Romani participants on Czech "reality" TV show now receiving death threats, claim they were manipulated by producers

The family is also alleging that the TV Nova producers pressured Petra into discussing the welfare benefits the family receives during the taping. The death threats read as follows: “You black, lazy fucks are living off of our taxes. I would shoot all you black gypsy monkeys dead because you don’t work and you cost us CZK 110 billion annually. Your daughter is already as fat as a pig, by the time she’s 20 she’ll weigh 150 kg. Somebody else pays for you to stuff yourselves and live where you do. You black whores, you’ll be dead of cancer in one year. DEATH to all black mugs living on our taxes!!!!!”

“When I read that letter I felt sick. I knew, when my girlfriend and I went on ‘Wife Swapping’, that everybody would criticize us, but I never anticipated that somebody would send something so disgusting to my address. I don’t know what such a person is capable of, so we are afraid, after all, we have two young children,” Marian (25) told news server Romea.cz.

The main “subject” of the episode, which was thoroughly covered on the websites of different tabloid news servers and on the Facebook profile of “Wife Swapping” (in Czech, Výměny manželek) even before it aired, is the fact that Marian has not had a job for the last five years and lives on welfare. Petra said during the taping that they receive almost CZK 27,000 [EUR 1,065] per month in benefits and survive on that without any problems.

For many viewers, that information was like the proverbial matador waving a red cape at an angry bull. “[The producers] wouldn’t leave my girlfriend alone. In that other family nothing was happening, so they pressured her over and over to talk about the welfare and say it’s ok. She succumbed to the pressure, basically she said what they wanted to hear,” Marian explains to news server Romea.cz.

That is exactly where one of the many stumbling blocks encountered by this family lies. The dramaturgs for this kind of program select people to appear on them who are easily manipulated, for various reasons, and then such people say on camera what the producers want to hear.

The result is more like a docu-drama where the protagonists are acting – it is not an actual reflection of their lives. None of these would-be “reality” shows are showing you real life, of course.

In any event, the producers of “Wife Swapping” are rubbing their hands with glee. While on average they get about 100 comments beneath their Facebook posts, Marian and Petra “collected” almost four times as many comments, most of them hateful.

From among that sea of comments, this is the one I liked the most: “One Romani man manages to increase viewership by 100 %!!! There have been thousands of Czech families on ‘Wife Swapping’ where hundreds of men were out of work, many were drinking, doing drugs, their families lived on welfare, their apartments were a mess, their children were hungry, but those episodes didn’t get such a viewership. That Romani man has become famous, everybody is writing about him.”

That is also the only reason Romani people are even cast in such programs, basically. For the viewership.

Negative emotions are the best promoter of viewership. However, in this case, it has gone too far.

We hope the perpetrator who sent Marian and Petra that hateful letter will be apprehended. By the way, if you take a look at the respected research into the quality of life in Czech municipalities published online at obcevdatech.cz you can see that Broumov, where Marian and Petra reside, came in the very last place three years ago – so their life there won’t be all milk and honey.