From dashing romantic reality star to DV charges: how it all went wrong for Bachelor Sam Wood

Along the main drag of Noosa Heads, expensive beachfront villas and resorts meld into designer-boho apparel stores, upmarket restaurants and bars and pizza joints. Kids with sandy feet and hair still dripping from the surf slurp gelati alongside activewear-clad women who have descended from the scrubby headland.

The beachside town is a holiday destination for middle-class families as well as the wealthy, and is a particular favourite with Victorians. And those who headed there for the recent King’s birthday long weekend were treated to plenty of Queensland sun.

But on Sunday, Queensland police alleged something darker had occurred that weekend on Hastings Street. They charged a 46-year-old Victorian man with assault occasioning bodily harm and strangulation in a domestic setting. The man was refused bail. The victim or victims were not identified, in line with Queensland laws, neither was the person who called the police.

Before he had even faced court, word had leaked that the accused man was very high profile. Media began naming him as the fitness influencer Sam Wood. He had come to public attention in 2015 as a contestant on the dating show, The Bachelor, then at the peak of its popularity in Australia, and married the woman he met there, Snezana Markoski, with whom he built both a family and a series of fitness and wellness enterprises.

On Monday, Wood’s lawyer told media that the star intended to “defend the charges”.

A statement posted to social media accounts of the husband and wife said: “This is a difficult time for all of us, we are working through this as a family and are thoroughly co-operating with authorities.”

On Thursday he was denied bail. The Maroochydore magistrates court heard Snezana, who was allegedly choked and assaulted by Wood, told police she “thought she was going to die”.

The cultural prominence of Wood, his sustained commercial success, and the sudden, thunderous collapse of his empire this week, was shaped to a great extent more than a decade ago, by the confected TV narrative into which he first stepped.

Reality TV in the mid 2010s was at the crest of its second wave. The Bachelor Australia, launched many years after its US parent, never quite managed the ratings heights of its competitors, and the show’s saccharine romance and engineered drama felt anachronistic and regressive. It nevertheless grew in popularity over its first two seasons, with an ecosystem of live-tweeters and recapping bloggers feeding on the minutiae of every episode, often with knowing cynicism. Indeed, for many – if not most – of its viewers, the irony was part of the appeal.

At the end of the second season, the drama had spilled outside the show’s heavily manipulated narrative: more than a million viewers had watched Bachelor Blake Garvey propose marriage to then-marketing assistant Sam Frost, only for the network to issue a statement the following morning explaining the couple had already split up. Garvey was soon revealed to be dating the show’s runner-up. Irony notwithstanding, consumers of romance hate seeing the heroine get jilted. There was increasing pressure to ensure the third Bachelor was a verifiable good guy.

Enter Wood, 34, a Tasmanian-born Melbourne-based personal trainer. He reportedly applied for season three having never watched an episode of the show, after a client at his Brighton-based gym, the Woodshed, insisted. Over the course of 16 episodes he lumbered along on cut-budget “dates”, whittling down his potential matches one by one, until he finally handed his last rose, the show’s love token, to 34-year-old Perth-based Snezana Markoski.

Snezana claimed she had been convinced to go on the show by her then-eight-year-old daughter, Eve. Her status as a single mother was an early plot point, edited throughout to suggest her “winning” Sam was an outside chance. Thus she became the unlikely heroine who stole the heart of the TV hero. The couple’s post-show relationship also appeared to defy cynicism about its origins: Snezana moved to Melbourne, Wood proposed, the couple got married and had three more children.

Meanwhile, they leveraged Wood’s increased profile, particularly among women, into significantly lucrative commercial ventures. At the time of his performance on the Bachelor, Wood was the owner of GeckoSports, a kids’ fitness franchise network. He sold it in 2016 to startup online fitness and health program 28 by Sam Wood, which grew rapidly, ballooning during Covid lockdowns and claiming more than 400,000 subscribers over its first six years.

The hyperreal television romance also morphed seamlessly into a shiny Instagram presence, replete with happy-family snaps and sponcon galore. Companies that have had commercial partnerships with Wood since his Bachelor appearance are numerous, including Weet-Bix, Mercedes-Benz, Under Armour, 2XU, Australian Eggs, MYOB, Vibe Soda, Remedy Drinks, and health insurer Bupa. (Many are now making clear those partnerships are long over.) He was a regular face on morning television, and lifestyle shows like Better Homes and Gardens.

In 2022, Wood sold 28 to myDNA, a Melbourne genomics company backed by pharmaceuticals mogul Dennis Bastas, for $71.2m, a 5% stake in the parent company, and an agreement that he would remain the face of the program.

Wood built his post-Bachelor empire off his family-friendly, women-friendly image. He sustained it by appearing to be the robust exception that proved the rule about “nice guys” on reality TV. The first major dent was Ollo for Women: his attempt earlier this year to couple his core product, fitness and meal planning, with telehealth consults and GLP-1 assisted weight loss. Some saw it as a betrayal of his principles, though Wood did not agree.

But his public image was always contradictory. He was the tanned and muscular leading man with the toothpaste-ad smile, who nevertheless remained down to earth, plain-speaking and polite. He was the rich and dashing romance hero, and yet the committed family man, father of daughters. He was, as a glowing 2023 profile in Men’s Health put it, the “de facto embodiment of Australian masculinity”.

On Monday, as news about the domestic violence allegations gathered steam, businesses and other fitness influencers began distancing themselves from Wood, in some cases breaking off active commercial agreements. Ollo’s social media accounts were deactivated. DBG Health, the ultimate owners of 28, put Wood on indefinite leave, and changed the cover image on the fitness program’s Facebook page from a smiling group shot of Wood, Snezana and other personal trainers, to a generic picture of a smartphone app.

On Tuesday, the company Wood had built “ended its commercial relationships with Sam Wood, effective immediately”. “DBG Health does not tolerate domestic violence in any form, and our thoughts are with anyone affected by it,” a spokesperson said, noting 28 would continue under the leadership of Mark Watkin, previously its chief operating officer.

“I was a pretty quiet, self-conscious kid from Tassie,” Wood said in that 2023 profile.

“Even now I have moments of impostor syndrome and disbelief that this whole thing has reached the levels that it has, almost like I don’t belong here and the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment.”

Wood returns to court on 23 November.

• Support for anyone affected by the subject matter of this report is available at Full Stop Australia (1800 385 578)