A new Hulu documentary is detailing all the horrific behind-the-scenes secrets of “The Swan” — one of the most extreme and shocking reality TV shows of the early aughts.
The show, which aired on Fox for just two seasons in 2004, transformed women from “ugly ducklings” to “swans” with aggressive plastic surgeries before pitting them against each other in the beauty competition.
“I think this is one of the most sadistic reality shows of all time,” the director of “The Swan: Behind the Mirror,” Erin Lee Carr, exclusively told Page Six.
Nine million viewers tuned in at the time to watch the swans undergo as many as 15 surgeries before they were pushed to slim down at the gym, debuting their final looks on TV three months later.
The show’s creator, former Telemundo exec Nely Galán, declined to participate in the new documentary.
Here are the biggest revelations from “The Swan: Behind the Mirror,” which is now streaming on Hulu.
They allegedly weren’t allowed to have mirrors
When the women first arrived at their housing, “The Swan” staffers went through their luggage, and removed their mirrors, former contestants allege in the doc.
“It was a shock, it was a surprise,” former contestant Beth Lay says.
She noted that staffers took away “everything with a reflective surface, like CDs.”
The swans didn’t get to examine their changed appearances until the end of the show, when they had to look in a mirror and react on-camera.
Former swan Kelly Alemi says she was blindsided by the rule.
She recalls, “I was like, ‘no mirrors, what are you talking about?’”
The women weren’t told about the beauty pageant ahead of time
Former contestant Kristy Garza claims the pageant portion of the show was never “mentioned before” she joined.
“Yeah, we did sign up to be filmed…to share our stories,” she says. “We didn’t sign up for a pageant.”
The show promised us therapy and plastic surgery. It did not promise us a pageant,” Alemi adds.
Former contestant Cindy Ingle says she was flabbergasted when Galán dropped a “bomb” on them about the pageant.
According to Ingle, Galán allegedly told the swans that they would have so much “confidence” by the end of their experience that they would be able to walk “onstage in a bikini, in front of millions of people.”
The show’s former producers claim that a pageant wasn’t part of the show’s original concept and Mike Darnell, Fox’s head of alternative programming at the time, allegedly pushed for it.
Darnell declined to participate in the doc. Page Six reached out for comment.
The women didn’t get much choice about their plastic surgery procedures
Lay claims they threatened to sent her home if she didn’t agree to get all the procedures that the show’s surgeons picked out for her.
“None of this was my choice at all. You’re told, ‘This is what you’re doing,’” she says in the doc.
When the plastic surgeons on the show told Ingle “this nose has to go,” she “didn’t feel like I could say ‘no, I don’t want that,’” she explains.
A former producer claims, “women had maybe one percent say over what procedures they had.”
They got all their surgeries at once
One of the show’s plastic surgeons Dr. Randal Haworth reveals they could only keep the women under anesthesia for 10 hours, which meant rushing through “as many procedures” as possible within that time frame.
According to Carr, most of the swans had eight to 15 procedures.
Because the women had to debut their final looks within three months, “I have to get the face stuff done as quickly as possible. It was very intense,” he recalls.
Garza recently told Page Six, “I know that they tweaked my eyes…but I couldn’t even tell you the exact surgeries I had.”
Post-surgery, they allegedly didn’t have much help or support
“We took care of ourselves,” Ingle says of post-surgery care.
She claims they initially had “two roaming nurses” tending to the 16 contestants after their surgeries, “and then, that got cut down to one [nurse]. So, we may see her twice a day. We may see her once.”
Contestants on the show were paired with roommates, who Ingle claims help nurse each other back to health.
“The other woman in your living situation had to change your linens, had to go get ice packs,” the doc’s director, Carr, recently told Page Six,
Alemi claims in the doc that the swans had like “one day of aftercare” before they were taken back to their housing post-surgery.
She details having a swollen face with bandages around her head as her liposuction leaked.
“I knew my boobs were humongous, and my ass and legs were hurting because they had done so much lipo,” she says. “You leak through your garments and your sheets – and, we didn’t have anyone to help us change our bedding.”
Season 2 had a sister twist
Sisters Kari and Gina Bravata were both contestants on Season 2 – but, Kari wasn’t aware that Gina was on the show until they revealed it to Kari on-camera after their surgeries.
To protect the secret, Gina said they kept her in a second location, away from the living facility the other swans were in.
“The legal team told me the cost of the twist – if anything were to be ruined, I would be sent home, and liable for I don’t remember how much money. Millions,” she alleges.
They were pushed to work out while they were still recovering from surgery
Debbie Siebers, the trainer who worked with the swans, alleges that the producers were unhappy that contestants weren’t losing weight fast enough, and told her, “We need to get you to work them out twice a day.”
“I thought, ‘That’s impossible.’ They’re not on enough calories, and they’re still healing. They needed months and months of recovery,” Siebers adds.
Lay alleges that Galan — who has not spoken out about the new doc — put contestants on a 1200-calorie daily diet.
“The whole time we were there, I was in a state of delusion,” Season 2 contestant Dore Weber recalls, “They made me go to the gym for several hours a day.”
She claims that she was only eating 500 to 800 calories a day.
Gina, meanwhile, claims while she was 2 hours into a workout session, they “had cameras in my face, and they would flat out tell me what a failure I was.”
One woman was allegedly told her arms were ‘unacceptable’
At the end of the process, the swans debut their new looks onscreen.
“I could not stand,” Gina says of her ballgown for the pageant.
She claims she was also given elbow-length silk gloves because her “arms were unacceptable and they could not be seen on television.”
Gina adds, “I had been working so hard for so long…and after all that, I was still not good enough.”
Galan allegedly reprimanded a swan for gaining weight after the show
Lay says after the show ended, she gained weight due to health problems, which was later criticized by Galan while filming a “where are they now” segment.
Galan “was in shock, like ‘what happened to you?’” Lay claims.
Lay says it was “mortifying” and alleges Galan reprimanded her, “in front of the entire table of women.”
Galan did not return Page Six’s request for comment.
Lay says after the show, she head nothing from the production team, and felt “emotionally scarred from the situation” because she felt “frustrated and ashamed” to have “fed into the world’s view of beauty.”
Alemi says that she would hear from Galan sporadically after the show, but she never asked if she was OK or needed a therapist and never offered to help former contestants find people to maintain their looks.
“We never heard from her because she immediately started filming Season 2,” she says.
A cameraman allegedly taunted a woman about her miscarriages
Season 2 contestant Dore Weber went on the show hoping to get back to her “old self” following years of miscarriages, infertility and extreme depression
After her sister had a baby, a camera man allegedly asked her, “How does it feel that everybody else can have kids, and you can’t have any?”
A former producer alleges that in Season 2, they wanted “the money shot” of making a swan cry onscreen.
“I got so upset, I tore off my bandages, left and went into the bathroom, and wouldn’t come out,” Weber recalls.
She says she was trying to “work so hard [to] heal,” and the production team was, “trying to open up wounds and try to make me cry for the camera.”
She notes the “tactics” they used were “shady” and “despicable.”
Kari ‘almost died for reality television’
Kari claims she didn’t wake up following her surgeries.
“I almost died for reality television,” she claims. “I wasn’t really breathing, and there was something about fluid in my lungs. My oxygen just got lower and lower.”
She adds that she had nurses with her for oxygen for a week or two after the ordeal.
She told Page Six that to this day she doesn’t know exactly what happened to cause her health scare.
The production was allegedly ‘giddy’ that a contestant had cancer
Former producer Jenna Baker recalls a moment in Season 2 when contestant Patti Chedohan discovered “cancer in her nose” when they were conducting plastic surgery.
Baker claims “the team was giddy about the diagnosis” because Chedohan’s husband had died of cancer.
Baker calls it “the worst moment of my career,” as she remembers asking Chedohan if she was afraid that she would die, leaving her children with no parents.
“That was when I started to think, ‘This feels kind of disgusting,’” Baker says. “These women are treated like a storyline, not like people.”
The women had post-show problems, and the show’s dentist later lost her license
“I had so many problems with my teeth – cracks, breaks. Whatever they did to my gums was very detrimental,” Garza recently told Page Six.
Garza noted that she’s had “six teeth” pulled in the years since the show, because she was given veneers that were “done improperly” and “the tooth underneath rotted.”
Gina claims in the doc the swans all had “extreme leftover problems” from the show’s dentist, Sheri Worth.
In 2017, the Dental Board of California suspended Worth’s license, due to complaints of “negligence, fraud, incompetence, overdiagnosis and excessive treatment,” per the LA Times.
“Let’s face it, she’s no longer practicing for a reason,” Gina adds.
Lay alleges that Galan “didn’t give us any tools for how to take care of ourselves” after the show.
Her left breast implant shifted, she explains, “I just had to kind of live with it.”
Ingle, meanwhile, says her breast implant “popped,” and she couldn’t afford to fix it.
“The Swan: Behind the Mirror” is now streaming on Hulu.
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