Advanced Reading Exercise
Couple Sue TV Station
Read the text and look at the questions that follow it. In this reading comprehension, the questions are true or false.
The couple banished from the hit "reality" series "Temptation Island" because they are parents of a young child have sued the production company and Fox-TV for defamation, claiming that producers knew about the toddler all along.
Ytossie Patterson and Taheed Watson claim in their Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that producers edited an episode of the hit show to make it appear that they had concealed their status as parents and then chastised them on the air in an "extremely condescending and humiliating manner."
A spokeswoman for Rocket Science Laboratories, the show's producers, referred calls regarding the lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday, to Fox, which said it would have a statement "later in the day."
Patterson, 34, and Watson, 29, were among four couples sent last season to an island off Belize in the Caribbean to film "Temptation Island," which separates the partners and sets each person up on dates with attractive singles to see who will cheat.
Patterson and Watson were booted off the show midway through the season after the network said it had discovered that they had a two-year-old child together, making their further participation inappropriate.
The couple claims in their lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, that they revealed the existence of their child when asked during preliminary interviews with Rocket Science and were told that that was "the wrong answer."
Patterson and Watson claim that "Temptation Island" producers decided that it would boost the show's ratings if the child's existence were suddenly revealed during a broadcast.
During that broadcast, the couple claims, hours of conversation between them and producers was edited and "manipulated" to create a false impression that they had kept their child secret.
"The footage was edited to exclude plaintiffs' responses to the producers questions and falsely portrayed plaintiffs as mischievous and immoral (and that) they had in fact concealed the existence of their own child and that they had nothing to say about it in the face of this disgraceful tongue-lashing," the lawsuit claims.
