Almost every season of Survivor includes a player who viewers dub "the bitch," and this season is no different. Never was there any contestant more deserving of this nickname than Corinne Kaplan, the onion alliance member who was captured time and time again acting nice to other players' faces, then revealing in confessionals that she wanted to "stab them in the face."

As original Fang Tribe members began to pick off the onion alliance, soon Corinne and Bob were the only alliance members left. Desperate times called for desperate measures and, only a week after Bob fooled Randy with a fake immunity idol, they decided to make yet another one, hoping to convince Kenny and Crystal to flip on Fang. Unfortunately, their plan didn't work; while Kenny changed his vote, Crystal played it safe. Corinne was voted out and, in her final comments, she told the remaining players she hoped they went on to live miserable lives.

The 29-year-old from Los Angeles, Calif. explains her turbulent mood swings, where she and Bob found the materials for the fake immunity idols and what she would have done differently.


How do you feel now that the episode in which you were voted off has aired?
Well, you know what's crazy? I didn't know why Crystal flipped. I just assumed she didn't want to leave her alliance. It turns out they totally thought my idol was real and they had tried to flush it, which I had no idea until I saw the show.

You thought they knew it was fake?
Yeah, I thought they knew it was fake and that Crystal didn't want to flip on her alliance, which made total sense. I did not think they thought it was real and that they were going to try to flush it. That's just ridiculous.

So why present the fake immunity idol to begin with if you didn't think Kenny or Crystal would fall for it?
I didn't have any other options. Either I or Bob was going home and Bob got immunity, so I was basically going home. I wasn't going to lay down and die, so I thought, "Well, I'm going to try and pull this off." I didn't really see any other options. I thought, to be honest with you, there's five people in that alliance, right? And then there's just me and Bob. All five of them cannot be in the final! I had hoped that Kenny and Crystal would flip and that way we would guarantee them a one in four shot. The worst you'll do is fourth place if you flip over. But they thought... Whatever they thought, who knows? They didn't do it. I had already previously tried to work on Matty with Randy, I tried to work on Sugar with Charlie, we had worked on Susie with Marcus – with these people, there was no other option.

Where was Bob getting the materials for these fake immunity idols?
That's a great question, because I think they think he, like, had somehow brought paint and beads to Gabon. You would think that they would show that because everybody's got to wonder where that came from. Bob and I came together and I don't know if you remember, but in the auction, I bought a $500 clue. That clue came in a very special bottle with beads and stuff all around the bottle, which really, nobody saw other than me. We needed things people weren't going to recognize from camp. Also, in the middle of the night, we woke up and took all the metal pieces off of the torches, which we bring to Tribal Council, because we really only carry those at night so they're not really recognizable. We strung together the beads from my bottle – and we used my earring, because I lost the other one, so I just gave Bob every scrap I could find. We pieced it together. He didn't actually make the beads or the metal pieces, he just put them together on the string I gave him.

Why were you so sure that Sugar didn't have the Exile immunity idol?
That's a misconception, too. I knew she had found the idol; I thought it had already been played. I thought that when they voted Kelly out, I thought that what they had really done was vote Sugar out, she played the idol and Kelly went home. I never thought they’d get rid of Kelly. Kelly had already flipped; she went with Kenny. And Kelly's much more athletic than Sugar. I thought surely they wouldn't vote her out. And then I figured there was a chance Sugar had found the immunity idol again when she went back to Exile, but, you know, I thought it was definitely played and then it was put back in Exile.

Why didn't you get along with Sugar? You seemed to have more problems with her than you did with anyone else.
Yeah, I mean, I think it makes for good TV to have a feud. But I didn't like her, and it has to do with – she irritated the hell out of me. The person I wouldn't want to be stuck with in an elevator for three minutes, let alone in Africa for 33 days. She's very high maintenance; she never stops crying; she's completely dead weight; she doesn't do anything at camp; she doesn't win challenges. She's so annoying that everyone kept sending her to Exile just to get her off their tribe. It's not just me. Everybody's got their own shtick – Marcus and Charlie with their "they might be in love or they might not be," Randy because he's angry at everybody and mine was with Sugar. But if you were to ask any of these people, they disliked Sugar just as much as I did.

What was going through your mind when Randy gave Jeff Probst the fake immunity idol?
I didn't understand why – there was no incentive for Bob to do that and Bob is not that guy. He's really sincere, he's really nice and I knew Bob was really my friend and was really in my alliance, so I didn't ever question that it was real. That made no sense to me. It still makes no sense to me now. It doesn't serve anybody any purpose other than now, nobody's going to give Sugar the million dollars, as if anyone was going to anyway. But if she makes it to the finals, nobody would bother with her because she looks like an a**hole, you know? What was going through my mind was that I couldn't believe it and I knew that as soon as Randy was actually going home, I was pretty screwed. It was just going to be me and Bob against everybody.

Did Bob ever explain why he gave Randy the fake idol?
Yeah, he did and it's actually very pertinent to the plot line, but for some reason it isn't in there. Basically, they cornered him and said, "We want to humiliate Randy. If you participate in this, you won't go home tonight, but if not, we're going to send you home." Bob is much worse of an immunity threat than Randy was, so if they were playing smart, they would have gotten rid of Bob and then would have gotten rid of Randy, but emotionally, they wanted to do that to him. Bob was told: "You buy yourself one more round if you let us do this with your fake idol." So Bob did it and he was absolutely sick about it. That's not Bob’s personality at all. I mean, you saw when he gets back to camp, he literally explodes on Sugar. He did not want to do that. He said to me he would rather be sitting on the jury than have had to do that on national TV. He felt awful.

For the first half of the game, the onion alliance seemed to be dominating and then your plans were thwarted by the two tribe shake-ups. How do you think the game would have been different if there hadn’t been any shake-ups, or even if there had only been one?
Oh, is there any doubt in your mind that we would have dominated? There's no – please. We were strategic, smart, we genuinely liked each other, we were having a fun time out there – that's the problem. I guess it was too boring to watch. They wanted excitement, so they kept shaking it up. It's silly. I think they shouldn't ruin the integrity of the game. It should just be: who is the last survivor? It should not be because there are these constant twists.

But by now, doesn't every season of Survivor include at least one tribe shake-up? Shouldn't you guys have had a contingency plan?
There was one shake-up and we lost Jacquie, so we brought in Randy. We compensated for that. But you can't keep surviving shake-up after shake-up after shake-up. It's very difficult.

Many consider you to be one of the most tempestuous contestants the show's ever had. Was that something that just developed because of the game and the environment, or was that already part of your personality?
I definitely think that it was edited accurately and that a lot of that is true, but you have to understand, that's tempered by plenty of times when I'm nice and I'm funny and I'm sarcastic. I'm other things other than angry, but that doesn't make for good TV, so what you saw was whatever they thought was the most valuable moment. It's 43 minutes – it takes three days to shoot one episode but the episode's only 43 minutes long. So you can only imagine how much stuff they missed.

They certainly had a lot of clips of you saying you wanted to stab somebody in the face.
Oh, I say that all the time! I don't know. I think it really captures the anger. It's just a figure of speech – obviously, I've never stabbed anybody, nor would I – but it felt like, at that time, I'd really like to stab Susie in the face. I think it's funny.

Do you have any regrets about the way you played the game? Would you have done anything differently?
No way. I just wish people had seen more of my personality to begin with versus just in the last five episodes, because I was exactly the same the whole time. I was wild and out of the box, I guess. I was very, very honest as person on a reality TV show and they just kind of cut that out in the beginning.

What was your strategy going into the game?
I thought that I wanted a really hardcore alliance of three people and then two periphery people. The three people I wanted – somebody who I needed and somebody who needed me. The person I needed was Marcus because he was so strong and the person who needed me was Bob. Then I ended up with Charlie, Jacquie, Randy – you know. I ended up with all these other people. But initially, going in, I thought, "These are the two people I’m going after."

If you hadn't been voted out, what would you have done next?
I would have gone with Kenny and Crystal and I would have worked something out with them. I wouldn't have ever tried to work something out with the other three.


Survivor: Gabon airs Thursday at 8 p.m. ET on Global and CBS. The season finale airs Sunday, Dec. 14 at 8 p.m. ET.

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