Rob Cesternino didn’t know he and Donna Kelce had “Bad Blood.”
The “Survivor” alum, 47, was the second person murdered on “The Traitors” Season 4 after the 73-year-old NFL mom, who was the Secret Traitor, put him on the shortlist to be killed — much to his surprise.
“I had a good relationship with Donna,” Cesternino told The Post in an exclusive interview. “That’s why it was so frustrating to see. Donna, you put me on your shortlist of people to murder. Like, why? Donna, what happened? I thought we had a good thing.”
“I like Donna a lot. She was in my car to come to the castle on the first night, and I think she might have been a little bit over her head, bless her heart,” the “Rob Has a Podcast” host continued. “Donna is in her 70s, and I felt like that she was somebody who I wanted to help as much as I could in the challenges, because I thought that she was somebody who was overlooked. I didn’t think that people really wanted to connect with her too much, and maybe it’s because they had suspicions about her being a Traitor.”
Cesternino added, “But I was very friendly with Donna, and so it was a little bit of a surprise that she put me on her list.”
After three straight seasons of “gamers” as Traitors, producers decided to switch things up and put “Real Housewives” alums, Candiace Dillard Bassett and Lisa Rinna, and “Love Island” star Rob Rausch in the turret, dooiming Cesternino’s chances.
But Cesternino never wanted to be a Traitor in the first place.
“I thought that people might think that I would be a Traitor. And I really wanted to be a Faithful,” he shared. “And I told Alan [Cumming], ‘Please make me a Faithful. I want to come in and be able to be myself and not have to carry the baggage of being a Traitor.’”
“And I thought that if I did so, I could play a really fun game of taking it to the Traitors in a way where I thought I would be able to logic out who the Traitors might be,” he added. “And I thought that that would be a really, really fun way to come into the show.”
Cesternino also revealed who he thought the Traitors were at the time of his murder.
“Dorinda [Medley] was somebody who I thought was very likely to have been a Traitor, because I thought it made so much sense for her to get brought back,” he explained. “And the thing that really sold it for me was when she got the casket in her grave and she was in my boat, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, Dorinda, I can’t believe they did this to you!’ And she was like, ‘Ah, c’est la vie.’ I was like, ‘Dorinda, they’re going to try to murder you again!’ She’s like, ‘Oh, whatever happens, happens.’ And I was like, ‘What?’ Dorinda is zen now? Since when?’”
“And then I also thought that Yam Yam [Arocho] was a Traitor,” he added of the “Survivor 44” winner. “Because I thought that they would have made a gamer one of the Traitors. I didn’t think it was Tiffany [Mitchell], and obviously it wasn’t Ian [Terry], and I didn’t really feel like it was Natalie [Anderson]. And so by process of elimination, I thought it was Yam Yam.”
New episodes of “The Traitors” drop Thursdays on Peacock.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
