Anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Pete Evans thought he’d beaten 60 Minutes at their own game when he demanded to film his interview with Liz Hayes for his two million social media followers.
The former My Kitchen Rules judge had no doubt hoped his uncut version would reveal his ‘truth’ instead of the mainstream media’s pro-science narrative.
But his efforts backfired badly on Sunday night when the full interview showed him rambling endlessly and failing to answer basic questions.
Checkmate: Anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Pete Evans thought he’d beaten 60 Minutes at their own game when he demanded to film his interview with Liz Hayes for his two million social media followers. But he was sadly mistaken
Most damaging of all, however, the footage, revealed Pete’s own hypocrisy.
For a decade, the 47-year-old celebrity chef was a judge on Channel Seven’s My Kitchen Rules – a competitive cooking show infamous for its manipulative editing.
During his years on the show, Pete turned a blind eye to the egregious way in which some contestants were portrayed as ‘bullies’ and ‘villains’.
In reality, many of these unlucky participants weren’t bad people at all.
Oops: The full interview showed him rambling endlessly and failing to answer basic questions
But footage had been spliced together with a healthy dose of dramatic music and suddenly they became public enemy number one.
Pete, who earned millions working in the media but now claims not to own a television, never once spoke up when contestants were being crucified on social media over their negative portrayals.
But now he’s on the receiving end of bad press, he’s demanding the full interview as an insurance policy in case he doesn’t like the edit.
Pete may claim he’s all about ‘freedom’ and ‘asking questions’ but this sneaky move proves that he’s still a control freak at heart.
Perhaps the most vocal critics of MKR during its heyday were Sonya Mefaddi and Hadil Faiza, who were kicked off for ‘bullying’ in the 2018 season.
After their unceremonious exit, the pair accused producers of using them for ratings and conspiring to oust them for being the ‘best cooks’.
‘We’ve been extremely disappointed with our experience and treatment by the show,’ they wrote on their joint Instagram account at the time.
‘Imagine how we feel watching the episodes back when the episodes have been extremely tampered with (the amount of editing is insane).
‘Twelve to 14 hours of footage… majority of airtime is on us because they want to build us up for ratings which equal $$$$ to the network.’
They continued: ‘I assure you people have acted a lot worse than us on the table, that hasn’t been aired.
‘We will both be happy when we’re off air because MKR have bullied us enough, constantly targeting us because we were unfairly dismissed and the only way they could justify this was to make us look so bad!’
Meanwhile, Pete’s version of the 60 Minutes interview saw him share his bizarre views on the COVID-19 pandemic, his own experience with modern medicine and his reasoning for sharing dangerous and scientifically disproved theories.
In the unaired footage, he explained he was once all for mainstream medicine, but developed a ‘sense of skepticism and suspicion’ as he got older.
‘We as human beings are a collection of our experiences, of our learnings. When people who are presented with something that is different from that, it is shocking,’ he said.
He also gave a long-winded answer to the simple question of whether or not coronavirus exists.
Pete has faced mounting criticism for his dangerous anti-vaccination and COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and viewers initially slammed 60 Minutes for giving those ideals a platform on the show.
But the program only aired snippets of the entire interview, and also included warnings from health experts who urged people to follow the advice of professionals.
In the version that aired on 60 Minutes, Evans suggested that he feared for his life due to his public profile and polarising opinions.
‘If I disappear or have a weird accident, it wasn’t an accident,’ he said.
‘There has been too many coincidences out there in the world for people who have questioned certain things… Sometimes those people don’t last very long.’