""Reasonable Doubt"
On this week's episode of "Hell's Kitchen," celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay eliminated a young chef named Joanna he accused of using rancid crabmeat in a spaghetti appetizer.
In a dramatic scene, Ramsay sniffs a container then calls an assistant over to sniff it. After the assistant recoils from the smell, Ramsay confronts Joanna.
"Can you not smell that?" Ramsay fumed.
Ramsay then makes certain that the crab had not been served to any of the restaurant's customers.
"Thank God for that!" Ramsay screamed. Turning on Joanna, he bellowed "You'll kill someone!" He then orders her out of the kitchen.
This incident led to Joanna's elimination from Ramsay's show in which chefs compete to be hired as head chef of a new multimillion-dollar restaurant with a $250,000 annual salary and profit participation.
I reported this incident in this blog earlier this week. The Associated Press has since reported a development that may cast doubt on whether Joanna was guilty of negligence that could ruin her career.
The former manager of an Indian-American restaurant filed a lawsuit in New York on Tuesday that accuses Gordon Ramsay of faking scenes from his upcoming reality series, "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares," that defames the eatery, the AP's Larry Neumeister reported Wednesday.
In the new series, Ramsay performs restaurant makeovers. In his lawsuit, Martin Hyde accuses Ramsay of fabricating scenes in which he finds spoiled meat in Dillons in Manhattan. Hyde also accuses Ramsay of using a defective chair on camera to imply that Dillons' furniture was shoddy, and hiring actors to make the eatery look busy when the makeover was complete.
Hyde says the experience humiliated him, and led to his quitting his job.
I'm not accusing Ramsay of anything. I just know he made grand theater of humiliating a young chef with accusations of criminal negligence that could haunt her the rest of her working life. The Hyde lawsuit suggests that, as I've stated here in the past - reality TV is often more about television than reality.