Cheatin' Situation

Her explosive segment is frequently aired. Michelle says her confrontation scene was filmed outside Sipango, a popular Dallas club. "I was thinking, 'This is so cheesy. I can't believe I'm doing this.' I'm so embarrassed because there's like 500 people outside watching me get reamed, and some girl saying I gave her a sexually transmitted disease."

Michelle recruited her friend Terry to appear on the show with her. Gomez said he'd create a story for them. Michelle didn't like what he had in mind.

"At first it was going to be two lesbians. I was like, 'God, no. You gotta come up with something better.'" Gomez then changed the plot: Michelle would date Terry's "boyfriend," another ringer she describes as a "Metallica reject."

"The cheating stuff was filmed all black and white, like us at a restaurant or him walking me upstairs to my apartment. The guy [Gomez] was weird. He asked us to act like we're making out. I was like, 'Why don't I just get on my knees and give him a blow job? Would that be good for the show?...Dude, you're not going to pimp me out.'"

Michelle says Gomez then told her, "'You need to take one for the team.' I said, 'No, really, I don't. I'm taking 400 bucks for the team.'"

When Terry and the crew arrived for the confrontation at Sipango, she began crying and screaming at her "boyfriend" as Michelle marveled at how into the role her friend was. "I'm just standing in the background, but then she pops out with, 'This nasty bitch gave me an STD.'"

Terry told Michelle that Gomez instructed her to say that.

It got worse when the show aired, Michelle says. "When I saw the episode, it first aired in December, and they used my last name, I was like, holy crap!"

She complained to Gomez. "He's like, 'Don't be telling people it's fake.' I was like, 'I'm sure as hell going to tell people it's fake.' I don't want people thinking I was dating this Metallica reject and gave him an STD. God, it was bad."

It got even worse. Mr. Metallica did a follow-up interview saying he and Michelle had sex.

Investigator Gomez denies that he staged Michelle's or anyone else's scenario.

"No, that doesn't sound accurate. If it was that, we could do 10 episodes in 10 days. I'm not gonna buy that. I think she's just probably pissed off because maybe she has a sexually transmitted disease." He says the show receives more than 2,000 inquiries per month and doesn't need to use ringers.

Gomez says Michelle's supposed paramour is "just a guitar player who likes to pick up women and sing a song everywhere he goes. It was funny--the day we were at Starbucks he pulled out the guitar and started singing on the damn patio."

Michelle says Gomez set up everything. "He would call me up, like Mr. Incognito, and say, 'Do you think you can meet at Starbucks? And don't make eye contact.'

"So here I am outside Starbucks with this geek playing guitar, long-ass hair, and all I'm thinking is that these people don't know that there's a chubby Mexican [Gomez] in the bushes peeping at us."

Michelle says she knows several people who've appeared surreptitiously on Cheaters. "They've done a lot of fake shows. Their whole premise at first was, 'We've got to keep the show going, so we do a fake one here and there.'"

Mark, another Cheaters alum, says he was channel surfing one night and saw his friend Becky on the show. (Mark and Becky asked that their real names not be used because they're still getting money for referrals to the show.) When Mark next spoke to her, "I told her that I'd seen the show and that I didn't know she had a boyfriend." Becky told him she didn't. It was made up. She was paid.

Becky referred Mark to Gomez, who arranged an interview for him.

"I just spilled the story to them that I'd been given by Gomez," Mark says.

Gomez called Mark later that night and told him to come to the studio the next night to meet Grand, then head out to confront the cheating "girlfriend" supplied by the show.

When Mark arrived at his confrontation scene, "Tommy shows me this film of her and this other guy making out. And then I go up there and yell at her and call her a bitch and all that. I'd never even seen her up to this point. When we were going over to confront her, I didn't know which couple it was until the cameras got around her."

Mark says Grand and crew offered sincere sympathy. "The whole way home Tommy's trying to console me. At the end we get out and Tommy says, 'Sorry it turned out this way; you don't really need her.' Then he told me there were a few titty bars right around that area where I could get my mind off her."

But Grand might have sensed something was amiss when Mark couldn't direct them to their destination--supposedly his and his girlfriend's favorite place. Or perhaps the many cheaters who seem to prefer dining-- and kissing--openly on restaurant patios, or who forget to close their hotel room blinds, might have tipped someone off that some scenarios are fake.