Karamo Brown Says an Exec Threatened His Career for Making Someone Cry on Camera

Season one, episode two. Karamo Brown does the thing he was hired to do — gets a stranger to open up on camera — and the person starts crying.

What happened next, by Brown’s account, is that an executive walked into a trailer where roughly 25 people were standing and let him have it: “If you make one more mother-f* person cry, you are f* fired! You are worthless … You are f* nothing!” And then, Brown says, the closer: “If you do this one more time, I promise you, you are f* never going to work in this town again.”

Brown told the story this month at ViewerCon in New Jersey, the TV and pop-culture convention; the Daily Mail reported his remarks. He didn’t name the executive. He did describe him as white, and he was specific about why he feels free to tell it now: “I can talk about this because everyone has confirmed it. They said, ‘Yeah, we were there.’”

His response, he says, was to keep going. “Well, listen, I got to just do what I do,” he recalls telling the man. “If you think you have that much power to [not have] me work in town, then I’m not in the right business because you don’t ordain my step.” He went back to set and did it again. The person cried.

Then they put it on a billboard

Here is the part that gives the story its shape.

The original marketing idea for the show, Brown says, was “turning red states pink,” as The Blast reported. By season two the billboards read: “We’re not crying, you are.” From that point on, he says, every conversation with the network ran the other direction: “How do we get this to be more emotional? How do we get to the heart?”

“We won Emmys off of this idea that we can get to the heart,” Brown said. “Which is what they fought against every day publicly, not just privately, me not doing.”

If his account holds, the network took the exact instinct one of its hosts says he was screamed at for, turned it into the brand, and collected the trophies. Brown’s read on what that does to a person is the most telling part of the account: “That breaks you down because even though you’re trying to be strong, you have people trying to tell you to question yourself. That’s what hurt so much because I knew that I was doing right, I knew I was being true but then I had people telling me that I was not worth it.”

He also put a name to the trap around it — that inside the Hollywood bubble he was doing the job for everyone but himself, and started believing the things he was being told.

Why this lands now

None of this is arriving out of nowhere. The Fab Five came apart publicly at the start of this year: Brown skipped the press run for the tenth and final season, pulling out of CBS Mornings and leaving Antoni Porowski, Jonathan Van Ness, Tan France and Jeremiah Brent to field questions without him. His statement at the time was about protecting your peace “from people … who seek to destroy it.” He later told PEOPLE that what broke it open for him was his mother — she’d overheard colleagues talking about him, and kept saying she’d thought they were his friends.

Worth being precise: everything above is Brown’s account — the trailer confrontation, what the network told him, what changed afterward — and there is no way for us to verify it independently. He says the people who were in the room have backed him up. The executive has not been publicly identified.

The shape of it, though, will be familiar to a lot of people reading this, and this next part is our read rather than his. A show sells warmth and vulnerability as its product. The person supplying it says he was told to dial it down, then watched it become the marketing campaign, then watched it win awards. Brown was pointed about the executive being white; he did not say that was the reason, and we are not going to put it in his mouth.

Ten seasons of teaching strangers to be honest about their feelings, and the hardest sell was apparently upstairs.