The Traitors finalist Mollie Pearce has said she was “hurt in the moment” when her close friend Harry Clark stole the whole £95,150 prize pot by deceiving her but she has “no beef” with him now.
The 21-year-old faithful disability model from Bristol finished runner-up in the hit BBC game show after she voted to banish faithful account manager Jaz in the final showdown instead of 22-year-old British Army engineer Harry, who was a traitor.
Mollie swore and stormed out of the room after it was revealed she had been lied to by her close friend, having previously told him she would never speak to him again if it was revealed he was a traitor.
Friday’s finale episode saw an average audience of 5.5 million tune in to watch the show’s dramatic conclusion, with a peak audience reaching up to 6.9 million.
Reflecting on the moment of betrayal after Friday’s finale, she said: “Obviously it hurt in the moment as you can see from my reaction, it definitely hurt.
“I think it was more the guilt of Jaz as well because, obviously, I’d taken Jaz’s experience and he left at the last minute, which wasn’t very nice, so it was more the guilt of that.
“I was upset, but it was a game and I think people forget that is what we have to do. And when you go in there that money’s never yours anyway. I never thought I was going to get to the final, I never thought I was going to have the money.
“You know that you’re going to have people that betray you in there, you can’t hold a grudge, you sign yourself up for that game and you have to accept the outcome.”
She revealed she and Harry are doing “fine” now, adding: “There’s no beef at all with me and Harry, we are the same as we were. And I’m happy for him as well.
“Watching it back, you can see what a good game he played, he had me totally fooled, and I think he had a lot of people fooled in there.
“I know, obviously, it focused a lot on our friendship, but there were a lot of other people that were convinced by Harry. It just happened to be me at the end with him.”
Mollie explained they saw each other quite soon after the finale, which was filmed in September last year, to “nip it in the bud” so they could enjoy the rest of the experience together.
Recalling the reunion, she said: “I just called him a name and then we had a big hug.
“I think in that moment you’ve got to just laugh about it, to be honest, I just said to him ‘Fair play’.
“It’s such a wild game, and I had the best experience ever and I’m not going to let what happened at the end take away from that.”
In the final banishment vote, Mollie initially chose Harry but then rubbed his name off her chalkboard after she asked him: “It’s not you?” and he confirmed he was not a traitor.
She said she did consider the doubts that faithful Jaz and traitor Andrew raised about Harry, but felt led by her emotions in the moment.
“I’m quite an emotional person and I think the friendship just took over for me and I just couldn’t do that to him without fully being convinced he was a traitor, I just would have found that really, really hard”, she added.
“Because if he stood up there and said ‘I’m a faithful’ I would have felt so guilty, I think I couldn’t win.
“I couldn’t have won because I would have felt guilty whatever I did.”
During the series, Mollie discussed how she was also born with a limb difference on her right hand and had surgery to remove her colon after she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which left her with a stoma bag.
The disability model, who has gone back to her day job as a healthcare assistant, said she has had some “amazing messages” from viewers thanking her for raising awareness, which has made the experience “all worth it”.
“I think that I’ve helped a lot of people. And even a lot of like parents have reached out to me and their children might have a stoma or limb difference and they say seeing me on the TV has helped them so much so I do feel like a winner in that sense”, she added.
“And I think this has finally given me a platform to spread that awareness. I’ve always tried to do it but having this massive platform now will change everything.
“I’m really looking forward to just advocating for that and really pushing that out there because I think it does need to be spoken about more.”