Yahoo Lifestyle Parvati Shallow Reveals an Unseen Day 1 Fight Between Janelle and Sandra on 'The Traitors'
The 2024 edition of The Traitors put the American edition on the map, catapulting it to becoming a pop culture staple. It was largely due to the personalities, like the so-called "Duchess of Deception" in Survivor legend Parvati Shallow. Filling a cast full of celebrities and reality stars, conflict is all but guaranteed. And we had plenty of fights in Season 2 of the Peacock reality series.
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Perhaps most memorable among them was a spat between two-time Survivor winner Sandra Diaz-Twine and Big Brother fan-favorite Janelle Pierzina. The tension got so thick at one particular roundtable that the two CBS stars were cursing, "You're a f–king Traitor" back and forth to each other before Janelle's eventual banishment. But, in a recent appearance on "The Social Game," a podcast co-hosted by Survivor alumni Michele Fitzgerald and Kellie Nalbandian, Parvati revealed the tension between the two stemmed back to the very beginning of the season.
"I remember this moment so vividly," Parvati recalled. "We're in the Land Rovers. We're heading to our first challenge. I'm not a Traitor yet; it was Day One. Janelle, I'm sitting right next to her, MJ, sitting next to us. Sandra's in the front seat with her braces."
"Janelle was sitting next to me," she continued, "And she was like, 'Okay, so 100% we're all not Traitors. So what's going on?' And she started talking about strategy and who we should banish. And Sandra turns around, and she's giving it back to Janelle. And I'm looking at both of them, and I'm like, 'Both of you bitches are Traitors!'"
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Indeed, as the two women went back and forth, Parvati said her "head was spinning" from their confident assertions from the jump. The only thing that would make them so sure that the other was not a Traitor, in her opinion, was if they were both Traitors. She would be proven immediately wrong, of course, when she would be recruited into become a Traitor that night alongside Dan Gheesling and Phaedra Parks.
If Parvati's logic sounds at all familiar, it's because it's exactly the argument Wes Bergmann used against Boston Rob Mariano in the past couple of episodes of The Traitors Season 3. Indeed, she and her fellow Villain and Survivor winner have been circling around many of the same shows in the past year. In 2024, while Parvati was one of the stars of The Traitors, Boston Rob anchored the debut season of Deal or No Deal Island. In 2025, it's Rob's turn to don the black cloak and take to the turret, while Parvati is now opening cases and facing off with the mysterious Banker in the hopes of winning millions of dollars.
However, while the résumé of shows are similar, according to Parvati, that's where the comparisons stop. The way she reasons it, the two approach the same experiences completely differently.
"I was talking to Rob about this when we were hanging out," she reasoned. "People love Rob because of his consistency. And I think for me, it's about my adaptability. I'm like, 'You're not gonna see the same me on every show. It's gonna be a different person or a different version of me.' Because I wanna play to win. But I don't think I can play the same game twice, because it's different people. It's a different environment. And so my flexibility and adaptability, I think, is my greatest strength in these games."
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Discussion also turned to Jeremy Collins, who Parvati was on a tribe with alongside Boston Rob in Winners at War. The Second Chance winner was taken out in a fit of Survivor-on-Survivor crime, eliminated in the fourth episode. And Parvati believes that at least part of Rob's rationale came from what happened in Fiji back in 2019.
"These shows do not happen in a vacuum. They happen in the context of history," she explained. "And Rob and Jeremy's most recent history is probably Winners at War, when Rob voted out Natalie and burned Jeremy. And then Jeremy voted out Ethan and burned Rob. So I have a sense that perhaps that came in."
Parvati addressed Rob's tense conversation with Wes last week, after the three-time Challenge champ was caught trying to conspire against him. And she thinks that where Rob is faltering comes from his desire for control, and how that bristles against the concept of the show.
"Deal or No Deal Island and The Traitors [are] not a control game," she says. "They're just not. And even Survivor, I think, to an extent now, you can't have any control. Because of the element of luck, the more you try to white knuckle something and make it go the way that you see your vision. So you really have to be able to drop whatever it is that you think is gonna have to go your way to navigate whatever's actually happening. And then to be able to succeed in these games, I think you have to have that ability to let go. I think some of these big egos don't have that, because they just want to be running the show. "
