The Ex on the Beach reunion was a messy one for Morgan Willett. The Big Brother: Over the Top winner, 24, faced exes Jay Starrett from Survivor and Corey Brooks from Big Brother and ended up taking a lie detector test. However, there was a lot that wasn’t shown during the special, which concluded on Thursday, April 4.
“Going into the reunion, I was a little nervous because I had been told that Jay was saying that he had a master plan to kind of ‘drag me through the mud and propel himself onto The Challenge.’ So I was very reluctant,” Morgan said on the “Watch With Us” podcast. “I was very guarded going to this reunion show … Do I blame him [for getting mad]? No, I don’t. I did him dirty, I’ll own up to that, and I wish I did do things differently.”
Listen to the podcast above and subscribe for more exclusive interviews and TV news. Here are more highlights from the episode, including what Jay told her right before they went on stage and where she stands today with Johnny Bananas.
On Jay finding out about the Bananas kiss at the reunion:
“I hadn’t talked to Jay honestly about it [before]. The kind of odd thing about all that is obviously when we got off The Challenge I came home. I talked to Jay. We decided to be just friends. We were on good terms. Later on, he asked me about Johnny and I owned it. I was like, ‘You know what, I’ll be real. I’ve been seeing him. This happened,’ blah, blah, blah, and he was fine with it. And then even before, I remember he was texting me because we were obviously hanging out as friends, and he was like, ‘Oh, my friend’s having a birthday party. You can bring Bananas if you want.’ So there was never really any bad blood. And then the reunion show comes, and obviously, I guess, feelings have changed.”
On the “eye opening” reunion:
“The issue I had with the reunion is I wanted to go to the show, and obviously I wanted to talk and apologize to Jay – apologize for how I treated him, how we broke up, all that stuff. The last thing I wanted was to bring Johnny into it because he’s not on that show. And somehow he’s not even on that show and he was the star of the reunion. … I wanted to keep some things in my personal life private because I guess I’m different than some people in reality TV. I like keeping some things hidden. I don’t want the public interrupting every little thing and scrutinizing every little move I do and who I’m talking to, and all that jazz. The reunion was eye opening.”
On her controversial comment to Jay:
“In the reunion show, you can see me look at Jay and say something like, ‘Never talk to me again’ and a lot of people are thinking I’m saying that because I’m having to do this lie detector test and I’m upset about it. That was 100 percent not where that was coming from. Right before we went onstage, he comes up to me. He gives me a hug. He says, ‘You know what, we’re just friends. We’re not gonna attack each other like the other couples. Let’s just go onstage and have some fun. Let’s joke around.’ So I was like, ‘OK, cool. This isn’t gonna be nearly as bad as I’m thinking. This is honestly gonna be easy, it’s, like, me and my friend talking.’ And then we go onstage and it’s a completely different attitude, which I can’t blame him for that, but it for sure took me off guard. All of a sudden I’m being dragged onstage and hooked up to a lie detector test? So in that moment, I was hurt. I was confused. I didn’t know really what was going on. So that’s where that comment came from.”
On her relationship with Johnny today:
“I’m very happy where I am in my life, and at the end of the day I did things wrong, and I regret a lot of my actions. … Obviously we’re taking it day by day. We see each other. Will you see more travel videos from us? I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know. It’s interesting, and I just ironically saw an article from MTV where they put out, ‘Are Morgan and Bananas canoodling?’ I hate the word ‘canoodling.’ I feel like that implies a hook up or a fling, and that’s just one thing I do wanna address is, I don’t consider myself a hook up. I’ve had a lot of people on social media reach out to me and say, ‘You know, you’re just hooking up with him to get on the next show,’ and that couldn’t be further from the truth. … I think what a lot of people don’t realize is we traveled the world, just him and I, for two weeks. So whenever you do that, you get really close with someone. You get to know them on a more personal level, and I will also say it was so refreshing to get to know a person not in the reality TV world.”
