Year 2004. British Sky One station airs a new reality show entitled There’s Something About Miriam (in Poland known as "All about Miriam"). Six attractive, heterosexual men aged around 20 are invited to a luxury villa in Ibiza. A reward? £10,000 and the heart of the beautiful 21-year-old Mexican model Miriam Rivera.
For a few weeks, guys date and flirt, compete, and... they really fall in love with Miriam. The whole program looks like a classic dating format – romantic dinners, swimming in the pool, sharp discussions about feelings. None of the contestants have the slightest idea that behind the scenes producers hide a great secret.
In the big final, Miriam picks the winner. The winner gets a check, kisses her in front of the cameras. I Then, in front of all of Britain, Miriam faces six men and says, "I am a transgender woman."
Transgender woman – a person assigned at birth to a male who identifies and lives as a woman. In the context of the entertainment and pornographic industry, Miriam was often also referred to as "shemale" – a term referring to transgender women who retained male genitals and did not undergo a complete gender correction surgery.
This disclosure was supposed to be the greatest sensation of the show. Instead, it triggered an avalanche of events that destroyed the station's reputation and forever changed the lives of everyone involved.
Men feel cheated, humiliated and betrayed. On board an aircraft returning from Ibiza they decide to act together. Even before the broadcast of the program, all six file a collective lawsuit against Sky One producers and stations. They accuse them of conspiracy to commit sexual assault (because there were kisses and intimate moments without their informed consent), defamation, breach of contract terms and serious psychological and emotional damage.
The case goes to court. Pthe programme is suspended for several months. In the end, there is an out-of-court settlement. Men receive an undisclosed amount (according to media reports, about £500,000, half of which went to attorneys' costs). In return, they agree to issue. The program will eventually air in February 2004.
Miriam Rivera becomes Britain's first transgender star reality TV opening. Even in 2004, he appears as a guest in the Australian edition Big Brother (where participants also did not know at first about its transgenderity. Initially, it is famous, but it quickly begins to feel the effects of media hate and tabloid attack.
Years later, her life becomes a drama. In 2007, New York falls out of a window on the fourth floor of her apartment – she says she was running from a burglar, but there are voices that she may have been attacked. In time, he returns to Mexico. She fights addiction, and her surroundings talk about difficult experiences.
February 5, 2019, aged 38, Miriam is found dead in her mother's apartment in Sonora, Mexico. The official version of the police is: suicide by hanging. However, her husband Daniel Cuervo and some of her family and close friends do not believe in this version. They claim that she may have been murdered – especially since she had received threats before and refused to participate in certain "works". To this day, the issue raises doubts, and documents and podcast investigators return to this story, showing how one reality TV program could affect a person's entire life.
Six men on the show never returned to normal. Miriam Rivera also paid the highest price. One secret, one unethical decision of the producers – and the reality show turned into a real tragedy that ended not only in court but also in human dramas that continue until today.
