After quitting Survivor 51, Rob tried to explain why. Try to make sense of it!

After leaving Survivor 51 because of an injury/infection so severe not even a doctor could see it, Rob Antonson is now explaining himself and/or rolling around in all the attention like a dust-bathing chicken, an animal I did not choose for any reason at all.

Rob did exit press—a credit to him, because he could have just skipped out—and says a lot of the same things over and over. What he never once says is what actually happened with his injury after he left the game.

Warning: Reading Rob’s comments may cause your eyes roll so far back in your head you’ll be looking down your esophagus at your own screams of rage.

After reading and watching a bunch of interviews (linked below for your perusal) and then retrieving my eyeballs, I take away four things:

1. Rob loves this attention.
2. He knew players who leave the game go sit at Ponderosa until the jury stage, at which the pre-jurors are flown home. But I didn’t see anyone ask Rob if he suspected that removing himself for a medical reason meant he’d be sent home immediately.
3. Rob’s vote-for-himself, forgot-to-read-the-rules plan was about trying to get himself out of the game that he is retroactively blaming on his pain and lack of sleep.
4. He offers nothing new that would make the injury story make more sense.

Let’s start with the first. Rob told Parade, “I woke up today being the reality TV villain right now. I kind of like it!” and The Exclusive, “I woke up as one of the biggest villain in reality TV right now.”

I think Rob is confusing “villain” with “joke.” I thought his exit was incredibly entertaining, watching him fold himself into a pretzel instead of saying the words I quit or My anxiety about injury is so overwhelming that even reassurance from a doctor who allowed a thumb-less man to stay in the game is not enough and so I must leave.

Let me be clear: I’m not a hater of quitters. I understand when people say that a quitter took the spot of another person who may not have quit. But that’s unknowable. Also taking a spot: a person who made a dumb decision and got voted off immediately. Ditto for a player who actually was removed from the game for medical reasons.

Part of Survivor’s challenging, tough game is that some people cannot meet the challenge. And that’s okay! I think there’s real strength in saying, Dammit, this is just not for me.

Surprise, that’s not what Rob is going with. In an Instagram video captioned “Lets draw the haters in lmaoooo,” he wrote, over a video of himself sipping from a mug:

“The amount of people who are crying right now over someone leaving or “quitting” a show is alarming! You people are crying over a TV show!? a game!? Some weird ass energy right there, soft ass society.”

Thank you for that example of toxic masculinity, Rob. So yes, Rob thinks his critics are soft, weak. And just so we’re clear, by “Rob” I mean “40-year-old man who quit Survivor because of a cut that no one could see and an infection the doctor found no evidence and an injury he told no one about were all causing him pain so overwhelming he acted normally around fellow players and the medics who checked him at every challenge.”

Also speaking of toxic masculinity, Rob did explain where his ideas about weakness come from to Parade’s Mike Bloom:

Doc would always ask me, “Everything good?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine, fine.”

That’s kind of how I grew up. My dad told me, “Don’t be a puss.” Have that kind of mentality. It kind of bit me in the ass here. And even my tribe, I didn’t say anything because I thought it would show some weakness to me.

An aside: Why is the p-word for vagina used as a synonym for weakness? I don’t have that body part but it seems pretty fucking strong to me, considering it’s capable of squeezing out a whole baby-sized creature, never mind taking a hammering from guys who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

But despite concealing his emotional response to his pain, Rob didn’t conceal his emotions when he removed himself, we just didn’t see any of those emotions. Rob told this to Jacob Walther, who was interviewing forThe Exclusive With Sharon Tharp:

I told [Jeff Probst], man, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I want to be here. I wanted to win. I wanted to compete. I kept apologizing all the time, but he was totally respectful about the whole situation.

[…] I was walking back to camp with Jeff and I was just I was let it all out. I was crying like a baby. I mean, that wasn’t shown because again, you got to jam everything into one episode. You only have so much time, but I was crying like a baby. They didn’t show that. It’s okay.

Maybe it’s all a problem with words and their meanings. Take a look at this jumble of Rob’s answers from four different interviews:

To EW: “I don’t feel like I quit Survivor. I feel like quitting is something you just give up on, okay? But there are certain circumstances that go to taking yourself out of the game, and that’s what I did.”

Also EW: “I’ve never quit anything in my life. I was someone who had my mouth wired for three months and just dealt with it. I didn’t tell anybody. But that’s always been my philosophy. And that’s almost a problem sometimes.”

To TVLine: “I don’t blame everybody for being like, ‘Wow, Rob quit,’ because nobody knew about the injury.”

To The Exclusive: “I’m calling it a medevac. I mean, because at the end of the day, the doc and Jeff, they have, you know, they got their list of how they take people out or whatever the rules are with CBS and how they take people out of the game of Survivor. They don’t know how I’m feeling inside. They don’t know the pain I’ve been going through.”

To Parade: “it kind of looks like I’m just this quitter”

Yes, it kind of does. But! Maybe the doctor was wrong. Maybe Rob learned something truly was wrong and thankfully he pulled himself from the game. After all, Survivor players

What was wrong? In multiple interviews, Rob mentions his wife is a nurse and told him horror stories about infections, which makes sense—except the doctor determined he did not have an infection. Rob also says he had swollen lymph nodes and chills.

Rob Cesternino first asked Survivor 51 Rob how is foot is today, and Rob acted like he was asked a strange question: “The foot’s good, man. I mean, it happened in April. Come on.”

Parade’s Mike Bloom asked Rob directly: “what happened after you left the game? Did it turn out that you were indeed at risk for infection as you may have thought?”, and Rob’s first words are “Well, I mean” and then he tells a story about a childhood infection in his ankle.

The answer might be: Nope, no infection! or At Ponderosa, they discovered my leg was about to fall off!

I’ll end on a high note, which is that at least Rob is blaming himself, and not the editing or anyone else. To Parade, he said this:

Can’t blame the edit at all. I can’t blame the producers. I can’t blame anyone but myself. If I said it before about the injury, there would have been video footage of my injury. When I hurt myself in the water, I would have screamed or something. Not even screamed, but just went back and told the camp about what happened. They all would have knew, and then it would have been on video, and then it would have been video footage of it. So the edit would have never got to where it was.

Wait, I would have screamed? I’m still confused.

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