The Biggest Loser’s kick-ass trainer, Jillian Michaels, says that a blow-up she had with contestant Filipe Fa last season got so bad that it resulted in an internal drug investigation. “Filipe said, ‘I think Jillian is giving people drugs,’” Michaels tells
TV Guide Magazine, with the unspecified drugs in question meant to help the members of her team lose weight faster. “We had an entire ‘Kenneth Starr’ investigation. Because the minute someone makes that claim, you have to. They didn’t shut down production, but it took a week. I was so furious, so disgusted. I felt so betrayed.”
According to both Michaels and Fa, the problem started when the NBC show pulled a switch during week eight and forced contestants to change trainers. Fa and his cousin, Sione Fa, had been working with trainer Bob Harper; now they would train with Michaels. “Filipe didn’t want to train with me,” says Michaels.
What aired on television was the big argument they had after Michaels, who heard the drug accusation off camera, refused to do a one-on-one workout with Fa during a team session. Says Michaels, “When he said, ‘You didn’t train me,” I said, ‘You’re damn right I didn’t train you!’ I literally couldn’t speak to him.”
Fa says he never made the accusation. “We had some issues, obviously, with us switching teams," he says. "There was never an accusation about her giving drugs.”
Wrong, says executive producer Mark Koops, who heard the accusation from the camera crews who follow the contestants. “The accusation came from Filipe,” he confirms.
Koops says the contestants are blood and urine-tested before and during the competition, mainly to make sure their systems stay in balance as they work out and lose weight, but also to insure overall fairness. The only pills contestants are allowed are multi-vitamins and caffeine pills to help them wake up and get through the day. Koops says those pills are only dispensed by the show’s team of medical professionals, not the trainers.
So when Fa’s drug charge came to his attention, Koops informed the players that the show would be bringing in a team of investigators “to make sure nothing untoward was happening.”
Nothing was. Fa says he and Michaels “smoothed things out” before he was voted off the show. Michaels says the incident has made her a better, stronger trainer. If it happened again? “It wouldn’t bother me at all,” she says.