn’t allowed to go to the gym, he’s not a frat boy. He’s got to grow up,” Olivia says.
And it’s not just words that get spliced together out of context: this editor says it’s images too.
In Olivia’s case, she appears crestfallen as she watches Jackson work out — but it’s not because she disapproved of his passion, as the show narrates.
“I’d said, ‘Please don’t film me in the gym at any point,'” she recalls.
“I’m doing my best not to cry because I’m thinking, ‘They’re putting me in a gym so that all of Australia can laugh at the chubby girl working out.'”
Between the glares at the gym and the “frat boy” comments, Olivia’s storyline was complete: she was the crazy wife, threatened that her husband had a hobby besides her — and willing to undermine his health as a result.
“To be in one of these shows and then watch what comes out at the other end, I think would be very strange,” the reality TV editor reflects.
Endemol Shine did not respond to Olivia’s claim that she was misrepresented in the gym storyline. Married at First Sight boss McWilliams has previously told the Daily Mail: “We don’t manufacture storylines or characters. What you see is a reflection of absolutely what’s happened on the show.”
Controlling the narrative
When the show finally goes to air, the final phase of a villain edit begins: controlling the narrative.
Now, program makers try to ensure that no narratives that contradict the edit make it into the media.
“They would remind me in a very threatening way before every single media interview that I had signed a [non-disclosure agreement],” Olivia says.
This becomes a problem for Olivia, because when the show goes to air, the backlash is swift.
When the nude photo storyline airs, all hell breaks loose.
A petition is launched arguing that Olivia should be reported to the eSafety Commissioner for “image-based abuse”. About 120,000 people sign on.
A second petition demands she be prevented from working with children as a teacher — her life dream.
Domenica files a police report, and Olivia engages a high-profile defamation lawyer, costing thousands.
Olivia is summoned to a meeting with HR at the school she works for. Fearing what’s coming, she offers to resign. Her teaching career was over before it had even begun.
“My mum’s a teacher. If I had finished my teaching degree, I would be an eighth-generation teacher,” she says.
“They made me look like a criminal on the biggest show in Australia. And I didn’t sign up to be framed as a criminal.
“I signed up to potentially be a bit of a b****, that’s OK, but to be framed as a criminal?”
Even Olivia’s mum, Sandy, was waking to messages from strangers saying, “you should have aborted your child” and “she killed her father, didn’t she?”
“I probably felt like vomiting for a couple of months straight every day,” Sandy says.
As Olivia became increasingly suicidal, her mum, Sandy, reached out to the show.
When a representative phoned her, there was “absolutely no sympathy”, Sandy says.
“She did say to me, ‘Oh, Olivia’s done worse things than what you’ve seen on screen’ or something.
“I absolutely thought that was a threat.”
Endemol Shine declined to comment on this interaction. Olivia says she did receive some sessions with an independent mental health professional, who she felt was ill-equipped to advise on this magnitude of trolling.
For the penultimate episode, Domenica hosted a viewing party with posters of Olivia’s face crossed out. Some of Olivia’s former friends from the show joined in as the MC incited a cheer from the crowd: “Can I get a ‘one, two, three, F*** OLIVIA!”
‘You will change on the other side of this’
Olivia is not the only person to experience suicidal ideation after appearing on a reality show.
In the UK, the suicide of former Love Island contestant Mike Thalassitis led the country’s media regulator to rule that British shows must protect the mental health of cast members.
Rebecca Trelease was once a reality TV star herself.
“I wanted to experience the joy I watched on TV for so much of my life,” she explains.
“But I also thought they’d see us as humans still. I guess I was naive.”
Since her own “villain edit”, she’s spent years studying the industry, including what researchers have dubbed “post-reality TV stress syndrome”.
“You become really enveloped in this world,” she explains.
“You’re not allowed phones and you’re completely cut off so you cannot have any perspective anymore.
“And so when you all of a sudden exit that production, you are very much on your own. For me, I had a lot of panic attacks. I lost like 12 per cent of my body weight in the two weeks after being eliminated, it was that stressful.”
Much like PTSD, participants find themselves triggered by things they associate with the production.
“Putting on make-up would feel like I’m about to be filmed. I’m about to be interrogated. I found myself always checking if I had a microphone on, and it’s like this constant panic, ‘Am I being surveilled?'”
“It needs to be acknowledged that there is something traumatic, you will change on the other side of this.”
During the audition process, contestants are subject to a psychological screening process. But Dr Trelease says this can actually be weaponised against them.
“If you were to push back at any point and say, ‘I haven’t been able to handle being on the show’, it’s like, ‘Ah, but you have a medical certificate saying you could be!’
“It’s never seen as ‘clearly the show has done this’. It’s never the show.”
Dr Trelease says there’s a growing movement in the US to unionise participants, under the slogan “Cast members are people, not props”.
In a landmark 2019 ruling, Australia determined that reality TV participants were employees entitled to compensation for psychiatric injuries inflicted by shows.
But the reality TV editor says in the edit suite, little has changed.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone be overly concerned with the contestants’ mental health.
“We’re not psychopaths, and we’re not trying to hurt people or anything, but most of the time I think there’s this attitude of, ‘They know what they’ve signed up for … so we’re just going to make the best show that we can.'”
Life as a TV villain
Following the broadcast of MAFS, Olivia spent months suicidal and unable to find work.
So, in an ironic twist, she turned to a forum that wouldn’t care that she was a villain: OnlyFans — the platform at the centre of the nude photo scandal.
Within a few days, she says she made tens of thousands of dollars. But in the flurry, one thing led to another.
“I went beyond my boundaries really quickly. And when you do that, you always have to escalate,” she says.
“I’ve posted some things that I wish I could take back.
“It’ll impact the rest of my life, what I’ve done for OnlyFans.”
Olivia is unsure she can continue with OnlyFans, but says she’s still unable to get a regular job — people still shout from car windows when she walks down the street, or glare at her in cafes.
“If I was teaching, I’d be so proud of myself. Even when I was just an admin assistant, I’d watch the kids get better and better and be so proud of them.
“There’s nothing with OnlyFans that I’m really proud of.”
It’s been more than two years since MAFS first aired. But every time Olivia thinks the hate is cooling off, the show comes out in a new country.
“I think the last country it aired in was Sweden. And I only found that out because I started getting death threats in Swedish.”
On the flip side of the feud, Olivia’s nemesis, Domenica, is also struggling: she told Background Briefing she’s currently in a mental health care facility “working through the trauma” of the past few years, including how the photo scandal played out in the public eye.
“It’s crazy: everyone’s talking about what happened on that show at lunch for four months of the year,” she says.
“I imagine [Olivia] was going through that same [scrutiny and abuse] but 10 times worse.
“It’s not about who’s a villain or who’s a hero — there’s no winner here.”
Olivia’s mum, Sandy, fears her daughter will “never escape how she’s been portrayed”.
“I’m not going to defend everything that she did, and she has to wear that. But when you look at this season and you’ve got a guy who was an international drug smuggler and it hardly raises an eyebrow, and then you’ve got Olivia, who didn’t like the fact that someone smashed a glass at her and that got pitched to being a girl-versus-girl battle — I have a real problem with that.”
Olivia says she can take accountability for “what I said, and what actually happened”.
“But when you’re that low and that dark and they know they’re responsible for putting you there, and … they just let you be devoured… Yeah, there’s something really f***ing wrong with that show.”
This story comes from ABC’s Background Briefing program. Follow the podcast on the ABC listen app.
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