Spoiler warning: This submit accommodates spoilers for the winner(s) of The Traitors’s third season.
Bambi. Gaggy. Ciggy Mommy. Newlywed. America’s Sweetheart.
Former Bachelorette star and podcast host Gabby Windey has, at instances, embodied all these beliefs, and now she will add yet another title to her bio: Traitors season three winner.
Windey, together with fellow “faithfuls” Actual Housewife of New Jersey Dolores Catania, skilled brother Dylan Efron, and lesser royal Ivar Mountbatten, out-maneuvered the remaining “traitors” — Huge Brother’s Danielle Reyes and Britney Haynes — to win Alan Cumming’s recreation present. Besting an assemblage of different actuality TV stars and barely random minorly well-known individuals at a citadel within the Scottish Highlands to take dwelling 1 / 4 of the $204,300 prize pot isn’t any small feat.
Successful the homicide thriller nearly looks like icing, although, as a result of Windey had already charmed, entertained, and gained the hearts of so many people watching at dwelling. With 832,000 followers on her personal TikTok, a rising podcast, and the fascinating reputation of Gaggy remixes, the throaty-voiced former cheerleader and her caustic high-femme persona are exploding on social media, promising to be a presence properly after this newest foray into actuality TV.
How Gabby Windey turned America’s favourite Ciggy Mommy
Loving Gabby Windey is like loving an expert sports activities staff.
You clear your schedule at 9 pm on a Thursday for weeks on finish. You brace your self for her making the incorrect calls on the present and putting out. You discover immeasurable pleasure in her good performances. And for the remainder of the week, you’re on varied web sites, primarily TikTok and her podcast Lengthy Winded, to see what she’s as much as, all in an effort to kill the time between episodes. And like a real fan, you begin to communicate her language — lethaaaaargic, ciggy mommy, I’m not dumb — a lot that it turns into each shorthand between mates and a litmus take a look at for potential ones.
Windey first appeared on TV screens as a contestant on The Bachelor, turning into well-known for rejecting Clayton Echard’s provide to stroll her out. She adopted that with a stint as considered one of two The Bachelorette(s) for that present’s season 19, and adopted that by popping out as homosexual on The View in 2023. Someplace in between, she was the runner-up on season 31 on Dancing with the Stars. She lately revealed her shock marriage to her first girlfriend, comic and author Robby Hoffman. Beforehand, Windey labored as a nurse and Denver Broncos cheerleader.
Nonetheless, Windey got here into The Traitors third season arguably overshadowed by greater, flashy, actuality TV personalities like Survivor’s Boston Rob and Actual Housewives’s Dorinda Medley. However with every confessional, every roundtable, every banishment, Windey’s shimmery outfits, sharp wit, and ethereal child voice made it clear she was the present’s large star.
Whether or not it was sitting alongside a castmate she believed to be a “chilly. blooded. killer.”, raving in regards to the Scottish breakfasts and criticizing her male castmates’ rowing method, or forgetting that Ivar Mountbatten was within the room, Windey made for wonderful tv. In a single improbable, contentious second, Windey shut down Danielle Reyes, the traitor who had seemingly spent the present’s whole tenth episode saying she was going to “annihilate” Windey.
On the roundtable, the place contestants attempt to sniff out and get rid of traitors, Reyes was gunning for Windey as cowl for her personal season-long deceit. Windey made it clear she noticed by way of Reyes’s plan, saying that it was straightforward to border her. “I’m a straightforward goal, I take every little thing on the chin,” Windey defined.
“I don’t assume you’re a straightforward goal, I feel you’re tremendous sensible, Gabby,” Reyes shoots again.
“I’m not saying I’m dumb,” Windey replies, silencing her alleged “annihilator.” “I feel I may have been saved round for this lengthy for this specific second.” Beforehand, Windey overheard Reyes and her fellow traitor, Survivor’s Carolyn Wiger, plotting in a single the citadel’s secret rooms, a truth she by no means revealed.
On TikTok, Windey added commentary: “Yeah I heard you again there, you lyin’, dishonest, traitor.”
Early within the season, Windey, Promoting Sundown’s Chrishell Stause, and WWE’s Nikki Garcia turned an alliance and known as themselves the “Bambis.” The group of doe-eyed bombshells believed nobody took them significantly — and so they weren’t completely incorrect. Nevertheless it’s Windey’s self-aware, unapologetically artful bimbo persona on the present and self-deprecating humor on her TikTok and podcast has made her a fan favourite.
She’s an attractive girl with no curiosity — in angle or actuality — in interesting to males. She’s additionally a sensible girl with little interest in convincing anybody that she is. You get the sense that she is aware of she’s already wasted an excessive amount of of her time attempting to be understood by individuals who didn’t get her, and located it boring.
So Windey is simply herself.
Typically that occurs to be lovely, different instances it verges on hostile. Watching Windey transfer by way of the present with ability, sassing self-serious avid gamers from Survivor and Huge Brother and completely confounding Zac Efron’s brother, you’ll be able to’t assist however need to know the way she sees the world. One can discover these insights on her TikToks, that are like if Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods mind-melded with Larry David.
One seminal second was placing to phrases an aesthetic often called “Ciggy Mommy.” It’s a vibe that lies on the intersection of leopard print, pearls, silk chiffon, Eating regimen Coke, and the Actual Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“I’ve ripped some heaters,” she says on her podcast. “I used to be raised by wolves … I do want you possibly can order half a martini.”
Regardless of her glamorous aspirations, Windey additionally is aware of the pains of on a regular basis individuals. With reference to her personal work ethic, she has boundaries.
“No, I’ve enterprise hours. What are you doing calling me after 3 pm?” she says in a TikTok bemoaning the work day and the inevitable post-lunch comedown. Windey’s monologue has since turn out to be half of popular culture’s quickly rising lexicon of emotion, with tributes coming from the likes of director and actor Elizabeth Banks, a cappella band Pentatonix, and Pixar. “I’ve misplaced all my confidence. I’ve simply had lunch. I’m torpid,” she provides — drawing out the three vowels that “torpid” accommodates and turning it right into a phrase that takes 4 seconds to say.
It simply feels higher, extra soothing, to say it like Windey.
Sadly for Windey’s followers, The Traitors ended on Thursday, which implies ostensibly much less Windey on TV. However Cumming likes to convey fan favorites again, so there’s at all times subsequent season of Traitors. Within the meantime, we all know the place to seek out her.
