Veronica Portillo and C.T. Tamburello were eliminated and sent to the Redemption House on the Aug. 7 episode of The Challenge: Final Reckoning. C.T. blamed Veronica for the loss, and blew up on her afterward. However, the tension between them was evident throughout their whole journey on the show, as C.T. continuously begged Veronica to workout and take the game more seriously. “He offended me by saying I don’t work out,” Veronica admitted to HollyoodLife EXCLUSIVELY. “As a woman you’re like…why, are you calling me fat? He brought up a lot of insecurities with his constant ‘stop eating that, don’t eat that.’ I take [the game] as seriously as I want to. I’m not going to sit there and not have a good time during this experience.”
Things got really heated after the challenge, though, but Veronica is insistent that she is not solely to blame for the loss. “I didn’t perform as well as I needed to in order to stay in the game, I will take full responsibility of that,” Veronica said. “But at the end of the day, he wouldn’t have been able to get over to the other side [either]. He could’ve worked better with me when we were trying to make it over there. There was no teamwork, and that’s the problem with C.T. — he can blame me and put the blame on me, but I feel very strongly that, if I had another partner, like Derrick [Kosinski], I would’ve gotten there. He would’ve made sure of it. C.T’s just no good at being a team player or communication.”
However, Veronica is also confident that she and her partner just got a bad luck of the draw this time, as she felt they had a great position within the house and would’ve been safe from a vote, had this challenge not been an automatic elimination. “I think that if C.T. and I were still in that main house, we would’ve really been able to run it,” she explained. “Between him being part of the boys club and me and the friendships that I had, I think we were in a really good position. We did really work that house and I think we could’ve had a lot of power.”
So, where do they stand now? Luckily, the drama from the game doesn’t seem to have spilled into their real lives. “We’re cordial,” Veronica revealed. “I have a lot of respect for him in terms of his personal life and what he’s gone through with his family. I kept trying to remind him of that during our time there. We’ve been in the game for a very long time together, but we’ve also gone through personal struggles that mirror each other. I just feel like we should have been getting along a lot more than we were. We have a history, and I feel like he was disrespectful to me [on the show].”