Rob Rausch, a handsome snake-wrangler from Alabama, was standing a few feet away from Maura Higgins, the former Love Islander, next to the Traitors’ roundtable. Showing little emotion, he finally revealed that he had double-crossed her to win more than $220,000.

“I was so fooled by you, you absolute *sshole, you pinky promised,” Higgins says in the Peacock finale. “You’re never going to have a girlfriend after this; you’re such a good liar.”

Higgins and the majority of the cast had been fooled all along.

“I wish I could sit here and say I knew he was a traitor, but I had no clue,” Higgins said at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees Studio. “He played the best game in that castle. I genuinely did believe he was a faithful, but you know what? It’s a game, and I was fine with it. I went through all the emotions very quickly, and then I was like, ‘You know what? Fair play.’ I genuinely was so convinced that me and him was winning the show together.”

Higgins was joined by Rausch and fellow Season 4 contestants Monét X Change, Tara Lipinski, Lisa Rinna, Rob Cesternino and Eric Nam for the Deadline conversation. Watch the discussion below, and scroll down for photos from the event.

Rausch was cold as ice. “I was actually surprised in the edit. I feel like they made me seem a little more nervous than I was,” he said.

Rausch, who also became famous on the U.S. version of Love Island, did make it up to Higgins, somewhat, by buying her a Hermès Birkin bag.

Rinna, a fellow traitor and the person who helped Rausch secure the bag, had similarly been crossed by him, twice. “I just didn’t see that coming, so I was really genuinely shocked by that because I thought he was a better boy than that, but he wasn’t,” she said. “Everyone wanted him to be Mr. America, and no one wanted to believe that he could possibly be a traitor.”

It was a dynamite finale for the Studio Lambert-produced show, which scored six Emmy nominations this year including for Outstanding Reality Competition Program, after winning that category the past two seasons.

In addition to those on the Deadline panel, the series starred Ian Terry, Porsha Williams, Donna Kelce, Caroline Stanbury, Tiffany Mitchell, Michael Rapaport, Ron Funches, Yamil ‘Yam Yam’ Arocho, Colton Underwood, Candiace Dillard Bassett, Dorinda Medley, Stephen Colletti, Kristen Kish, Natalie Anderson, Mark Ballas, Johnny Weir and Eric Nam.

Nam, who became a traitor after being recruited halfway through the show, was also crossed by Rausch in the finale. “Rob was like ‘We’re going to win this together’ and I was like ‘Cool.’”

The singer-songwriter said it was difficult pivoting from being a faithful to becoming a traitor. “Emotionally, it was exhausting,” he said. “We had quickly become friends. I went to bed one night and three hours later, you have to go decide who to kill and that was such a stressful experience.”

One moment not shown on screen was when the whole group was going down the stairs: Nam shouted “Traitor,” and Rinna turned her head. She was subsequently banished in episode 7. But she was fine with that.

“I had no strategy whatsoever, but the plan that I had was I wanted to wear that Erik Charlotte Couture dress to the banquet, and I didn’t know when the banquet was because they tell you nothing. I was just holding out for that, and so once they got me after that, I was fine because in my mind I had won,” she said.

Monét X Change, a faithful murdered in episode 5, said that he had tried to send Higgins “messages from the grave” but she didn’t hear him.

Cesternino, a former Survivor star, was murdered in episode 3. He said that The Traitors is more “mentally taxing” than the CBS competition series.

Lipinski, an Olympic figure skater, made it to the end but couldn’t convince Higgins or Nam that Rausch was a traitor.

“He plays it so cool, at all times,” she said. “You’re constantly surveying everyone, and you just don’t pick up any type of energy of [whether] he even wants to be there. He just did a great job.”

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