As if 2025 couldn't get any stranger, another former reality TV star was recently sworn in to a government position.
Sean Duffy is the new leader of the Department of Transportation after being sworn in on January 29, the day before American Airlines Flight 5342 tragically collided with an Army helicopter. After Sean Duffy gave a press conference on the crash as the new secretary of transporation, people became curious about who was sworn into the position and found out that he got his start in a pretty interesting way.
Sean Duffy was originally a reality TV star of The Real World: Boston
Long before Sean Duffy became a Wisconsin congressman, he was a reality TV star.
Sean Duffy appeared on The Real World, Road Rules: All Stars, Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons, the fifth season of the show that went on to become MTV's The Challenge. On Road Rules: All Stars, Sean Duffy met the woman that would become his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is best known now for being one of the hosts on Fox & Friends Weekend.
The Real World: Boston aired in 1997. It was the sixth season of the series and the only season that MTV filmed in New England with other seasons being filmed primarily in warmer climates with the network regularly picking locations like San Diego, Las Vegas, and Miami or occasionally taking the housemates somewhere international with a few seasons taking place in London, Paris, and Sydney.
Although shows that follow relatively normal people living their lives are a staple of reality TV now, it was a new concept when The Real World: New York premiered in 1992.
MTV took its inspiration from a PBS documentary that aired in the 1970s called An American Family that followed the Loud family, an ordinary suburban American family in their day-to-day lives. Unlike An American Family, MTV took total strangers with little in common and forced them to live together and let cameras film as the cast members, as the slogan for the show said, "stop being polite and start getting real."
Sean Duffy was a controversial cast member on The Real World
"Stop being polite" they did. Although there were many explosive feuds and blowout fights between the cast members on different seasons of The Real World, many of them have been lost to time and buried under the weight of other reality TV feuds.
Unfortunately for Sean Duffy, his confirmation as the transportation secretary has reality TV fans that remembered him from the 1997 season of The Real World: Boston looking back on the show and they've uncovered some serious drama: including him comparing one of his Black cast mates to a notorious historical figure.
On Sean Duffy's season of The Real World: Boston, he was put in a house with a Black woman named Kameelah Phillips, and in true reality TV fashion, the two of them butted heads. Things came to a breaking point when at one point in the series, Sean Duffy compared Kameelah Phillips to Hitler.
"She wants to have that racism right now, that same mentality for the Black people against white people now in 1997 ... That’s what Hitler thought," Sean Duffy said in an episode of The Real World during a conversation with co-star Jason Cornwell about the fact that Kameelah had vented about not liking some other members of the house, Sean included.
To his Real World cast mates' credit, Jason was shown in the clip pushing back against Sean's analysis of what Kameelah thought of her housemates.
During the conversation, Jason asked if Sean really heard Kameelah say that she believed that and he said, "That would be absolutely, completely asinine and, like, completely against everything [Kameelah] believes."
In a later clip, he's seen suggesting that they bring a gun on their mini vacation during the show so that Kameelah can "play Russian roulette" and housemate Montana McGlynn is shown giving him a shocked look before she disagrees and says that she doesn't "want Kameelah dead."
Following his departure from the MTV reality TV universe, Sean Duffy stepped into politics and, like his wife, became a co-host on a Fox show with a stint on Fox Business' The Bottom Line, but left the show in 2023 to head back into politics as a nominee for his current position.