We are releasing this statement; not for those who demand it by means of bullying and harassing team members, families and contestants, but for the sincere fans of Jason Genova. We did not want to rise to provocation or respond to threats, but with regard to last weeks competition there are a few things we would like to clear up.
We would like to start by pointing out that we strongly deny any allegation that Jason was disqualified because of a disability. Our knowledge is still limited about any aspect of Jason's personal life, and whilst we have heard many rumours over the last 24 hours regarding this, we would in no way discriminate against anybody, let alone anybody with a disability. We take the Physique Of The Week competition seriously, and anybody featured is allowed to win, without question.
The reason for Jason Genova being disqualified was not due to any opinions about any disability, any opinions about his character, or any opinions about his appearance. The reason to disqualify Jason came down to suspicious voting activity, which showed exactly 100 hits from a single IP address and also showed Jason's votes jump by exactly 100 in a 10 second period. As people frequently offer 'likes' or 'votes' for as little as $5, this led us to believe a bot had delivered votes. As well as this, we also have witnessed several forum threads in which people were offering 'rep points' in exchange for votes. Whilst we understand this was not Jason himself, it was still a method of buying votes, even if the action was taken on his behalf by other forum members. Since we cannot prove who purchased the votes, or know how many of them were purchased, unfortunately Jason was left the victim.
We have since learned that Jason is American, and with all of the posts on the forum we started to doubt whether Jason had even applied at all, given that his email address on the application form was a .co.uk account. It was never our intentions to single out Jason, or to leave any feeling that he was disqualified for personal reasons, our intentions were simply to keep the competition fair for all people taking part, and we made a decision based on the only data that we had.
We understand people are upset by this outcome, and we have tried to reach out to Jason to try and resolve the situation, but due to the high levels of people contacting us impersonating Jason, or pretending to be a representative of Jason, this has proven difficult.