The Big Brother Saboteur was a twist in Big Brother 12 (2010) in which a secret houseguest carried out missions designed to wreck everyone else’s summer, without ever being identified. Annie Whittington was the first Saboteur. Ragan Fox was the second, voted in by the public after Annie was evicted.
It ran for one season and has never been used again.
How Did the Big Brother Saboteur Work?
One houseguest secretly held the role. Production handed them sabotage missions in the Diary Room, and they had to carry them out without the rest of the house working out who was doing it. Missions could target one person, a group, or everybody at once.
Alongside the missions ran the broadcasts. At unpredictable moments the house was called to the living room television for a message from the Saboteur — a silhouette on screen, a distorted voice, usually promising something unpleasant. These were prerecorded and played on production’s schedule, which meant the Saboteur had to stand there and react to their own announcements alongside everyone else.
There was no automatic penalty for being identified. Nobody could accuse you and end the game. The punishment for being suspected was the ordinary one — getting voted out, which cost you the money.
And both Saboteurs stayed in the game proper. Annie and Ragan were eligible for Head of Household and the Power of Veto throughout, which created the trap at the centre of the whole twist: the missions required you to slip away, act strangely and lie about it, in a house that votes out anyone acting strangely.
Two Saboteurs, Two Completely Different Outcomes
Annie Whittington
Role: Saboteur one
Chosen by: Production, before the season
Had to survive: 5 weeks
Playing for: $50,000
Missions on record: 4
Lasted: 13 days
Evicted 10–0 on July 15 and paid nothing. She was never eligible for the $500,000 either — she’d have been removed from the game the moment her stint ended.
Ragan Fox
Role: Saboteur two
Chosen by: America’s Vote, mid-season
Had to survive: 2 weeks
Playing for: $20,000
Missions on record: 5 of 6
Lasted: 62 days
Served the full fortnight without being identified and collected the money — the only person ever paid for the twist — then went back to playing a normal game.
The gap between those two outcomes is the whole story of the twist. Annie was a stranger asked to sow chaos in the single most paranoid week of the season, when nobody has an alliance to hide behind and anyone hard to read is the easiest vote in the house. She was gone in thirteen days and the season’s headline twist went with her.
So production rebooted it, and handed the casting decision to the audience. Julie Chen announced the return on Thursday August 5, viewers voted, and Ragan Fox won the poll.
Production hid the offer inside another twist. Matt Hoffman won HOH that week and opened Pandora’s Box — which handed Matt the Diamond Power of Veto and, as the price, unleashed a new Saboteur on the house. Under cover of the Diary Room sessions that followed, Ragan was quietly offered the job. He could have refused. He took it.
The difference was cover. Ragan already had alliances, a settled reputation and a reason to be wandering the house at odd hours. He wasn’t a stranger behaving strangely — he was a familiar face doing what familiar faces do. That’s why he lasted, and it’s why the chaos arrived five weeks late and only ran a fortnight.
Every Sabotage Mission
01 — Annie: Padlocked the storage room
Annie padlocked the storage room in the dark after the first HOH competition, leaving the house without food or supplies.
They ate nothing but slop for days.
02 — Annie: Marked the memory wall
Annie taped an X across Britney and Kathy’s photographs on the memory wall.
It was an attempt to steer the week’s nominations. Hayden ignored it entirely and nominated Brendon and Rachel. Britney, on the feeds, didn’t care and thought the whole thing was lame.
03 — Annie: Invented a pre-show relationship
Annie told the house that two people living among them had known each other before the season started.
It was a lie, and a well-aimed one. They spent days trying to work out which pair.
04 — Annie: Hid cricket noise makers
Annie hid cricket noise makers around the bedroom.
Chirping nobody could locate, in the room where everybody was trying to sleep.
05 — Ragan: Targeted Brendon
Ragan told the house that Brendon had been throwing competitions.
It was aimed squarely at Rachel, and at the showmance the house was already circling.
06 — Ragan: Claimed the Saboteur had already left
“You have gotten me out of the house, not out of the game.”
The message was engineered to convince the house that the Saboteur was somebody already evicted. Hayden was still quoting it back a week later, on August 15.
07 — Ragan: Suggested there might be no eviction
Ragan warned the house there might not be an eviction that week.
Nothing unsettles a house faster than removing the one fixed point in their week.
08 — Ragan: Kept the house awake all night
Ragan announced a competition for the next morning, then kept the house awake all night with messages.
From around 2:00am on August 16 the feeds logged 13 separate announcements — Britney reckoned closer to 15. Pack your bags. Say your goodbyes. Somebody’s going home. There was no competition.
09 — Ragan: “I know your secret”
Ragan left a handwritten note on Enzo’s bed reading I know your secret.
No name, no secret specified. Suspicion scattered in every direction at once — the Brigade was still hidden and Matt was running a fabricated story about his wife’s health. Everybody in that house had something to worry about.
Annie had more planned. In her exit interviews she listed the missions she never got to run: throwing every towel in the house into the pool, overloading the dishwasher with detergent, and hiding the girls’ makeup.
Ragan was assigned six missions across his two weeks. Five are on record; the sixth has never surfaced on the feeds or in any contemporary report.
Why Was Annie Evicted?
Annie wasn’t even the target that week. Hayden won HOH and nominated Brendon — who the house had largely decided was the Saboteur, on no better evidence than that he was big and kept to himself. After the veto, Annie went up as the replacement, and on July 15 she was evicted 10–0.
The house didn’t know she was the Saboteur. But the suspicion had reached her before the vote — on July 10, five days out, Enzo told Hayden and Lane on the feeds that he thought Annie was the Saboteur, and that voting her out would take the twist out of the season with her.
That wasn’t the whole reason she went, and it probably wasn’t the main one. She’d played hard and fast, talked to everyone, and tied herself to Brendon and Rachel just as they became the house’s target. Annie’s own account afterwards was exactly that: too much, too early, and attached to the wrong people.
The twist itself is what made her look like that. To lock a door in the dark, tape up a photo wall and hide noise makers in a bedroom, you have to disappear, come back, and lie about where you were — in the one week of the season where everybody is watching everybody.
Why Did the Saboteur Never Come Back?
Production has never publicly given a reason. There’s no stated explanation for why the twist never returned in the same form.
What is on the record is how production felt while it was happening. Before the season, Allison Grodner explained the twist as a way of wrong-footing an unusually well-informed cast — Big Brother 12 was full of superfans who knew the game inside out, and the Saboteur was meant to make it harder to play than it had ever been.
After Annie went out in week one, Grodner said: “We loved this twist. We were hoping it would go longer.”
And when the decision was handed to the audience, she was blunt about the first attempt: “I hope America does a better job than me.” Production also acknowledged that the reboot could fail again if the chosen houseguest refused.
What came afterwards took pieces of the idea and removed much of the risk to the player. Big Brother 16’s Team America paid three houseguests per completed mission rather than for surviving. Big Brother 20’s Hacker let someone disrupt nominations anonymously. Big Brother 26 gave the sabotage role to an artificial intelligence. Big Brother 27’s Secret Accomplice ran for a single night.
Every one of them borrows something. None of them puts a houseguest’s own game on the line for the privilege of ruining everyone else’s.
Has Any Other Big Brother Had a Saboteur?
Not in the American house, and not in Celebrity Big Brother or Big Brother Canada. The closest anyone has come is Brazil.
Big Brother Brasil 11 (2011) ran a twist called the Sabotador the year after BB12. Viewers picked the saboteur in an online vote, production handed out covert missions in the Diary Room, and the player had to complete them without being identified. It ran three separate times across the season. The payout worked differently — tied to the missions rather than to surviving a fixed stretch — but it’s the nearest relative the Saboteur has anywhere in the franchise.
Elsewhere the family resemblance is looser. Big Brother UK has run mole-style secret tasks more than once — including Makosi in series 6 and Mario in series 11 — but those paid out in immunity or in the right to stay, never in cash for outlasting the house. Big Brother Australia’s Insider and Big Brother Belgium’s Mole worked on similar secret-task ideas.
Sixteen years on, the Big Brother 12 Saboteur remains the only version of the idea that asked a player to bet their own game on it.