It goes without saying: We all have a lot of questions for Jeff Varner after Wednesday's episode of Survivor: Game Changers.
In case you missed it (or you've been hiding under a rock the last 12 hours), the Survivor contestant outed Zeke Smith as transgender during tribal council in what appeared to be an attempt to save himself.
However, Varner believes if the entire two-hour long tribal council wasn't edited down to 20 minutes, you might be able to understand a bit more where he was coming from.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly's Morning Live on SiriusXM Thursday morning, he explained, "That Tribal Council is two hours long. It went forever. They had to edit it down to 20 minutes. There is so much you didn't see that went on forever. We talked about all of it."
He continued, "It's unfortunate that you can't see the entire Tribal. I wish there is some way they could put that as a secret scene or something because I was illustrating the deception that Ozzy [Lusth] and Zeke—and Andrea [Boehlke] was in part of that—that they were illustrating. When I was talking deception, that was 100-percent what I was talking about. There was no hope. There was no hope of anything. I didn't go into that Tribal with [outing Zeke] as a target—with that as a plan to do."
Rather, he said, "When I was talking about the deception of the secret alliance and trying to sway everybody else, there was a moment where Zeke looked at me—this was edited out of the show—but he looked at me and said, 'There is no deception. I'm not deceiving anybody.' And when he said that, my question just came out of my mouth to him."
But before you start rolling your eyes, thinking he's looking for sympathy, he added, "Let me just clarify: I make zero excuses. There are no excuses for what I did. I'm not looking to garner any sympathy from anybody. This is not about me. This is about Zeke. And I'm devastated that this is what happened and this is where we are."
Varner has already expressed his apologies to Zeke and the LGBT community and continues to do so.
"I will say that I have spent 10 months stewing in this awful, horrible mistake I made," he told EW. "I have been through I don't now how much therapy with the show's therapist, with a local therapist. I have met with and spoken to several LGBT organizations, I have joined the board of a couple of them, I joined a national study on outness. This has changed me drastically. But I don't want to spend two minutes talking about my experience because this isn't about me. This is about Zeke. And I can only profusely apologize. "