No, 'Jeopardy' contestants weren't the first to make game show history
This is pretty awesome: Maine resident Jason Singer won on Jeopardy! on July 1 to join the long list of the game show's champions ... which includes his wife Susan McMillan, who won back in 2021.
With reports that they may have been the first married couple to both be champs, that's ignited some backlash from former Jeopardy! winner Kristin Sausville who revealed that she and her husband Justin both won, and per some of her research, there were other married couples who were both champions.
MORE JEOPARDY: Contestant won thanks to wildest Final Jeopardy coincidence
"If you're friends with me, you're probably aware that both Justin and I won; Justin in 2011 and me in 2015," she wrote on Facebook. "But we weren't even the first. As far as I've been able to research, Dan Pawson and Andrea Saenz were the first."
Here's more from the post:
And between Justin and me and the person who aired yesterday, there were several, including Amy Stephenson and Scott Bateman, as well as David Rigsby and Ryan Alley. There are a decent number of couples who met through J! and later married, particularly through various Teachers Tournaments.
But the local media for the guy last night took up the story and ran with it, and then other media picked it up and ran it without checking for accuracy, and now it's everywhere that the guy last night is part of the first married J! champions ever. Now that the bots have the story, it would be impossible to correct them all even if I cared enough to take the time to do so.
As Entertainment Weekly added, "A representative for Jeopardy told Entertainment Weekly that the show does not track spousal records for contestants and acknowledged that several contestants had noted that they were also married to champs after Singer's victory."
Let's take a sec and acknowledge how cool it is for all these married couples. The record has been corrected!
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