04-07-2025
The controversy over the champion ‘Jeopardy' couple: A brief explainer
On Tuesday, Jason Singer won $22,401 on Jeopardy four years after his wife, Susan McMillan, claimed a $35,600 cash prize of her own. Several media outlets celebrated the couple as the show's first married champions. It turns out, they weren't.
Here's a brief explainer on how the sweet story turned sour.
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Before Singer's win, publications were touting the history-making potential. For example, a June 30 headline from People proclaimed: "Married Jeopardy! Contestants Hope to Be First Husband and Wife Winners: 'History Is at Stake'"
Then after his win, ABC's Good Morning America ran a segment on the couple with a slight caveat, stating on air, "The Jeopardy team is confirming that Jason and Susan may just be the first-ever already married Jeopardy champions." When George Stephanopoulos questioned the use of the word "may" in the statement, Lara Spencer responded that the game show doesn't do "deep dives into last names or private lives in that regard."
Meanwhile, past married winners began to grumble about the inaccurate news reports, beginning with 2015 winner Kristin Sausville, who is married to 2011 champ Justin Sausville. She took to Facebook on Wedenesday and wrote that she was "really bothered" by the misinformation. "There is something really surreal and honestly kind of sinister in watching part of yourself be erased in real time," she said. She has since received an outpouring of support on social media.
Sausville added, "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. 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. I'm sure it's a matter of weeks before AI like ChatGPT and Google will give you them as the answer to the question, based on the sheer volume of bot activity. It's really Orwellian to watch how easily it's happening."
She summed up her feelings by stating, "At the end of the day, I'm not all 'but my LEGACY!' about it, but I am really bothered by seeing how quickly misinformation can be spread and accepted as truth. We should keep that in mind for everything we see online and particularly via AI."
A rep for Jeopardy has confirmed that the show does not track such records and said that other coupled winners aside from the Suasvilles have since been identified.
Singer, a real estate agent from Portland, Maine, has acknowledged that he and his wife have not made history. He told the Portland Press Herald. "Jeopardy doesn't track every married couple that's ever been on, but they've written about a bunch on their website. Whether we're the first, the second, or the first in a long time, I just think it's a really cool accomplishment."
"Just the fact of being her husband is the greatest preparation one could ever get," Singer said of his wife. "She's so curious and surrounds herself with such interesting and cosmopolitan things all the time, that by osmosis I almost had to get better." His final answer on the show notably included a hashtag to #BringBackSusan.
On Thursday, Gold Derby checked in with Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence program, and it accurately stated that "there have been several married couples" to win the show, and even mentions the "incorrect" reporting regarding Singer and McMillan. A victory for truth! Other married winners include Dan Pawson and Andrea Saenz, Amy Stephenson and Scott Bateman, and David Rigsby and Ryan Alley.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT claims that the first married couple to win on Jeopardy is Kristin and Justin Sausville — oops! That's not correct, as their victories were in the 2010s, while Pawson and Saenz triumphed in the 2000s.
To date, Jeopardy has created six millionaires: Ken Jennings (who has hosted the show since 2023), Brad Rutter, James Holzhauer, Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and Yogesh Raut. See the list of Jeopardy's biggest winners ever.
Merv Griffin's iconic American game show originally debuted in 1964. Unlike other programs in the genre, Jeopardy's contestants are presented with general knowledge clues in the form of answers and must respond in the form of questions. The modern-day syndicated version produced by Sony Pictures Television launched in 1984 and continues to air.
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