Acting Like a Brat: Big Brother 8’s Jen Breaks the Rules, Gets First U.S. ‘Big Brother’ Penalty Ever

It is a rare show that gives us two inductions into the Reality TV Hall of Shame for the same season. But it is unprecedented to have three from the same season of the same show! Yet that is exactly what we have for Big Brother 8 as we now add Jen to the list.

The reasons for Jen’s induction are mostly very different from those of Dustin and Mike. Those two were inducted because their poor game play took them from places of safety to being sent right out the door. While we’ll see that there is some of that with Jen, it is not the main reason.

What is the main reason? Where do we begin?

Let’s start with the fact that Jen is the first player in the U.S. version of Big Brother to ever get a penalty in the game – and she received two! That’s quite an accomplishment, considering this is the eighth season.

Jen had agreed, in an earlier veto competition, to be on slop for the remainder of her stay in the Big Brother house. But when she was backdoored onto the chopping block, Jen decided the rules no longer applied to her. She grilled up some burgers and chomped on other food, in direct defiance of her food restrictions.

Big Brother punished her with a penalty nomination the following week if she made it that far (this was not shown on TV, but live feed viewers heard about it). That didn’t stop Jen. She kept right on breaking the rules. So then Big Brother issued the punishment shown on the air – she received a penalty vote.

It could be argued that Jen’s penalty didn’t really matter, since it was a unanimous vote against her anyway, but that would ignore one of the reasons it was a unanimous vote. Other players were angered by Jen’s attitude and rule-breaking – we heard from at least two of them at the time (Zach and Eric), who specifically said they didn’t like people cheating and violating the rules.

Meanwhile, Jameka, who had agreed in the same veto competition not to participate in five HOH competitions, didn’t have the option of ignoring her restrictions. The contestants who had to pour nasty crud over their heads once an hour for a day did it. Other people who were stuck on slop for shorter periods went right ahead and ate it (indeed, Chicken George in Big Brother 7 was stuck on the same slop-‘til-the-end diet as Jen was this season, but he didn’t break it).

But violating her food restrictions isn’t the only reason Jen is being inducted into the Hall of Shame. She also destroyed somebody else’s property – specifically, Dick’s cigarettes.

Yes, I know, Dick was being a, well, dick. He was blowing smoke into her face when (or because) he knew darned well that it pissed Jen off. In her position, I’d have been upset as well.

However, she went too far by destroying his cigarettes. Like it or not, those were his personal property and cigarettes are not exactly cheap. Maybe it made her feel good, but it was a shameful thing to do.

Getting back to our main point, these two things are indicative of Jen’s behavior throughout the season. She insisted that she wasn’t on Big Brother for the money, but for the experience. Yet throughout that experience, she showed that really the only thing she cared about was herself. Witness her crying when she didn’t like her memory wall picture, her taking down the photo of herself with her mother, and her inability to have a conversation that didn’t revolve around herself.

With such immature behavior, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that at the end she threw a fit worthy of an upset three-year-old. Mad at Dick? Smash up his cigarettes. Mad at Big Brother and the other players? Violate the rules. It was the behavior of a brat.

At the beginning of this article, I said Jen is being inducted for reasons that are mostly different from the other two Big Brother 8 inductees. But there is one similarity.

In my RealityNewsOnline interview with Jen, Jen said she believed “I could have stayed had I not done the whole eating food thing, and had I really thought about it in that sense I probably would not have eaten.” In other words, not only did she break the rules, but she believes if she hadn’t, she might have been able to stick around. Putting herself in danger of leaving the game when she didn’t need to only adds to the reasons for a Hall of Shame induction, as that was the very reason for inducting Dustin and Mike. Yet she admitted she wasn’t thinking about that. What she didn’t say, but I would add, is that she was busy throwing a tantrum.

Jen’s actions were shameful from both a strategic and a behavior standpoint. She was self-centered throughout the game, but went to extremes when things didn’t go her way at the end. She violated the rules, she destroyed another player’s property, and she earned herself the first (and second) penalty handed out on a U.S. Big Brother. She even managed to get evicted with more votes cast against her than there were houseguests voting! Jen, welcome to the Reality TV Hall of Shame.

Do you want to see a replay of the action that took place in the Big Brother 8 house? Then click here:

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David Bloomberg is the Editor of the Reality TV Hall of Shame, and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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