“I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
With only seven celebrities remaining on last Sunday’s The Celebrity Apprentice, Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders needed to fight to stay in the game. When Trump narrowed it down to either herself or celebrity chef Curtis Stone to be fired, Sanders needed to throw Stone under the bus to save herself.
“I just couldn’t sit there and say that Curtis did an awful job,” Sanders said in an interview Monday. “Curtis described himself as tone-deaf so he couldn’t help with the music. And then his vernacular was different so he couldn’t write the spots so he was hamstrung. It was just – his hands were tied. He couldn’t do a lot in the task.”
Trump encourages and even provokes his contestants to throw their fellow competitors under the bus. However, Sanders said she couldn’t place the blame on someone else when she felt it was her fault her team lost.
“I felt like it was my responsibility to give (Curtis) a job,” Sanders said. “Therefore I took a lot of the responsibility when we lost. I know Celebrity Apprentice is not known for, you know, ‘teaching lessons to people,’ but I do think that a very strong and important quality for a leader is taking responsibility and then moving on from that. The only problem was I couldn’t fight for myself. I’m just not a good fighter.”
While Trump insists that he fires contestants solely on their performance on the show, Sanders said it’s possible Trump shows some favoritism, especially during last week’s task when no one was fired.
“I’ll come out and say it,” Sanders said. “My background is if you’re not there for your race, I’m sorry you don’t make the Olympic team. There’s no re-dos. When it was down to it and (Sharon) was project manager and Holly was project manager, I think it was perfect timing (to not fire anyone). But I also look back on it and I say, hmm, if Curtis was the project manager on the other team – or on Sharon’s team and they lost, would Curtis have been fired? I think it’s a pretty valid question.
Even though the executives who judged Sunday’s task clearly thought the team of Bret Michaels, Sharon Osbourne and Maria Kanellis won, Sanders said she still doesn’t understand what went wrong with her team.
“I’m very competitive and I sit here this morning and I still don’t know how we lost that challenge,” Sanders said. “I don’t get it, I really don’t get it. I have to think that there must have been something that was clearly just missing on our side or maybe we offended them in some way and we just didn’t know it that just put them off of our creative, because I still don’t get it.”
In a previous episode, Sanders was the project manager of her team and won a challenge, winning her charity Right to Play $20,000. Sanders said this was her defining moment on her Apprentice run.
“When I got to compose myself and say that I was playing for Right to Play and the fact that we bring sport and play to children who’ve been affected by war in developing countries, that was the highlight of my experience by far,” Sanders said. It was fabulous for the nation to hear a charity that I’ve been working with for a little over 14 years.”
While she said she overall enjoyed her time on the show, Sanders said the editing, especially the editing that pitted herself and Holly Robinson Peete against Grammy winner Cyndi Lauper, was difficult to watch.
“I think as just your normal mom of two kids sitting at home watching the show, I sort of thought I could go on the show, be myself, be respectful, do a great job and have fun and then that’s the way it would come across on camera,” Sanders said. “I learned that so quickly after the first time I was project manager, the power of editing. And it’s brutal; it is absolutely brutal.”
