Static Zombie

The Jury Has Spoken

A jury found original Survivor winner Richard Hatch guilty of tax evasion today after only a day of deliberation. His defense strategy sounds like it was plucked from the bottom of a cereal box. In the media, he claimed that producers offered to pay his taxes for him in exchange for his silence upon discovering that other contestants were getting food snuck in, against the rules. It's not unlikely that cameramen in the first season were on a loose leash and dropped candy bars or other munchies in the path of players they liked, although Hatch's fellow players deny that any cheating went on. But the jury never heard about the supposed deal, because he never testified to it in court and his attorney never asked producer Mark Burnett about it during the trial. Instead, Hatch's ingenious defense boiled down to this: "I'm the world's worst bookkeeper."

I'm no Ernst or Young. I rely on Turbotax every April. But when I got my TV show windfall, I forked over the government's share. I wasn't sure if the producers would withhold my taxes or not, but when a check arrived for the full quarter million it didn't take a genius to realize I'd be writing a fat check of my own to the IRS.

There's no way he could have honestly believed his taxes had been taken care of by the network. And even if I believed he was being truthful on that count, there's the little matter of the taxes he didn't pay on the over $300,000 he earned for hosting a radio show. Did he think CBS was picking up the tab there, too? And the charity money he spent on home improvements was just an indictment waiting to happen.

Hatch isn't stupid, so this whole situation baffles me. How did he possibly think he'd get away with it? He was so cocky, he rejected a plea bargain agreement last year to take the case to trial. Apparently he forgot that all that money came to him as a result of becoming reality television's first break-out villain. A jury might well have let Rupert Boneham off the hook, but Hatch was dead meat.

Soon he'll be fresh meat.

Posted by Peter at January 25, 2006 07:55 PM