A petition to remove Big Brother 15 cast member Amanda Zuckerman from the game has reached over 7,500 signatures on Change.org. The signups have shot through the roof over the past few days as Amanda engaged in constant harassment and verbal torture of current Head of Household Elissa Slater. Combined with the rampant conspiracy theories about Big Brother 15 being rigged for Amanda to win, fans are in an uproar to get the former reality TV producer removed from the show. Amanda’s history of questionably racist and homophobic remarks on the show isn’t helping her reputation much either.
As Amanda herself has stated on the 2013 Big Brother Live Feeds, this is the first week she has not “controlled” what will happen at the live eviction on Thursday. Her response to this sudden lack of power has been to let loose in a series of nasty attacks against HoH Elissa. Half of this was simply Amanda absolutely hating Elissa and how Elissa has stolen her power in the house. The other side to the personal insults and harassment was a very weird strategy to “Evel Dick” her into doing what Amanda wanted. The worst part and the most dangerous statements for Amanda to make were actual threats about killing Elissa in her sleep and wanting to do violence to her.
SPOILER WARNING: This post contains Big Brother spoilers from the Live Feeds about information from inside the house that has not yet aired on the CBS network show. Proceed with caution.
The strange tactic started off with a crazy idea to get Elissa worked up and then send Andy in to comfort her, hopefully earning her affection and preventing him from going up on the block as a replacement nominee. This was combined with an idea for everyone to say they would vote out Andy Herren instead of Aaryn Gries if he went up to try to get Elissa to put up GinaMarie Zimmerman instead. Amanda was trying to save both of her 3AM alliance members, Andy and Aaryn, by getting GM put up as the sacrificial lamb. Even McCrae Olson got in on the action and called Elissa some very rude and offensive things, like telling her she was a rich b*tch who believes she is better than everyone else.
Amanda’s attacks became so aggressive, nasty and personal that the Big Brother 15 Live Feeds actually went dark for almost an HOUR at the height of her harassment on Sunday. When they came back, Amanda was still going after Elissa but we found out she had been warned by production about her behavior. (She was later seen reading the rulebook to find out exactly what she is and is not allowed to do.) Spencer Clawson also stated at one point that production had threatened penalty noms if the disrespect in the house got to be too much.
This strategy went absolutely nowhere and Elissa went right ahead and put Andy up on the block after all. She didn’t believe the house would vote out Andy over Aaryn. Plus, she’s punishing Andy for being a rat fink and betraying her and ally Helen Kim last week, helping to get Helen evicted. She doesn’t expect the house to really flip against Andy but honestly she doesn’t seem to care that much if they did.
Even with all of this, Amanda kept up her nasty behavior toward Elissa on Monday for most of the day. She got angry that no one else was treating Elissa so badly. After McCrae and Elissa had a talk about their fight and apologized to each other, Amanda got pissed at McCrae for even speaking to Elissa. The feud went on well into the evening until, finally, Amanda and Elissa actually sat down and talked civilly to each other for a while. At the end, they even hugged it all out. (Although we think it was the fakest make up hug ever.)
Big Brother 15 fans are not so forgiving as Elissa Slater appears to be (or at least acts like she is to Amanda and McCrae). No amount of fake hugs or non-apology apologies are going to keep a horde of viewers clamoring for Amanda Zuckerman to be removed from the show or calling her out for being a horrible person. Personally, we’ve seen much, much worse harassment and attacks in previous seasons than anything Amanda has done on the show so far. Short of physical violence (such as Willie Hantz’s chest bump last season), CBS has seldom taken drastic action for any kind of personal battle between HouseGuests — no matter how verbally nasty it gets.
We don’t expect the Change.org petition to remove Amanda to have any real effect, although it is impressive that it collected the first 5,000 signatures in two days, according to GossipingPens.com. Nor do we think CBS is likely to penalty nomination Amanda or remove her from the house unless things turn physical between her and another HouseGuest. Or she ramps the bad behavior up so far that the game stalls completely just to deal with her drama.
Let’s just hope that everyone in the house who is just as sick of Amanda’s sh*t as we are all can manage to bond together next week and get her the hell out. Unless she or McCrae wins Head of Household, in which case we can already see the conspiracy theories about how she has been picked to win BB15 exploding out like fireworks on the fourth of July.
