Outlast’s Female Contestants Address Toxic Male Behavior From Team Charlie, Season 3’s Villains

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the first six episodes of Netflix’s Outlast: The Jungle. Read at your own risk.]

The third installment of Netflix’s Outlast, dubbed Outlast: The Jungle after a move from chilly Alaska to sweltering Panama, is supposed to be about survival skills and gutting it out in the wilderness, but one rampant societal problem from civilization crept into the first batch of episodes released earlier this week: misogyny. 

The show brings survivalists together to compete in teams to outlast each other as players eventually eliminate themselves if they can no longer handle the difficult conditions or are ostracized by their teams. The only rule of Outlast is that players have to be part of a team in order to stay in the game: no lone wolves allowed. But this season, there are plenty of alpha dogs. 

Team Charlie emerged early as a strong frontrunner and the season’s villains, led by 24-year-old adventure vlogger Braxton Fish, 21-year-old commercial fisherman and Southern idiom spouter Brett Johnson (“He thinks he’s hot snot on a silver platter, but all he is is a cold booger on a paper plate”), and 36-year-old former NFL player and current human tank Wes Saunders. In Episode 3, the team’s trio of men voted out a female teammate, the gregarious and outspoken 25-year-old Sarah Awad, mostly because the guys found her annoying. Charlie’s other female member, 26-year-old Leiya Pillitteri, didn’t want Sarah voted out but was overruled by the boys. In fact, as she gave her defense of Sarah, the men talked over her and did a team huddle and cheer as Leiya was mid-sentence, effectively telling her that her opinion didn’t matter because man-jority ruled.

Sarah was a chatterbox who tried hard to take on a leadership role and said that her grit and independence rubbed certain people the wrong way. “Some guys don’t like that, they feel threatened by it,” Sarah told Team Bravo as she made her pitch to join their squad after being ousted from Charlie. (Bravo would later let her join.) Whether that was the case or not, Sarah dodged a bullet by leaving Charlie, one that Leiya would not be able to get out of the way of. 

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More chest-beating antics occurred during a precarious standoff in which the 6’7″ Wes physically put himself between female players from Bravo (including Sarah) and valuable natural resources while threatening them, daring them to do something, and telling them to “back yo ass up.” It was so alarming that Netflix used it as an episode cliffhanger. (In Wes’ defense — or what I can attempt as a defense — after the two sides parted ways, he immediately said he wasn’t going to do anything, but he had to “play it up.” This doesn’t break any of the show’s lax rules, just society’s.)

The most disturbing portion of the later episodes was the men from Charlie’s treatment of Leiya, who was left to fend for herself while the boys openly plotted how to get rid of her. In conversations with each other and the camera, they called her “stupid,” “sweetheart,” “useless,” “an energy leech,” and a “bitch,” because Leiya oversold her primitive skills knowledge and had difficulty starting a fire, though many of her ideas led directly to huge wins for the team that she was not credited for, like using the lens on binoculars to get a flame going, a tactic Brett ran with and took the praise for. (To be fair, a built-in gameplay tactic is to make your team stronger by getting rid of those who are deemed weaker, and Leiya had trouble finding her place among Charlie. The fewer people on your team, the greater the share of the million-dollar prize you take home.)   

Men behaving badly is nothing new to reality television — have you seen Love Is Blind recently? — but Outlast has been somewhat immune to it due to the strong personalities of its cast. These women can hold their own. In fact, Season 1’s infamous bully was Jill Ashlock, reversing gender stereotypes. But like many fans who have watched the season so far, at least two members of this season’s cast did not approve of how Team Charlie behaved.

“I didn’t really know anything about Team Charlie, so you know, my depiction of them is what I see on the show,” Team Alpha member 28-year-old photographer Maddy Jones told TV Guide after Outlast premiered on Netflix. “I think over there at Charlie Camp, from Wes, Brett, or Braxton, they’re all very immature, regardless of how old they are. They’re just very mentally immature.” 

“I’m very much for the girls,” Alpha member 28-year-old boxer Nikki Hru told TV Guide. “I do not like men who try to intimidate women. It’s a button for me. And we had definitely heard about the interaction that they had at the beach with the coconuts, and where [Wes] went up to Morgan and Sarah, and them, and was just very looming and very intimidating, and I think everything I heard about Charlie is now being portrayed in the show, and I have not heard contrary to what is being portrayed.”

Meanwhile, over at Alpha, 41-year-old former federal agent Ben Orndorff was imposing his will on his team with three women, 20-year-old model Halle Cooley, Maddy, and Nikki. While the women had ideas about how to proceed with survival, Ben would overrule them with his single vote and go off on his own adventures, like floating on his back in the nearby ocean, taking naps, or asking to be “glazed” by the women because he built a fishing spear. He singlehandedly decided to reject Leiya’s initial request to join their team, despite the others wanting her to join. When discussing how to attack an important challenge, Ben steered toward minimal effort and said, “I’d rather not do anything.” Ben gave male lion vibes, while the pride’s lionesses did most of the real strategizing. (Ben would later be eliminated after Charlie won a challenge that allowed them to cast off another player.)

“Ben wasn’t all bad, he could have been worse, you know,” Maddy said. “There was definitely worse guys we could have been paired up with. Like, did Ben bring a lot of bushcraft skills to the beginning? Did he help us on our shelter? Did he do all those things? Yeah. Did we all pitch in and do all those things? Yeah.”

“I felt like a lot of my ideas and a lot of things I wanted to do or try in terms of gameplay or making things like bushcraft or anything else, I felt like I kept getting shut down by Ben,” Nikki told TV Guide. “It wasn’t so much a team decision, right? It wasn’t like, ‘No, we don’t really like that.’ It was more of him being like, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’ And then I noticed it starting to happen to other people on the team, and that I think really started to wear on me, because it felt like a little bit more of the Ben show versus Alpha team trying to accomplish things.”

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Mental fortitude is often just as important in Outlast as physical well-being. Maddy thinks that may have influenced Ben’s actions on the show.

“I think there came a point where I don’t think Ben wanted to show it, but he was starting to give up, and it was almost like you can only put on your brave face for so long, as to where I think Nikki and Halle and me were all still doing good, I could tell Ben would just start to break,” Maddy said. “Like the scene where he kind of gives up on the raft, and Halle’s out there grinding and getting beat by the waves, and is Ben out there helping her? No, he’s just like, ‘I’m here for a swim,’ and it’s like, tell me that you’re ready to be done without telling me you’re ready to be done.”

Still, the two admit that gender does play a role in the game. Nikki says that men are stronger, which helps with building shelter and other physical tasks, but that she used negative female stereotypes to her advantage, as Alpha did when they worked with Leiya to steal gear from Charlie by having Maddy provide a distraction by pretending she wanted to join their team, paving the way for Leiya to join Alpha.   

“I think in a lot of ways being women did help us in the sense of again being underestimated,” Nikki said. “It made it really easy for everyone to count us out because we didn’t have a man on our team after a certain point, right, and it made it really easy to trick Charlie, because they didn’t expect three women to do that, and I think in that regard, the bias of other people really helped us in other ways.”

While survival skills are valuable in a game like Outlast, recent changes to gameplay have tilted the competition more toward pressuring teams to get sucked into drama, likely to make it more entertaining for the audience. That just makes teamwork and harmony more valuable.

“I think on Team Charlie, you see people starting to really get at each other over very minute issues,” Maddy said. “I think that at Alpha Camp, I felt like we were all just at a place where we don’t want drama, we don’t want controversy, we want to get along with everyone, regardless of how old you are, what your gender is, or what your strengths are. I just think we were mature enough to not let little problems become a big issue with us, and [that allowed us to] focus on the big picture.” 

The first six episodes of Outlast: The Jungle are now on Netflix. The final two episodes will be released on Wednesday, June 17.