Of all the reality TV dating shows out there, one will forever be known as the most controversial and irredeemably exploitative. On the surface There's Something About Miriam - which ran on Sky One in 2004 - had the same format as other popular programmes. Six handsome British men were moved into an Ibizan villa to compete for the affections of a drop dead gorgeous woman. They had to do various tasks and take Mexican-born model Miriam Rivera, then 21, on dates. Week by week, she voted one man off after another until she whittled it down to a final suitor she could go on a luxury holiday with.
However, this programme had what they dubbed a “twist”. Unbeknown to the contestants, Miriam was in fact a trans woman. The model, who did not seek to hide her identity in life, was told to keep this a secret for the premise of the show. She is seen in a glamorous montage in the first episode of the ill-fated series, explaining, “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.” The aim, of course, was to “other” Miriam and in case anything wasn’t clear they chose to humiliate her by cutting to a doctor, who confirmed he had done a medical examination on Miriam and that she had a male appendix.
As for the men, they had 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 are real emotions on the line.
However, host Tim Vincent, of Blue Peter fame, then gets the pair to stand back and tells the cast there is a “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 actions 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 was 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 where 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 a 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 fall out 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 unrecognisable in hospital. “She was in a whole body cast, half her head was shaved, she had brain surgery, she had haemorrhaging, her 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 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 taken her own life 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 believes 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 the 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.”
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