When I recently reached Wall on the phone, he was driving to his job, as a bouncer at a strip club. His version of events aligned in many respects with the stories I’d heard, although he denied yelling or being abusive. (He hadn’t been in a fight since third grade, he said.) He had done short-term jobs in construction, on a fishing boat, and as a behavioral aide at a “kid prison,” but was out of work when a “Love Is Blind” casting person reached out to him on Facebook. “I was a professional drinker at that point,” he told me. “I could hang with the big boys.” In the pods, he’d fallen for Poche, “my little barefoot Cajun girl,” only to have her pull away after she saw his bank balance. Wall told me that he felt “butt-hurt” by her judgment, seeing it as hypocritical, in part because of something that she’d told him in confidence, off camera, in Mexico: she’d once had an OnlyFans account, which she had since deleted.
As we spoke, Wall swung between praising Poche—and admitting that he’d blown the relationship because of his own immaturity—and making undermining remarks about her. (She was “a ‘free the nipple’-type gal,” “in the ninety-ninth percentile of both libido and income,” “a real freaky rich woman!”) He denied that he’d punched the car seat, done a dine-and-dash, stolen anything, said racist things, or acted in a threatening way. He did admit to calling Poche a “thot,” and to saying “Shut your ho-ass mouth” at the barbecue, while drunk. He had also used the word “fa*ggot,” but said that it had been a joke. In addition, he acknowledged trying to sneak a woman into the Houston apartment he’d shared with Poche—something he’d justified as payback for her rejection—only to get caught by crew and cast members. When I asked Wall, who told me that he had recently found God, if he regretted having signed up for “Love Is Blind,” he initially said that he’d do it all again, except that he would get a job this time. Then he changed his mind: “No, I probably wouldn’t take it. The thought of people knowing things about me . . .” His voice trailed off. “I thought I wanted to have attention. I don’t want attention.”
If you watched Season 5 of “Love Is Blind,” you know that none of these events wound up on the show. Neither did the wedding ceremony that Poche stormed out of, ending her relationship with Wall for good. Instead, she shows up onscreen only in glimpses, a star turn trimmed into a cameo: she makes wisecracks in the pod lounge, and later on, in Houston, she perches on a sofa during another woman’s bridal-gown fitting, identified as a member of the “Pod Squad,” and mysteriously wearing white herself. Wall is barely present. The decision to cut the couple’s story was made around April, 2023—the month that the Business Insider exposé appeared. By that time, the initial edit had been completed, and in September many crew members tuned in, eager to see Poche, their favorite character, have her story told, only to realize that she’d disappeared.
According to interviews that she gave after the season began streaming, Poche herself learned about the decision in August. She didn’t buy the explanation she got, which was that the story line was cut for time—the fifth season was eleven episodes, whereas the others had had at least fourteen—and that Kinetic hoped to spare her from reliving a bad experience. During this period, Kinetic also informed her that she hadn’t been cast in a spinoff dating show, “Perfect Match,” a competition show starring former reality stars.
“And now, from downtown!” Cartoon by Trevor Hoey Link copied
Wall had a different explanation for their story being removed, one that squared with what most people I spoke to had heard: a close friend of his had called Kinetic, warning that he might kill himself if the season aired. Wall denied to me that he had been suicidal—his friends had overreacted to his drinking, he said—but he admitted to being worried about coming off as a loser on the show.
Another factor may have informed Kinetic’s decision not to air the uncomfortable story of Poche and Wall’s relationship: the sexual-assault lawsuit by Tran Dang. Shortly after Season 5 débuted, Dang’s legal action—which had been filed fourteen months earlier—hit the press. Poche read an article in People in which Chris Coelen, the “Love Is Blind” creator, called Dang’s false-imprisonment charge “preposterous,” claiming that the set was a secure, supportive environment, and insisting that Dang had never expressed concerns about her safety. Poche, who was one of Dang’s friends from the pods, was livid—and began speaking out.
After Poche gave two interviews about the show, she received cease-and-desist orders, which she ignored; plenty of “Love Is Blind” cast members had done interviews without being sued. In a third interview, she talked in depth about her fear of Wall, beginning with that shower scene in Mexico. In Houston, she said, the production would cut scenes short when he got angry. “I think they were just as scared as I was,” she said. “Eventually, I was, like, ‘I don’t want to be with him alone. Like, I’ll go for filming, finish whatever we need to do . . . but I’m not staying at the apartment and I’m not even gonna be there during the day.’ ” The producers had agreed to this, she said, but nobody stepped in to protect her—instead, they kept urging her to give Wall the benefit of the doubt. When she told Wall that he frightened her, he guilt-tripped her, saying that he’d hit rock bottom: “He said it made him sad that I would think that. But he’s six-foot-five, three hundred pounds—like, a huge guy with a really bad temper!”
Whereas Dang’s lawyer was a Houston employment attorney, ucan set Poche up with Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman, powerful Hollywood entertainment lawyers who had connections across the TV industry. Freedman had negotiated exit settlements for many celebrities, including the “Bachelor” host Chris Harrison and the “America’s Got Talent” host Gabrielle Union. Geragos appeared regularly on cable news. Years earlier, Freedman had represented United Talent Agency in a dispute with Chris Coelen, who’d recently left the company. (Freedman has a legal history of his own: when he attended the University of California, Berkeley, a teen-ager claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her; although he denied that anything nonconsensual had occurred, he was party to a settlement of forty thousand dollars.)
Geragos and Freedman had begun building an extensive legal case against the reality-TV industry, snapping up clients, among them Bethenny Frankel and other litigants tied to Bravo shows. Neither lawyer watched much reality programming, but the working conditions in the industry struck them as shocking, even for Hollywood. “There are people signing contracts that aren’t just illegal—they void the entire contract itself!,” Freedman told me. “There’s an ecosystem in which people bring therapists to the set and then those therapists break confidentiality and share information with executives and executive producers—and even lawyers for the studio. I mean, it’s unbelievable.”
In January, 2024, Poche filed a counterclaim saying she had signed up for a show that bragged about screening out men with “red flags,” only to find herself engaged to an unemployed serial liar who was “homeless, violent, estranged from his parents and actively addicted to alcohol and amphetamines.” (Wall denies that he is violent or estranged from his parents.) Now the company that she believed had put her in danger was suing her for telling the truth. Geragos and Freedman’s goal was to nullify Poche’s contract—which, they argued, contained multiple illegal clauses, all of them standard for reality shows—and to blow up that prohibitive N.D.A. If it was declared illegal, a piñata of revelations about the industry would split open. “If this doesn’t attract you as a lawyer, you should be selling oranges on the side of a freeway,” Geragos told me.
For decades, reality fame was the monkey’s paw of Hollywood. You were globally famous but flat broke—a household name, harassed by haters, with no prospect of an entertainment career. In the two-thousands, the Kardashians blazed a new path, and soon afterward Instagram opened up the path to anyone. By the time “Love Is Blind” began airing, many ordinary people had “followers,” and reality fame was more of an intensifier, like squirting accelerant on the flames of social media. Even low-level stars could cut branding deals; bigger stars could make a fortune as full-time influencers, like Lauren Speed-Hamilton and Cameron Hamilton, the Season 1 couple, who run a YouTube channel on which they posted a sponsored fifth-anniversary vow renewal at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. Stars could jump from one reality show to another, hoping for a do-over—and the more star power you accrued, the better you were treated. In the dream scenario, you might host a reality series and join sag-aftra.
In the eyes of Hartwell, these perks amounted to “golden handcuffs” as effective as any N.D.A. They kept former contestants tied to companies such as Kinetic, jockeying for favored status. Though only a few made it big, opportunities dangled in front of other cast members, if they played ball. “I won’t name names, but a lot of the cast, before the show aired, were angry, railing against how they were treated,” Hartwell told me. “But here’s the thing—that feeling is rational! If you go on one of these shows, you’re not paid anything. You go through all this trauma, then all of a sudden you’re presented with an opportunity to actually make money off of it. . . . Who knows what I would have done.”
There were cast members for whom the experience felt worth it. Among these was Alexa Lemieux, from Season 3, whose experience resembled Nick Thompson’s, but with a happy ending. She, too, signed up on a whim, mid-pandemic, having swooned at Lauren and Cameron’s formative “I love you.” She, too, fell in love fast, in her case with a sales manager named Brennon Lemieux. They became the season’s “stable” couple, and were another cross-cultural pairing: he was from a rural, lower-middle-class Christian family; she was from an Israeli American family in Dallas that had become wealthy. Alexa Lemieux told me that she hadn’t found the experience in the pods cultlike, just “emotionally intense.” To her, the set had felt almost luxurious, a secure retreat where her requests (an espresso Martini, some sushi) were catered to by crew members whom she trusted.
The contestants, she argued, were all adults who had chosen to take a gamble. Nobody had to drink. She had stayed friends with her Kinetic producer and was especially close to Colleen Reed, her fellow-bride that season; only cast members truly understood the experience, she said. Both women had Instagram accounts on which they showed themselves trying out beauty products—and, in Lemieux’s case, maternity jumpsuits. She and Brennon were expecting their first child. For Alexa, the one downside of “Love Is Blind” was the viewers, who had sent antisemitic death threats and mocked her plus-size body. (On Instagram, she sometimes posted droll clapbacks to critics.) None of that would have been worth it if she hadn’t met Brennon, she said. But she’d never have met him without the show.
