'MasterChef' Is ‘Fake!' Former Contestants Speaks Out About Behind-The-Scenes Trickery

Add MasterChef to the growing list of reality TV shows that are anything but real. According to past contestants, producers follow a strict recipe in cooking up drama, and only RadarOnline.com has all the details of the behind-the-scenes reality TV fakery!

Season Two contestant Ben Starr recently fired off a bitter blog post about his experience on the show, exposing for the first time what he says really happens on set.

“MasterChef is entertainment,” he wrote. “First and foremost. It is not real. It is not a competition. It is highly engineered fiction … designed to keep you watching from episode to episode. … There is NOTHING real about reality TV.”

Starr says he “witnessed the ugly side of reality TV,” starting with the strict contract he had to sign that gave away all rights to how he would be represented. According to Starr, the exact wording of the contract was as follows:

How do producers do it? “Comments you see a contestant make are often pieced together from sound bytes tangents recorded throughout the entire season,” he claimed in the post. “They’re really good at that. They even did it to me … strung together a sentence from three separate sound bytes scattered from my interviews at various points during filming. I never said what aired on TV. They created it out of thin air.”

And it’s one, he says, that puts contestants at risk. Season 3 runner-up Josh Marks notoriously committed suicide after his run.

“Do I believe MasterChef is specifically to blame for his suicide?” Starr wrote. “Of course not.”

Still, he claimed, “Contestants are subjected to deliberate, intentional stress in order to trigger a high emotional response to situations. They are kept sequestered, locked in a hotel room and can’t leave without an escort, unable to communicate with spouses, children, or parents for weeks at a time. On some seasons, contestants would be awakened in the middle of the night, ordered to pack up their room, and moved to a different room in a different hotel.”

“All this to create frustration, sleep deprivation, and confusion as to where other contestants are being housed,” he said. "On seasons subsequent to mine, contestants were plied with alcohol to loosen their tongues and feel more confident saying things that personal decorum might otherwise prevent them from saying while sober.”

Starr did not respond to RadarOnline.com’s request for comment. And though he was on the show back in 2011, RadarOnline.com has learned that the fakery continues to this day.

At a filming for the upcoming season in L.A. last month, RadarOnline.com has learned, would-be contestants were provided with seemingly home-made posters and various pieces of flair to jazz up the audition shots.

“Production staff handed out signs that said things like ‘Star Quality,’” an auditioning contestant tells RadarOnline.com. “It was clearly supposed to look like the contestants had brought them, but no one did. It was so fake.”