She just won $250,000 on Big Brother for the second time – and Reggie has vowed not to repeat the same mistakes as the past.
Reggie Sorensen was announced as the winner of Big Brother Australia in a live finale on Tuesday night, with previousseason three winner going home $250,000 richer.
It meant Reggie, 48, made Australian TV history, as the first Australian Big Brother contestant to win the show twice.
And in a strange turn of events, a similar story was playing out over on MasterChef last night, as season seven winner Billie McKay became the first player to win that show twice.
It had been 19 years since Sorensen beat Chrissie Swan to take out the third season of Big Brother, winning $250,000 in the process.
But those winnings soon dissapated in a mess of legal fees and scams.
In a radio interview after her win today, she vowed not to repeat the mistakes of the past with her second massive reality TV winnings.
Speaking to Mike E & Emma on RnB FRIDAYS Radio, Sorensen said a man posing as a TV producer had scammed her out of $40,000 of her prior winnings. Another big chunk went to various legal fees.
“Lawyers in the divorce, lawyers to get out of my contract with (celeb agent) Harry M Miller… that’s where it all went,” she said.
This time around, she had plans for a more concrete use for for winnings: “Hopefully I can use this money to use a deposit and get a house for me and the kids.”
Sorensen was up against new players Johnson Ashak, 25, and 34-year-old Taras Hrubyj-Piper, in Tuesday’s finale.
The top three had earlier offered their final pitches to viewers just before voting lines closed.
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“It was hard, but I went into the house, I was true to myself, I was the most nominated housemate, nine times, and every time I got myself out of that purple chair for God’s sake,” said Johnson.
Reggie said she had wanted to play an “honest game” and wanted to win for “the OGs,” while Taras said he’d played a “strong game” – one that he acknowledged had earned him “a lot of enemies.”
That top three was decided by Taras in Monday’s penultimate episode of the season, with his final challenge win giving him the power to decide who would join him at the finale.
It was a decision he agonised over, unsure about whether to bring Reggie – a proven audience favourite – to the end.
“I don’t want to do it, I want to give myself the best chance to win,” he said.
“How the hell do you win against Reggie?”
It was a very good question: Sorensen is perhaps one of Big Brother’s best-loved contestants, beating Chrissie Swan back in 2003 to win season three of the reality show.
But since her win, Sorensen’s life has been fraught with difficulties: she lost some of her winnings to a con artist and has suffered health problems including a degenerative eye condition that means she currently only has 9% of her central vision. During the finale she revealed she had found it difficult navigating the Big Brother house, committing the layout of the rooms to memory as she learned to make her way around the space.
This season of Big Brother has struggled in the ratings for Seven, with episodes regularly pulling less than 350,000 viewers across the five metro capital cities. Tuesday’s finale was watched by just 363,000 viewers across the five metro capitals, while over on Ten, 875,000 tuned in to watch the winner of MasterChef be announced.
Originally published as Big Brother Australia crowns a 2022 winner in history-making finale
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