6 Wildest ‘Naked and Afraid’ Controversies, Including Accusations From Former Contestants

Naked and Afraid’s medical emergencies have sickened us. Its pixelation process has amazed us. And now, its controversies are astonishing us.

Since its debut in 2013, the Discovery Channel reality franchise has landed in trouble more than a few times, sometimes by its own alleged doing, sometimes not. Former Naked and Afraid contestants and a famous survivalist have accused producers of meddling with the reality of the competition, for example, while a few viewers seem to have taken their fandom too far.

As we await the premiere of the spinoff Naked and Afraid: Shipwrecked on Sunday, August 2, at 8/7c, we’re ranking our picks for the wildest on-air and off-air controversies around the franchise.

6. Survivorman Les Stroud’s fakery accusations

Survival expert and Survivorman star Les Stroud alleged in a 2015 Vice interview that many survival reality shows are “produced, staged, faked, scripted, set up, and done in a way so that they can produce numerous episodes, some of which do it horribly and blatantly so.”

He also name-dropped Naked and Afraid as an example of one such “carefully orchestrated” survival series. “A lot of the times, you’ll see somebody who has a fear of caves just happen to conveniently run into a big, dark, scary cave as the only form of shelter, or an episode will put emphasis on wolves early on only to have a direct confrontation with, lo and behold, a pack of wolves later in the episode,” he said. “All of this stuff is a sham. It’s not genuine survival. The producers of these shows want to push the envelope more and more each season because the whole escalation lies in the next biggest thing. They have to fake these scenarios in order to achieve that consistently.”

5. Phaedra Brothers’ claims of storyline tampering

In 2014, after appearing in Naked and Afraid’s third season, Phaedra Brothers aired her frustrations with the experience in an interview with TV Insider’s sibling publication StayTuned. Brothers said she got food poisoning not from untreated water — as was explained on the show — but from a meal she ate before the survival experience started. She also claimed she had tried to point out the inaccuracy to the show’s producers and Discovery Channel.

“They said that if I said anything other than the storyline they picked, they would delete my online comments,” she said. “They decide the storyline. But in that particular [instance], I think they thought it would be a better, more dramatic story, but it wasn’t the truth. … The people in-office, they change the experience into something else. The experience itself was everything I thought it would be and more; the actual episode and airing of it was 100 percent different than I thought it would be.”

4. Honora Bowen’s behind-the-scenes stories

One of Naked and Afraid’s most vocal critics is Honora Bowen, who appeared in the main show’s third season and the first Naked and Afraid XL season. In a 2015 blog post, Bowen said she stumbled upon and availed herself of a shack in the Brazilian wilderness “complete with pots, pans, a knife, fishing line, garbage bags full of empty food wrappers, an immense pile of empty Campari bottles, [and] coconut husks.” during Naked and Afraid Season 3. And she said producers forbade her from returning to the shack.

Bowen also blogged that while in Colombia for Naked and Afraid XLSeason 1, she found a medic tent with supplies that costars ended up taking. “What did I find there? A small box of Emergen-C,” she wrote. “Foolishly, I shared these with my partners, of course, and of course, they partook of them. Oh well. Lessons learned.”

Then, in an interview with Empty Lighthouse Magazine posted a week later, Bowen said that Naked and Afraid XL producers barred her from taking medications prescribed by a doctor while admitting they let a previous contestant use a fake prescription.

And in a 2016 blog post, Bowen said Naked and Afraid is “like a Nazi experiment.”

3. One father’s Naked and Afraid-inspired digital detox

In 2025, a man from California faced the possibility of child endangerment charges after disappearing into the Brazilian wilderness with his 13-year-old son and not resurfacing until authorities found them nearly a week later, per People. The father told authorities he wanted to do a digital detox with his son and to mimic the conditions of Naked and Afraid.

2. Danielle Beauchemin’s lawsuit over nude photos from the show

Earlier this year, former Naked and Afraid contestant Danielle Beauchemin sued Maine’s Kennebec County, the county’s emergency management agency, and various current and former county officials, alleging civil rights violations, according to the Kennebec Journal.

In that lawsuit, she alleged that former Emergency Management Agency Director Arthur True entered her locked office, logged onto her work computer, accessed her personal Google Drive account, and downloaded more than 100 photographs of her, including many uncensored nude photos of her from her time on Naked and Afraid. An attorney for the county denied the allegations.

1. Substitute teacher’s Naked and Afraid screening

In 2015, Florida’s Collier County Public Schools banned a substitute teacher from working at any school in the district after that teacher inexplicably showed Naked and Afraid to second-grade students in a computer lab at Golden Gate Elementary School, according to WINK.

The school’s principal responded to the incident by calling all the students’ parents, some of whom didn’t understand the situation until seeing a clip of the show.

Naked and Afraid: Shipwrecked, Sunday, August 2, 8/7c, Discovery Channel