Quote:
Originally Posted by hulkrogan
From the Gordon Ramsay Wikipedia entry: In January 2011, while in Costa Rica, Ramsay was doused in petrol and held at gunpoint as he tried to uncover the dark world of illegal shark fin trading for a new TV show.[101] Ramsay stated: They told me they’d shoot me. At one, I managed to shake off the people keeping us away, ran up some stairs to a rooftop and looked down to see thousands of fins, drying on rooftops for as far as the eye could see. When I got back downstairs, they tipped a barrel of petrol over me. Back at the wharf, there were people pointing rifles at us to stop us filming. A van pulled up and these seedy characters made us stand against a wall. The police came and advised us to leave the country.
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Whomever wrote that must have never actually watched Shark Bait. Ramsay was just trying to goose headlines and ratings with those claims which were mostly fabricated or blown way out of proportion. I'm shocked I tell, just shocked, that Wikipedia could be wrong...
First of all, you know this stuff is pretty off when he claims this happened in Costa Rica when the incidents he's exaggerating about really happened in Taiwan. He had cameras following him the entire time, and so we'd expect any such incidents to have been taped. But, then we never see any of the stuff that he claimed happened on screen which doesn't pass the smell test since that footage would have been ratings gold.
Instead, the cameras captured an increasingly paranoid and erratic Ramsay on the show. (I thought he must have been on something with the way he was acting). When he claims he was held at gunpoint or how he was lined up against a wall or how they pointed rifles at him, we don't see anything close to that. Instead, the only thing we see about guns is after Ramsay breaks and enters into a private building to gain access to the roof top where they're preparing shark fins. The Taiwanese woman is clearly bewildered by this foreign intruder who keeps shouting at her in English, so she calls somebody on the telephone in Chinese cause this is Taiwan and their native tongue isn't English. For all we know, she could just be calling the police to report this intruder. But, Ramsay freaks out about this phone call and says they better leave right now 'before they get shot'. So, the only guns or mention of guns we ever see on the show is when Ramsay himself brings it up...
Ramsay was so strangely paranoid throughout this documentary that its hard to seriously believe his claims about the danger on the rooftop. We also saw Ramsay freak out about a barking dog behind a gate, and claim they have to leave because the Taiwanese have released dogs to chase him even though that dog remains locked behind a gate. And, we also saw Ramsay freak out because a single Mercedes with blacked out windows passes by him, and Ramsay insinuates that the Mercedes must belong to a gangster. Ramsay would would later exaggerate that single car into a claim that multiple cars with blacked out windows tried to block him in.
The only semi-true thing is that happened was that somebody did dump a small bucket of liquid from the rooftop onto the ground after he left to shoo him away. But, he didn't get soaked, much less get a drop on him. And, it wasn't a barrel nor was it petrol. If you're going to dump some liquid to chase somebody away, you're going to grab the closest thing near you and why would you have a barrel or bucket of petrol on a rooftop?