‘The Challenge’: 25 Stars Who Were Kicked Off the Show & Why
Apparently, the real challenge on The Challenge is keeping your hands to yourself, given the number of contestants who’ve gotten kicked off the show for altercations. In fact, disqualifying fisticuffs date back to the turn of the millennium, when the reality competition show was still called Real World/Road Rules Challenge.
It’s not always about physical violence; other contestants on the MTV-turned-Paramount+ series have been disqualified for ripping off a costar’s top, drinking alcohol before an elimination, and — in the most recent scandal for the show — dropping a racial slur.
Read more about The Challenge’s history of DQs below.
The Challenge, Wednesdays, Paramount+
Ayanna Mackins (Season 4: Extreme Challenge)
Mackins got the boot after getting rough with costar Christian Breivik after Breivik made an offensive joke to contestant Laterrian Wallace — even though Breivik wanted Mackins to remain the competition.
Mackins later reflected on the incident, explaining in a podcast appearance, “Here I am, early 20s, there’s this guy who’s older than me, drunk, 11 o’clock at night. I’d asked him several times to move out the way because he was blocking the exit to the bus. And he wouldn’t move out the way; he just kept using the N-word, saying, ‘I can say what I want to say.’ And then and then and then.”
Steven Hill (Season 9: Battle of the Sexes 2)
Hill slapped fellow contestant Shane Landrum during Battle of the Sexes 2’s “Cast a Spell” challenge. He apologized, and Landrum seemed willing to move on, but producers ousted Hill regardless.
“I had my hands up, and Shane grabs my arm, and as a reflex, I whipped my arm and pushed his face. The second I touched him, I was like, ‘Oh man,'” Hill said at the time before then-host Johnny Moseley “ejected” him from the game, above Landrum’s protestations.
Tina Barta (Season 13: The Duel 2)
During a heated disagreement, Barta punched Beth Stolarczyk in the face and was disqualified from the competition.
“Beth needs her time to shine. She comes up to me and tries to start a fight with me in the midst of Diem’s victory,” Barta later said in a confessional, refering to the episode’s iconic moment when Diem Brown removed her wig for the mud pit challeng
CT Tamburello (Season 14: The Inferno 3) & Adam King (Season 17: The Duel II)
Tamburello got DQ’d from The Inferno 3 for punching Davis Mallory in the eye after asking if whether he could take a punch, Mallory told Reality Blurred. But Tamburello didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, telling the site his reaction was, “Like, get over it. … You got a little boo-boo. Let it go.”
Then, Tamburello was removed from The Challenge again in The Duel II due to a duel with fellow The Real World: Paris alum Adam King in which he busted King’s face open. The onetime enemies later teamed up for The Challenge: Rivals.
King looked back on the incident in 2021 and said their friendship was strained during Paris and that bled over into The Challenge.
Tonya Cooley (Season 18: The Ruins)
Producers took Cooley out of The Ruins after she slapped costar Veronica Portillo. She later sued MTV, the show’s production company, and two costars, alleging that she had been sexually assaulted while passed out during the same season.
Brad Fiorenza & Darrell Taylor (Season 18: The Ruins)
Conflict between Fiorenza and Taylor boiled over in The Ruins when they got into a physical altercation that left Fiorenza unconscious and both men disinvited from the competition.
The next morning, when he was sent packing, Fiorenza admitted in a confessional, with a blackened eye, “I just never meant for anything like this to happen. And had I not been drinking, and had I not been in a stressful environment, and caught myself slipping in this situation, this never would’ve happened.”
Brandon Nelson (Season 19: Fresh Meat II)
Nelson was removed from Fresh Meat II for consuming alcohol before an elimination. As a result of his disqualification, his partner Katelynn Cusanelli had to leave the game as well.
Adam Royer (Season 21: Rivals)
Royer was kicked off the Rivals season for punching Ty Ruff during a disagreement following the season’s first challenge.
After Ruff told a woman she had cellulite, Royer confronted him and, though their fellow castmates attempted to separate them, Royer hit him, accidentally knocking over Mandi Moyer in the process. Royer was immediately removed from the game.
Vinny Foti (Season 22: Battle of the Exes)
Foti was sent packing after he ripped costar Mandi Moyer’s top off at a nightclub, and his disqualification also meant his partner, Sarah Rice, had to go home, too. “Unfortunately, an incident happened at the club last night,” host TJ Lavin told the group of contestants. “We here at The Challenge don’t tolerate any kind of behavior like that.”
In 2025, he later said in a podcast, “I apologize to everyone in the house. It was a terrible thing that happened, and looking back on it, as I’m older now, I see what happened, and it’s just a terrible situation for everyone. It could’ve easily been avoided. I was drunk, immature; if I could go back, I would change things.”
Nia Moore (Season 26: Battle of the Exes II)
Moore got disqualified for an altercation with Jordan Wiseley in Battle of the Exes II, following a racially-charged conflict they had on The Real World: Portland.
The two later appeared in an aftershow together, and Moore said of their repaired relationship, “I love this man, and we’ve grown both together. You don’t even understand how immature and lost all of us were back then.”
Camila Nakagawa & Tony Raines (Season 28: Rivals III)
In Rivals III, Nakagawa threw a glass at Raines, and Raines cornered her against a wall. Lavin announced two of them had to go, calling their behavior “completely unacceptable,” according to the International Business Times.
“When it came to the game, I think I tried, really hard,” Nakagawa told the site. “I really tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. And then he just started blowing up every night and being very rude and being very disrespectful not just to me but to all other women in the house.”
Later, in the first season of The Challenge: Champs vs. Stars, Nakagawa was not only kicked out and edited out of the competition but also blacklisted from future Challenge seasons after allegedly getting physical with a production assistant and stealing a golf cart, according to The Ashley’s Reality Roundup.
Later, Leroy Garrett went public about his experience on Dirty 30 being targeted with racist comments, and MTV apologized for them.
Shane Raines & Simone Kelly (Season 30: XXX: Dirty 30)
Raines and Kelly — who both made early exits from prior seasons due to their partners withdrawing — got into a violent fight during the XXX: Dirty 30 season and were booted from the competition.
Raines later said in a podcast that the altercation started after Raines refused to put grease in Kelly’s hair. “The cameras left for about an hour. So we’re all upstairs and sitting in the terrace area, talking about all kinds of things … and it got a little political, and whatever, so I just didn’t say much. Well, it got to one little thing, and I mentioned what I had to say, and she just had a little reaction. And I was like, I hated what she said. I was just like, ‘That’s the problem with the world right there… why can’t you just let everybody be part of every community?’ She didn’t like that. She said, ‘You don’t have a say.’ … I called her a ‘dumb b***h,’ which I shouldn’t have done. After that, she facepalmed me and started clawing my face, so I started holding her down.” After he was put in a chokehold by costar Devin Walker, things escalated. “The whole thing was stupid,” Raines admitted.
Kailah Casillas-Bird & Melissa Reeves (Season 32: Final Reckoning)
Casillas-Bird and Reeves only made it as far as Final Reckoning’s second episode before getting into a shouting match that turned into a shoving match and getting ousted from the game by host T.J. Lavin.
“I think her and I are more similar than we even realized, and that’s why we didn’t get along,” Casillas-Bird later said on Instagram.
Cory Wharton (Season 32: Final Reckoning)
During that same season, Wharton body-slammed the aforementioned Tony Raines after the latter tossed out his plate of pasta. (“I was oblivious to the fact that Cory took that the wrong way,” Raines later told Us Weekly. “Basically, that was the most expensive pasta he’s ever had in his entire life. It’s million-dollar pasta.”) For Wharton, the Final Reckoning was a disqualification from the game.
Turbo Çamkıran (Season 34: War of the Worlds 2)
Çamkıran got a Turbo ticket home in War of the Worlds 2 following an altercation with the aforementioned Jordan Wiseley, one that eventually involved security personnel.
Wiseley then recounted in a segment of Behind the Challenge that he “came in there hot” and agreed that Çamkıran might’ve perceived it as “aggression.”
Faysal Shafaat (Season 37: Spies, Lies & Allies)
In Spies, Lies & Allies, Shafaat got into a screaming match with Amber Borzotra and Josh Martinez and ended up pushing Martinez in the face and getting disqualified. “I was hoping that it wouldn’t turn into the madness that it did, but at that point it was just such a buildup between both of us that it just exploded,” Martinez told Entertainment Weekly.
Ashley Mitchel (Season 37: Spies, Lies, and Allies
Mitchell was removed from the game for a rule violation, and although an official recounting of what she said, reportedly to Josh Martinez, was never given, she later opened up about the matter herself.
In a video, she explained, “I got a little bit drink, and by a little I mean I woke up the next day, and I was still f**king drunk. And so, Josh was following me around, well, harrassing me, telling me I should put myself in, I didn’t deserve to be there. I was drunk as a skunk still so I pretty much flipped out and said some things I shouldn’t have, nothing derogatory, no slurs, nothing racial or anything like that. I just went in on him, and for some reason, that was good enough to kick me off the show.”
Nelson Thomas, Josh Goldstein, and Leo Dionicio (Season 42: Cutthroat)
Thomas, Goldstein, and Dionicio “all broke the code of conduct” during Season 42 “so they’re all gone,” as Lavin told the remaining contestants. Goldstein reportedly used a racial slur during a game with Thomas, angering Thomas to the point that he trashed kitchen items.
“I let my emotions take over, broke dishes, destroyed [the] kitchen and violated the code of conduct,” Thomas admitted on X. (Previously, Thomas was removed from The Challenge: XXX: Dirty 30 for an altercation with Derrick Kosinski.)
Dionicio reportedly repeated the slur, and he, too, got sent home. “Someone else should have gotten fined, and someone else should have got kicked out. But I didn’t even think I should have been part of the mix,” he said on the Death, Taxes, and Bananas podcast.
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