Reality television is a HUGE part of entertainment these days. It’s cheap to produce, addicting, and proves the old cliche true: reality is stranger than fiction. But you can’t just film reality and expect it to be interesting, you have to piece it together to make a story. With most reality shows, producers set up conversations to help move the storyline, or even re-shoot them to create a desired effect. That doesn’t make reality television completely fake, but it does blur the lines a little bit. Sometimes, important elements are left out to shape the story producers want to tell.
On the MTV documentaryTrue Life: I’m a Textaholic (premiere date Nov. 5, 2011), Kristin Raeon was featured to tell the story of her texting addiction. The basic storyline of the show was that her constant texting was ruining her life, causing her to have problems in school, and ultimately ended her marriage. Kristin was shown going a birthday trip to Panama City with her husband Steven Brooks. They went out drinking, and to to shock and dismay of the viewing audience, Kristin immediately let a guy buy her drinks, exchanged numbers with him, and then ran back to tell her husband about it. Kristin got a lot of backlash about this depicted behavior, but she tells starcasm.net exclusively that all wasn’t as it seemed.
According to Kristin , the True Life narration failed to mention was that Kristin and Steven had separated before their trip, and were both essentially free agents. Steven failed to return to their hotel room that night, but Kristin says she didn’t “hold it against him”:
My ex husband and I just began our separation when MTV started filming. You guys look at me like a bad wife because I was flirting with guys and getting guys numbers when we were in Panama City, but the only reason why they showed all of me and not a thing of what Steven did was because the show was not about him. It was about me. That morning I received that text message from Steven in PCB, he wasn’t in the room because he stayed in some other girls room that night. But we were separated so I never held it against him because I couldn’t, just like flirting with guys and getting their numbers, to only text, he never held that against me. Steven and I are friends and can get a long we just didn’t have a love life left.
There was some drama involving Steven taking off his wedding band at the club, and Kristin angrily taking hers off as well, but she says that she was angry at him because they had made an agreement to keep their wedding rings on during the trip out of respect for each other, even though they were already broken up.
The show made it seem like texting alone was ruining their marriage, especially with the voiceover narration and a scene of Kristin and Steven having dinner where Kristin responds with Maybe you should have a thirty minute window of kiss my butt, because you’ll divorce me before that ever happens,” when Steven asks if they can have a thirty minute window when they don’t use their phones.
Kristin says their relationship was on rocky ground from the beginning, and that texting wasn’t the main source of their relationship problems. They met while they were both deployed to Korea, and Steven started seeing Kristin right after he broke up with another girl. It was a rush into another relationship too quickly, and Steven and Kristin argued a lot from the start, but “when we weren’t arguing we were so happy that I guess it didn’t matter to us.”
She also says she had trust issues with Steven:
Steven and I had a lot of rough times because of certain things he did (I don’t want to air his business out there) which led to trust issues. Since then, I have never completely trusted him. Once we got back we got married and I got pregnant with Austin. Everything happened so fast that we just argued more and more and it became unhealthy. So, we decided to split.
Kristin also says that the lines she read for the voiceover narration were written for her, but she doesn’t feel they are necessarily her words, especially the line “It’s an addiction, I love it” used many times in the transition from commercial break.
As for texting without hands, and texting with her son in the car, Kristin owns up to that and says that she doesn’t do that anymore, but still feels the material was manipulated to make her behavior look worse than it was:
I understand it was a mistake to drive with no hands and text, especially with Austin in the car. I really only did it that one time, and stopped. There isn’t an excuse for it and I do take responsibility for it. I stopped because I knew it was an endangerment to my son’s life and everyone else’s on the road. Now Steven and I were talking about this shortly after the show aired and even he stated “When you were driving around the turn with all the traffic, Austin was not in the car, I remember”. I did text with Austin in the car but it was on a side road outside of our old house. Not on the main road where there was a ton of traffic. With that being said, yes I still know it was a mistake and no, I don’t do it anymore.
You can follow Kristin on Twitter, and on her blog The World of Drama.
Here’s the full episode, which also features a girl named Loren, who’s suffering from hand problems from her texting addiction:
