Ross Mathews Explains His Investigative Reporting In The ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ House
Ross Mathews is waiting for his Pulitzer. The TV personality was the man behind some of the biggest Celebrity Big Brother headlines when he used his interview skills to get Omarosa Manigault to dish about her recent stint in the White House. Ross knew he was sitting on reality TV gold when he got Omarosa to spill the tea about her time on Trump’s team—his conversations even made it into a White House press briefing—and he says he did it for the people.
“Listen, I felt like I was an investigative journalist in that house, and I needed to get all the scoop from the O, from the Omarosa,” Mathews told E! News. “So every time we sat down to talk, I would just sort of ask a little question.”
Ross Mathews has plenty of experience as a red carpet correspondent for E!, but no one was prepared for his savvy sit-downs with Omarosa, who has known Donald Trump ever since her days on The Apprentice. Manigault joined the Celebrity Big Brother cast just two months after being fired from her post as director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison, so Ross Matthews cozied up to her multiple times to get the scoop as the Celebrity Big Brother cameras tracked her every word.
After Ross asked Omarosa to assure everyone that things were not as bad as they seem with Trump’s administration, she replied that the opposite was true.
“No, it’s going to not be OK,” Omarosa said. “It’s not. It’s so bad.”
Manigault also revealed that when she was in the White House, she was “haunted by tweets every single day.”
In a later conversation, Omarosa said if Vice President Mike Pence ever became president, people would be begging to have Donald Trump back. Omarosa called Pence “scary” and “extreme” and she mocked the fact that he says Jesus tells him to do things.
In an interview with Us Weekly, Ross Mathews explained why getting Omarosa to talk was so important to him and why he reported back to fans in his Celebrity Big Brother diary room sessions.
“I seriously was DYING inside the house trying to get scoop for everybody,” Ross told Us. “And when she would open up to me I would just shut the hell up and let her spill the tea.”
Mathews also joked to TV Guide that he is waiting for his Pulitzer Prize for his Omarosa reporting.
“Every second of every day, I was fascinated by her,” Matthews told TV Guide.
“I wanted to get as much dirt out of her as I could. I felt like I was America’s player before they voted me their favorite player…Where is my Pulitzer Prize? Give me an Edward R. Murrow Award, please! Let’s come to our senses! Put me on 60 Minutes. Did they spell my name right? There’s one ‘T’ in Mathews.”
Ross Mathews was excited to learn that some of his Omarosa interviews made it on-air on Celebrity Big Brother, but he wasn’t surprised they made news headlines.
“Well, I assumed it would make news,” Mathews told the Daily Beast of his initial investigative interview with Omarosa. “In fact, as soon as the conversation was over I ran to the Diary Room and said, ‘Did you guys see that?’ I know what a scoop is. I knew what I was doing when I talked to her.”
While Ross admitted he was “trying to get any juicy scoop” that he could out of Omarosa—he even asked her about fired FBI director James Comey and her thoughts on a Hillary Clinton presidency—Mathews said it’s a sad day for the U.S. when a conversation in the Big Brother house spawns a response from the White House.
“I think it is a sad state of affairs,” Mathews said. “It is not OK that the White House had to comment on a conversation I had in Celebrity Big Brother. We should not be living in that kind of world.”
Although Ross Mathews said he felt a sense of “despair” after Omarosa’s dire warnings about Trump’s administration, he might feel better now that she has had time to think about it.
After her elimination from the Celebrity Big Brother house earlier this week, Omarosa Manigault backtracked on her comments that the people of the United States will not be OK.
“I think that we can — I’ve had a lot of time to think inside of the Big Brother house — we can if we make a pivot as a nation,” Manigault told host Julie Chen. “I was a part of and on the front row of probably one of the most divisive elections in our history. And as a nation, we’re better than that, we’re bigger than that, and we’re bigger than just two parties.”
