The setting is a villa in Ibiza in July 2003. A crew is gearing up for the final shots of what will be titled There’s Something About Miriam, a reality dating show. In this last scene, the show’s star, Miriam, a Mexican model, will pick the winner. For the past three weeks, a group of six white, male Britons have been competing for her heart. Only two are left in the running: Scott, a martial-arts expert, and Tom, a student, both in their early 20s. The rest cheer them on.
There’s a twist to come, one this show is based upon. In this closing episode, as the cameras roll, Miriam will reveal her “secret” – that she is a trans woman. It’s not a secret, exactly, but the information has been carefully kept from the contestants. Miriam has been recruited because she is a trans woman. In fact, her gender history is the show’s unique selling point, its special hook. Executive producer Jo Pilkington, who pitched the idea at Sky headquarters earlier that year, says as much. The reality “twist” is also the premise on which Brighter Pictures – a subsidiary of Endemol, makers of Big Brother – have produced the show. From the casting days in London, to the weeks of filming in Ibiza, it’s all been plotted to this point: Miriam’s grand reveal.
The clip is on YouTube, just over five minutes of torture. Miriam announces the winner (“Tom!”) and then the presenter, Tim Vincent, tells the camera that before the prize is claimed – £10,000, and a boat in the bay waiting to take them on the “trip of a lifetime” – that Miriam has something to say. It’s softer when the actress Trace Lysette narrates it, on the 2021 podcast Harsh Reality: The Story of Miriam Rivera, which revisits Miriam’s life and the show nearly 20 years on. Lysette knew Miriam from the ballroom scene in New York, and the podcast attempts to return to the show, and particularly this clip, with a different lens. This moment would go on to elicit much attention: critiques of the premise, empathy for the boys. But what about Miriam? Nobody thought of her. Why did she sign up for a show that was only going to humiliate her, that presented her body, indeed her very being, as a trick? The cameras are waiting. “She knows this is the moment she will prove herself,” says Lysette. “When she will deliver the scene she was essentially brought on to deliver.” Miriam takes a deep breath, and tells Tom her gender history. It’s a speech she’s prepared, but she starts to falter when the disqualified guys start to giggle. They point at Tom, laughing, doubling over, cackling. Later, they will feel angry – the show was a set-up. Tom is asked if he’ll go on the trip; he rubs his chin. This is the show’s emotional crescendo, the money shot. Televised humiliation.
Then it’s over. Tom agrees to go on the luxury cruiser. The couple walk off together, arm in arm. Everybody claps. But when the camera’s stop, it’s a different story. Nobody gets on the boatInstead, as the crew clear up, violence starts to bubble. Scott, the martial-arts expert, begins to axe-kick terracotta plant pots into the pristine swimming pool. Miriam is whisked away. The producers climb out of a bathroom window. As the hours tick by, the contestants become increasingly livid, and when they fly back to London, they arrange to meet a journalist, then a lawyer.
This is how a lawsuit emerged – one that would draw on a controversial section of the Sexual Offences Act, and a section of transphobic law that remains in place today. Speak to a lawyer on the circuit, and they’ll have something to say about Schillings, a firm that specialises in libel cases and celebrity clients. Founded in the 1980s, Schillings became infamous for defending high-profile clients against the tabloids, most recently Meghan Markle, in her claims against the Mail on Sunday. In tandem, the firm also developed a specialism in reputation management for the wealthy, with a roster of shadier and shadier clients including money-laundering fugitives (Jho Low in 2020) and Putin allies (Alisher Usmanov in 2022).
In September 2003, rumours of the show and its emerging lawsuit began to circulate. It was a story everyone had heard on the rumour mill, but that nobody could confirm: the contestants had clubbed together and got high-level representation from Schillings. That October the firm prepared a letter before action directed at BSkyB – which owned Sky One, the show’s commissioner – and Brighter Pictures, the producer. Then in November, Schillings took the next step by issuing a list of allegations to a court.
In this moment, the lawsuit became public. Journalists, who could access the court documents, now had something to go on. The allegations caused a sensation. They were on multiple grounds, beginning with breach of contract (claims the contestants had signed eight-page waivers at the airport, before flying to Ibiza: bad practice); moving on to defamation (the men didn’t know what they had signed up for, and their reputations were at risk); personal injury (the men were psychologically damaged by the experience); and ending finally with the most spectacular allegations of all: the sexual ones.
Transphobia is everywhere in this story, but in the criminal allegations, it becomes most plain. Schillings was alleging “conspiracy to commit sexual assault”. It was a spectacular claim: BSkyB and Brighter Pictures were effectively being accused of tricking the contestants into hugging and kissing a “man”. The claims suggested that the men’s consent to these acts was not properly informed, because they did not know Miriam’s birth-assigned sex – a controversial accusation, one that had no clear precedent in criminal law. In this experimental allegation, what appeared like consensual fun and games was, Schillings was claiming, actually sexual assault.
During any litigation process, the parties are not allowed to speak out. Throughout November and December 2003, Miriam described being hounded by the press, wishing she could tell her side of the story. The contestants were also pursued, but they had someone to speak for them: Schillings lawyer Rod Christie-Miller, who made statements to the press. “After they’d been encouraged to have sexual contact, they found that she was a he,” he said. He explained that the men were suffering flashbacks, and were unable to leave their homes.
The sexual allegations drew on a section of the UK Sexual Offences Act, which outlines sexual fraud – where consent is gained by a deception. Never before had gender history been put forward as a deception. In this offence, historically applied to men impersonating a known lover, the person making the claim might have agreed to the sexual behaviour at the time, might even have enjoyed it, but their consent was not informed. If the deception is proved in a criminal court, then consent was not true consent, and the sexual acts become sexual crimes.
Sexual fraud made its way into UK legislation in the Victorian era, as part of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which first outlawed “gross indecency between men” (code for any sexual action between men that wasn’t sodomy), and made it an offence to “procure women and girls by fraud”. Versions of this latter offence were carried through parliamentary debates about sex legislation and subsequent reform – famously in 1921, when lesbian acts were first debated by parliament (it was decided they should not be outlawed, since naming them might actually advertise them); in 1956, when sex offences were consolidated in one act; in 1967, another famous moment in sexual-offence history, when homosexual acts including gross indecency and sodomy were officially struck off the act, and decriminalised; in 1976, when feminists first began to influence sexual-offences law; and finally in 2003, a watershed moment, when the Sexual Offences Act as we know it today was passed.
The act, which remains in place today, was considered a feminist milestone, notable for the inclusion of the first definition of sexual consent, drafted by feminist scholars. Yet, in all these moments, as sexual-offences law was reshaped or reformed, sexual fraud remained unchanged, a kind of time capsule. Indeed, in 2003, it was actually given its very own section for the first time, one that has sparked controversy ever since.
Miriam was not a defendant. From a legal standpoint, conspiracy to commit sexual assault was the weakest allegation. Across the 2000s, under the new Sexual Offences Act, criminal courts would begin to determine, case by case, what kind of deceptions were deemed “significant” enough to undermine consent, and what deceptions were merely “trivial”. Gender history was not yet on the cards. What’s more, acts like hugging and kissing rarely resulted in prosecution. Concerns at the time circled around HIV status, and whether failure to disclose it before having sex with someone, if you were positive, was a potential crime. When it came to breach of contract, Schillings was on much stronger ground. Yet the sex claim was the most spectacular, Miriam was at the centre of it, and she was also at the centre of the media circus that had now sprung up around it.
In the podcast, Trace Lysette explains that the show’s money shot, when Miriam revealed her “secret” on camera, was also meant to be another moment, too. Through Miriam’s blog, friends’ recollections and tactful speculation, the podcast brings Miriam’s motives and desires into the picture. Miriam had signed up for the series hoping to break out of the small nightlife scene she was a part of, and to gain recognition on the main stage as a trans woman. She’d come so far already: growing up in north-west Mexico, she made it to Los Angeles as a teenager, then New York, supporting herself through sex work and walking for the House of Xtravaganza. Videos of her at the balls circulated, and she was recruited for a trans girl band called the Speed Angels, which didn’t work out, before she was discovered by TV producer Remy Blumenfeld, co-founder of Brighter Pictures. The podcast teases out a rift between what the producers say they conceived the show to be – Gavin Hay of Brighter Pictures explains, unconvincingly, that it was planned as a celebration of trans experience – and its reception. Those who took part in the casting process describe the specially designed screening process, involving psychologists, used to identify men open to exploring their sexuality (even if they didn’t know it themselves). Did Miriam have any faith in the process? Should she have known it would end badly? Scottish psychiatrist Gareth Smith, interviewed in the podcast, was flown out to the villa in the final days of filming, when an Endemol executive, Philip Edgar-Jones, began to fret. Smith remembers the show’s creator, Blumenfeld, appearing blissfully unaware that Miriam’s reveal might elicit anything more than good humour; he was planning for “champagne and canapés” on the terrace right after. Smith also spoke to Miriam for several hours. She appeared upbeat, he recalls, and seemed to be holding out for a happy ending – Tom saying yes, the secrecy being over, the trip together. Smith remembers leaving the villa with his heart sinking. He felt it certainly wouldn’t end as she imagined. But nobody could have predicted the actual outcome: the show’s “twist”, when Miriam finally took the stage as herself, would become part of a spicy lawsuit and framed as assault.
Sexual fraud was a very old story even before it was a crime. As scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger explains in her book, The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000): “You go to bed with somebody you think you know, but when you wake up you discover it was someone else – another man, another woman, a man instead of a woman, or a woman instead of a man, or a god, a snake, a foreigner or alien, a complete stranger.” Shakespeare made this “bed trick” famous through plays in which one lover is substituted for another in the dark, but tales of sexual trickery have deeper roots, as Doniger shows, and can be found in Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Hindu texts. The deceptive figure or foreign being discovered between the sheets can take many forms; true to the folkloric pattern, it is flexible, shaped by the anxieties of an era. Shakespeare’s plays often featured women switching places but across the centuries, husband impersonation has dominated sexual masquerade folklore. The idea that one man could replace another tugged on fears around paternity; before DNA testing emerged in the 1950s, it was impossible to ever be certain of fatherhood – unless you married a virgin, secured a pure wife, made sure she was loyal and steadfast. But what if she was tricked in the dark? Anxieties around husband impersonation reached a peak in the Victorian era, when rare cases made it into courts of law. By the 1950s, something had shifted and new, post-war anxieties were afloat.
In The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, her investigation of a trans legal case that was “missing” from the archives for 30 years and only recently came to light, writer and historian Zoë Playdon tracks the cultural tide-turn against trans people, particularly women, that took place in the 1950s. Her book, published last year, shows how transphobic discourse first became mainstream in the post-war decade, when trans women were – like Miriam – beginning to take the stage as themselves, writing biographies and speaking to the press. Christine Jorgensen in the US in 1953 and Roberta Cowell in the UK in 1954 serialised their lives as trans women in popular magazines. Yet visibility was no guarantor of safety, and exposure was quickly followed by disdain, as the format of sensationalising trans women for entertainment was established. In Roberta’s case, the kickback was swift, as the platform became a pillory. Front-page headlines on what was dubbed the “Cowell Sensation” claimed that she was an “unhappy freak”.
In October 2003, when the first media reports on the There’s Something About Miriam lawsuit appeared, there were gaps to fill. The show itself was a blind spot; the footage was still under wraps. Unable to speak to the parties, journalists writing about the case worked backwards from the allegations. The mistakes and inventions, which litter the reporting around Miriam, reveal so much about the culture, notably the crude fixation of trans people’s genitals, still in play. “Miriam picks the winner and then lifts up her skirt,” wrote one journalist in the Guardian, suggesting she flashed a hidden penis. In other reporting, Miriam’s beauty and very being were constructed as a gag. “WOULD YOU?” ran a headline in The Sun, above a picture of Miriam in a bikini, lying sideways. “Think carefully before you answer this, guys,” a smaller caption read. The joke, designed to elicit a tart cocktail of laughter and horror, offered the bed-trick’s trickster in its millennial form: a dream woman with a penis.
In her essay “Skirt Chasers” (2005), Julia Serano examines the mechanisms by which trans women have been constructed as liars and freaks. Studying the depiction of trans women on TV and in popular culture, Serano identifies a dominant archetype, which she calls “deceivers”: trans women who are depicted as frauds, and “act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys”. The trans women who pass most successfully – like Miriam – are, at once, the most threatening to culture and the most effective entertainment, since they make plot twists more thrilling. “Deceivers,” writes Serano, will generally be exposed in “embarrassing” and “violent” ways – for TV thrills – before they are “punished accordingly”.
For Miriam, that punishment was two-fold: the crucifying reveal, immortalised on camera, and the sexual allegations. Accused of being a deceptive player in a TV conspiracy to commit sexual assault – it couldn’t have been worse, playing into the negative trans archetype Serano identified, in extremis. The show paled beside this real-life spectacle; in a sense, the lawsuit and the reporting that followed became the main show – more memorable, juicier, and more “live” – than the one that would eventually air.
The lawsuit never made it to a court and before a judge. Perhaps predictably, in January 2004 the contestants chose to settle for an undisclosed sum, estimated at around £500,000. The show, which had been delayed indefinitely during litigation, aired in February and March 2004. It drew one million viewers, usual viewing figures for a Sky One show at the time, as a commissioner interviewed for the podcast observed.
This all took place over one year of Miriam’s life. Later episodes of the podcast track her through the next decades. When the show aired, she got to speak out – finally – and enjoyed some fame, got more work (appearing on Big Brother Australia), did a little more modelling, a little more partying. Then in 2007, she fell from a fourth-storey window at her home in New York while escaping an intruder. Other reports claim she was pushed. She spent months in hospital recovering, with almost her entire body in a cast. Her friends remember the damage that lingered in the years to follow, physical but also spiritual. Eventually she returned to Mexico and to her family. She committed suicide in 2019, at the age of 38.
To Trace Lysette, and other members of the trans community of which Miriam was a part, she was a trailblazer, a legend. Of the many experiences she lived through, it was the reality-TV one that dominated. In some sense, she was caught up in something bigger than her. The show was commissioned at a time when reality TV in its current form was taking shape, and also when UK laws around sex and gender were going through major reform. Just as the lawsuit was being litigated in autumn 2003, the UK Sexual Offences Act had just been overhauled. The new act, influenced by feminists and implemented in England and Wales, was given royal assent in November 2003, just when Schillings issued the allegations. The legislation came into action six months later in May 2004. The reform had been years in the making, with a spate of government reports across the 1990s and early 2000s concurring what so many feminists already knew: that the current legislation was archaic. Rape, for example, as it was defined by law, was terribly narrow. To be investigated by police and recognised by a court, it required the perpetrator to have a penis and to be a man. Reform to the Act accounted for all the ways a body – any body – could rape or be raped: raped with an object, anally raped, raped in the mouth, raped with a body part. A new offence was invented to describe these acts in 2003, and called “sexual assault by penetration”. This was not the only new offence added to the Act. The reform was also (perhaps surprisingly) a significant expansion and part one, detailing the offences, grew from 47 to 79 sections.
The Act garnered mixed responses from the media and public. Curiosity and interest melded together with suspicion. It was the beginning of a new millennium, and feminist demands for new standards of consent had, miraculously, passed through Parliament. Making history, the Act included a statuary definition of consent – the first of its kind. This definition put sexual consent on the main stage for the first time: entering primary legislation, it had gone mainstream. Questions bubbled up. What did the new definition mean? Did it change sex? When was consent not real, and how did you make sure you got it? Sexual fraud was a way of thinking about these questions – a crime that captured the imagination and an enduring story that put uncertainties about sex, power and identity into relief.
Why was the lawsuit such an attractive thinking point? Decades of ridicule in the media had entrenched the idea that trans women were fair game – deceivers, a joke, not real. Was it easier, then, to think through sex’s changing rules with somebody who could easily be jeered at the narrative centre of it all?
Sex offence reform was a response to acute issues in sexual culture. Rape historian Joanna Bourke discusses why rape statistics are notoriously difficult to pin down, not least because the definition of rape has changed over time. In Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), she employs the British Crime Survey of 2001 (a national survey based on interviews with the public about their experiences of crime, whether or not they reported it) to suggest, in this period, around 47,000 women a year were victims of rape. Reform of sexual legislation in these years was also an attempt to reform sexual culture, suggesting that new rules – perhaps even a new system – were desperately needed.
In this climate, the reporting on the lawsuit seemed to siphon the heat off some of these issues.
Serious questions about rape culture and consent were refracted into a game show, and a laddy joke (“Would you?”). Consent, by way of these “bizarre claims” (as one journalist put it) could be giggled at as overblown, gone too far, its definition stretched by scheming lawyers – the juicy headlines a welcome distraction from the worrying claims put forward by feminist killjoys.
