“I Could Have Made a Good Run of It” – RealityNewsOnline’s Exclusive Interview with Survivor: Tocantins’ Erinn

We kept hearing about how easy Erinn would have been to beat – but she had plans if she had made it in front of the jury instead of being on it. She also had plenty to say about her time in the game and some of those with whom she played, so let’s get to it!

RealityNewsOnline: Hello, Erinn, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us here at RealityNewsOnline.

Erinn: No problem, love to.

RNO: We heard a lot about how your original tribemates disliked you – but why did they dislike you so much?

Erinn: I came into this whole experience on the heels of a really bad breakup. I was really having a tough time with it. I couldn’t function in my normal life, let alone in this crazy existence. One of the things I was really afraid of was, going through so much, that I didn’t want anybody to see how vulnerable I was to use it against me. I didn’t want anybody to take advantage of me. I didn’t want to talk about it.

When you’re going through it, it was debilitating and all-encompassing. It was so hard to talk about anything. The thing I do when I don’t know what to talk about is I talk about anything and everything and sometimes I can’t be shut up. If nothing else, I’ve learned that from this experience.

Also, I didn’t want people to know how well I knew the game and I’m a smart girl. I figured I’d stick around a little longer by not being a threat. It became apparent that there were no other puzzle people out there – every puzzle challenge we won, I had a hand in. You want to be valuable but not too valuable. I didn’t want to be a threat in any way, but I did that almost too well, I think. On the other hand, you had somebody like Sierra who only wanted people to know how smart and prepared she was, and those two things really clashed.

RNO: Along those lines, how did it make you feel to be referred to so many times as the easy one to beat if you’d been taken to the end?

Erinn: I think there was so much talk of that – as much as that was being said, it was being said to me like it was in interviews. When it came right down to it and I had to figure out the final three, how I would beat each of those guys, I had definitely worked out different scenarios for each one. I could have made a good run of it. With Stephen, I am on equal ground. I could say these are the people I’ve been with and I’m one of them, it’s because of them that I’m here and they’re there, on the jury. And Taj, I knew I had a vote from. As much as there was talk of being the easy one to beat and as much as I tried to convince them of that, I think I could have had a good showing.

RNO: So what would have been the rest of your case to the jury if you had made it?

Erinn: I would have made a different case for each of the guys. For Stephen, I had really thought it would be easy to go in and say this guy has ridden J.T.’s coattails the whole way here, he aligned with the guy who was making the moves and I did this on my own and had to keep coming up with new ways to stay in the game when I was doomed from the beginning. To go against J.T., it would have been so easy to say this guy screwed you all and I haven’t done anything – you could make a lesser of two evils argument. I think it would have been really easy to say they betrayed you, you thought you were friends with them, I never told you I loved you and then stabbed you in the back like they did. I never made you any promises.

RNO: Did you see anything on TV that, if you had known about it prior to voting, would have caused you to change your vote over to Stephen?

Erinn: I didn’t vote for Stephen for a lot of reasons. There is the first argument is J.T. is going to do such good things with this money that you want to give it to him.

When we went to Tribal Council, I gave Stephen an opportunity when I asked why I shouldn’t vote for J.T. – I had told him before that he had my vote no matter what but he couldn’t give me a reason not to vote for J.T.. That coupled with the fact that I wanted him to own up and say, “This is what I did, these are the moves I made.” But we didn’t get that, he didn’t want to offend and lose votes so he didn’t get credit for what he did.

Going back, he was the brilliant end of the two of them, saying this is what we’re going to do and vote out this person and this person. I wish he would have told me that because I know my vote would have changed and I think some others would have too.