Why Deontay Wilder leave The Traitors early? Fans are confused by his absence

Episode 4 of The Traitors US premiered on Peacock on Thursday, January 18 and it left viewers with many questions, the biggest being: what happened to Deontay?!

While the majority of The Traitors cast is padded out with reality TV personalities from the likes of Survivor, The Challenge, Big Brother, Bling Empire and The Real Housewives franchise, one exception to that rule—alongside with Former Speaker of the House of Commons in the U.K. John Bercow—was Deontay Wilder, the American professional boxer who held the World Boxing Council heavyweight title from 2015 to 2020. 

Deontay was present in the first three episodes of The Traitors season 2, which dropped in one fell-swoop last Thursday on Peacock. Throughout the first few episodes, fans saw the formidable athlete become distraught over RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Peppermint being erroneously tagged a "Traitor" by the cast and banished during one of the show's signature round-table votes. 

Things seemingly got even more emotional for Deontay after episode 3's round table, when he had swayed the group scrutiny away from Big Brother legend Dan Gheesling—who, in fact, is actually one of this season's three "Traitors"—and targeted Dancing with the Stars pro Maksim Chmerkovskiy instead. That led to Maksim, one of the show's "Faithfuls," to be banished from the castle and the game. 

One episode later and Deontay would be missing in action from the game's proceedings, with host Alan Cumming swiftly and too succinctly revealing to the rest of the cast that the pro boxer had quit the show prematurely. But exactly what happened?

It turns out that the culture of "murdering" and "banishing" in the show's game put too big of an emotional toll on Deontay, who told US Weekly :“This game was definitely harder than I thought it would be. I thought it was trying to figure out [who] were the traitors, and being that you have so many more faithfuls than the traitors, that it would be kind of easy to try to figure it out. But being on this show, it really struck some childhood trauma from me that I didn’t expect.”

He continued, discussing his regret over Maksim's banishment: "Maks was one of the first guys that I met and I really kicked it off really, really well with him. And we really built a certain type of friendship, a bond, and to be able to bear false witness against him when I really felt that he was [a traitor] because he started acting different and all that. We can go off of certain emotions, certain things that people do or whatever. You really have to have a watchful eye of things.”

However, he says that he doesn't regret being emotional during his time on The Traitors, adding: "My profession is the hurt business, as I call it. But as a man, as Deontay Wilder, as a person, I’m a loving, caring guy that I love everybody and I want to see everybody succeed in life. And I think you got the best of me being on the show.”

Fans wonder what happened to Deontay on The Traitors: