Just like the man who nominated him, Donald Trump’s pick for transportation secretary Sean Duffy has a history as a reality star. And in 1997, he made the most of his time on MTV’s The Real World: Boston, as the show’s most sex-crazed cast member.
Now a former congressman and ex-Fox News contributor, Duffy has been fairly open about his experience as one of seven strangers picked to live in a house together for America’s entertainment. He met his wife, also a Fox News personality who starred on The Real World: San Francisco, Rachel Campos-Duffy, at an all-stars version of the series.
“We got married, fell in love and now have nine kids,” Duffy said in a 2019 Youtube interview. “We are the most prolific Real World couple of all time. No one beats us.”
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And though the former congressman admitted in the same interview that “you look back now, you look at the things you say and did [on the show], it’s embarrassing,” he also called his televised experience living with roommates Syrus Yarbrough, Kameelah Phillips, Genesis Moss, Montana McGlynn, Jason Cornwell, and Elka Walker “wonderful.”
If you take a look at Duffy’s season on the show, you can see just how wonderful it was for the then-25-year-old law student at William Mitchell College in St. Paul, Minnesota. His fellow cast members at the time described him as a “jock-type guy” who “likes to party”—and as a viewer, you get to see Duffy do just that, and fairly often during his season.
One storyline in particular showed his fixation on wanting to have sex with his female cast mate Moss, who identifies as a lesbian, while other parts of the season showed him flirting with a different female cast member, who he tried to persuade to masturbate in front of him. He employed such romantic phrases as “feel my noodle” in an attempt to make that happen.
But he wasn’t just fantasizing about his onscreen roommates. In one episode, he missed a meeting with kids he’s supposed to be mentoring to hook up with a “local girl.” And when MTV’s Road Rules had a crossover episode with Real World towards his season’s end, he went out with a literal bang, as viewers found out that he bedded 22-year-old Erika Ruen from that show as well.
Said one of his Real World cast mates of Duffy and his latest fling, “They went to town. They went in the bathroom. Had her up against the wall. You know what I’m sayin’.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Duffy for comment but has not received a response.
Other unflattering moments for the former congressman include when he called his Black female roommate a “b---h” as the two bumped heads and when he drank alcohol in front of the at-risk children in his charge. He then ditched those children to go skiing, and was subsequently sacked as a mentor.
Now a “devout” Catholic himself, Duffy famously interrogated the one openly religious Catholic cast member on the show, Elka. Her conclusion at the end of that conversation: “Everybody in the house’s belief system and religion is different from mine.” He also agreed with another female cast mate, McGlynn, when she declares that religion is “bad for women.”
For any potential foreshadowing that the future congressman may one day hold public office, look no further than when he had the chance to hear Presidents Clinton, H.W. Bush, and Carter speak in Philadelphia and fell asleep in the crowd.
But “embarrassing” as Duffy finds those old recorded experiences, he still hadn’t had enough of reality TV when his season of Real World ended. He went on to appear on Seasons 1 and 5 of MTV’s The Challenge, a show on which reality stars compete for cash and prizes. He won both of those seasons—and met his co-star wife on the show.
In 2010, Duffy became the first reality television star to serve in Congress, when he was elected in northwestern Wisconsin. Three years later, he was once again a TV fixture, this time as a Republican congressman holding the government hostage in an effort to overturn Obamacare and making cable news appearances in support of the Tea Party. He served in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2019, after which he joined Fox News as onscreen contributor.
According to CNN, Duffy’s last day at Fox employee was last Monday, and he interviewed for Trump’s transportation cabinet gig later in the week.
Now that he’s presumably settled down his “partying” days, the former reality star may become the country’s next Secretary of Transportation. But it might be hard for anyone who watched The Real World in the ‘90s to take him seriously.
