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23rd September 2025
01:11pm BST
With the final of Traitors Ireland set for today, tensions in Slane Castle have been rising.
And it seemed as tensions boiled over on Sunday night when both traitors got off scot free, Joanna Masiarek was banished as a faithful.
Joanna took to her social media to say she was "heartbroken" by the online reaction to her emotional banishment.
When Joanna stood up to reveal she was a faithful, she told her fellow players while fighting back tears: "I said I’m not going to cry, and the only reason I’m doing that is because my character was being attacked.
"I actually hope one of the guys will win it, because you are mean girls, and I’m a faithful."
Her words caused a major uproar, both within the group left in Slane Castle and on social media after the episode aired.
However, Joanna, the 39-year-old logistics specialist, quickly said she holds "absolutely no grudges" as she looks back on her time on the show. She goes on to describe all remaining contestants as "wonderful people", urging fans of the show to keep their negative comments to themselves.
Even though Joanna recalls it all feeling "very real" in the moment, Joanna said she would like people to remember that it is just a TV show featuring "real people with real feelings".
She goes on to say: "I wouldn’t like this comment to hurt anybody. I am absolutely devastated seeing all the comments online. I’m heartbroken because I didn’t think that something that I said, that I felt at the moment, would have such an impact."
"To be fair, I can’t even imagine how all of the girls are feeling because even I’m getting so many messages and horrible comments, so I can’t even imagine what they are going through. When you are there, you’re just thinking about the present moment that you’re in."
"The majority of the female contestants that are still in the castle are very young, still on their path of self-discovery, finding their life,” she continues.
"Before sending any messages or comments to any of the contestants, please think twice. Is this something you would like to hear? Or is it something you would like your daughter to receive as a message?"
Joanna said she's "not very big on social media" but feels lucky that strangers' comments do not impact her.
"I don’t really allow the strangers to dictate what I feel or how I feel, so I think I’m lucky enough that it doesn’t bother me as much," she added.
"It’s not nice. I’m concerned about others probably more than myself, because I know I could deal with it, and I know I can distance myself from like opinions about me."
Joanna didn't think she'd be the type of person to get emotional at the roundtable.
"I was actually the one person that was always saying, ‘you’re not going to see the tears from me, because it’s just not who I am’," she said. "But at the moment, obviously, like I felt like my character was being attacked. That’s where the tears came from."
"Because for me, the one thing that I do in life is since I came out to myself and to the world, and like living as a queer woman who wants to be true to herself, I said: ‘I will never lie.’
"And those are the things that I am saying to my girls, ‘Do not lie because it will always catch you.’ That being used against me, that felt like I was being attacked.
"That was it, that’s where all the emotion came out."
She goes on to say that she has no regrets regarding how she went about the game, including her decision to gift Kelley (23) a shield, despite Kelley later voting her out of the show.
"She felt like she was being targeted, so for me, it’s just the mam inside that I was like, I just need to protect her. She’s closer in age to my daughter than to me."
The final episode of Traitors Ireland will air on RTÉ One at 9.35 pm tonight.
