While their on-air tussle over the use of a mirror sent social media into overdrive, no one picks herself up off the mat better than the former host of Funniest Home Videos.
Burnt out and over-committed with work, a frazzled Jo Beth, now 44, admits she walked away from TV at the height of her career in the late 1990s after rumours of a sex tape surfaced.
“There was a rumour that I’d done a porno and that really hurt me,” Jo Beth tells campmate Paul Harragon on the show.
“I felt condemned even though I’d done nothing wrong. There was nothing I could do.
“I just felt really attacked, even though I’d hadn’t done anything.”
Also a one-time pop star, with hits such as 99 Reasons, Jo Beth attributes her quitting entertainment and retreating to San Diego to being “burnt out”.
“I was too busy in hindsight, too much pressure,” adds Jo Beth, who first admitted news of her breakdown to Ray Martin on A Current Affair.
“I was really burnt out and couldn’t do it anymore. I woke up one day in a ball and couldn’t stop crying for like two days.
“I probably wasn’t thinking all that rationally and I quit.”
“Working in television was different back then for women, I felt like I was pushed around a lot and taken advantage of to some point.”
Jo Beth also had to survive her second marriage break-up, to former world tennis number one Thomas Muster, the father of her son Christian, 15.
They were married in 2000 and separated just two years later, with Jo eventually moving to Noosa, Queensland, where she rekindled her broadcasting career on radio and later hosting TV’s Dirty Jobs.
Although Jo admits she doesn’t have much to do with Thomas nowadays, she knows she at least has an outpouring of support from her campmates – and fans.
They’re rallying to keep her in the jungle so she can win the major prize of $100,000 for her long-time chosen charity, World Vision.
Meanwhile, you can learn all about Laurina’s surgery secrets by clicking here.
