A mistake that may have influenced the outcome of “Survivor: Africa” has forced CBS to pay three contestants as second-place winners.
Last month, the network awarded $100,000 each to runner-ups Lex van den Berghe, the tattooed marketer from Santa Cruz, Ca., and Tom Buchanan, 45, a Virginia goat rancher.
The original first and second-place winners – runner-up Kim Johnson, a retired teacher from Oyster Bay, L.I., and $1-million top prize winner Ethan Zohn, a former soccer player from Lexington, Mass. – will keep their prizes.
“This was a screw up not a scandal,” a “Survivor” spokesman said yesterday. “It was an honest mistake and the producers dealt with it right after they became aware of the situation.”
The mistake was made while filming the show last August in Kenya and corrected in the days following the show’s two-hour finale last January.
The glitch occurred during the second-to-last immunity challenge when the remaining four castaways were asked to recall personal details about their fellow survivors.
In a winner-take-all final question, host Jeff Probst asked: “Which female survivor does not have anything pierced, including her ears?”
Johnson won the challenge when she guessed booted-contestant Kelly Goldsmith.
But after the finale ended, “Survivor” producers learned that there was actually a second female contestant on the show with no body piercings: Lindsey Richter, the castway who van den Berghe had guessed as his answer.
CBS did not make public the fact that it had designated three second-place prize winners until reporters began to ask questions yesterday.