Stefanie Williams has been publicizing her search for the right man since she was a student at this university, sharing her dating woes and triumphs with friends and coworkers. But today, her search hits the national stage.
Although Williams has made a career out of sharing her love life experiences by creating a blog and e-Book, the 2008 university alumna took her search for love to another level this summer after being chosen to compete on the second season of the reality dating show Sweet Home Alabama, which airs tonight on CMT. But Williams said she was not looking for love on the show — she was just looking for some time for herself after a rough breakup.
“I went through some typical horrible girl depression, like, ‘I’m never getting married, nobody’s gonna want me, I’m the only single one of my friends,'” Williams said.
With some encouragement from her mom and friends, Williams applied online for the show’s second season, hoping the experience would provide her with a hilarious blog post at the least. And while Williams said she worried about getting along with the other women on the show or looking bad on TV, she said her previous experiences prepared her for anything thrown her way.
“With all the stuff written about me, this was a walk in the park at the end of the day,” she said.
After Williams was chosen for the show, she traveled to Alabama to compete with 21 other women for the heart of an unknown bachelor, who the women later learned to be former Clemson quarterback Tribble Reese.
“I definitely played up the Clemson-Maryland thing a lot and I had no trouble giving him grief for being a Clemson football player,” Williams said. “I’m sure Maryland’s not pumped they’re getting acknowledged on this dating show.”
And although friends said they were eager to watch Williams on the show, they said she stopped surprising them years ago.
“She’s dated celebrities in their own rights; she’s slept with Hollywood stars I see on TV literally every day,” said Melissa Weiss, a friend and former copy editor at The Diamondback. “There’s nothing she could do to shock me anymore.”
Williams said she’s no one new to fame. She began dating athletes — or “chasing the jersey” — and receiving attention for her online writing as a student and opinion editor for The Diamondback.
She said she experienced her first instances of backlash on-and-offline after she used her semester-long experience as a member of Kappa Alpha Theta to write a few scathing columns about pledging.
“I was like the antichrist; they still don’t like thinking about me,” Williams said of her former sorority sisters. “After I did that [column], I think I lost 90 friends on Facebook like that.”
Williams said she gained another taste of notoriety during the 2006 Duke lacrosse rape hoax, when she wrote columns defending the players, one of which was later published in the book Until Proven Innocent.
“She’d been doing a lot of writing supporting the guys, and not even as some sort of weird groupie, but she studied the case and I think something in it resonated,” Weiss said.
Williams added that her outspokenness about the case also came from loyalty to the Terrapin men’s lacrosse team, which she managed as a freshman.
In fact, friends said her column, blog and book have always been more than funny stories about one woman’s hapless, but star-studded, love life.
“She’s admirable in a way that she takes a taboo subject and puts it out there,” said Virginia Zint, a friend of Williams who first encouraged her to apply to be on Sweet Home Alabama.
Williams wouldn’t exactly call herself a champion of women’s rights — she said she hates “getting all feminist on you because really, that’s gross. I shave my legs, I get waxed, I wear makeup, I own only bras that have enough padding to be bullet proof” in a Monday blog post. But Zint said her writing has helped spark a new kind of dialogue about sex — that it should empower women.
“Being sexual as a women isn’t something a lot of people really talk about, and she just comes out and says ‘This is how it is and you shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it,'” Zint said. “The blog, the book, I think they really started a conversation about sex and that it’s OK to talk about it; that people all over the world are having it and it’s fine.”
But some readers, through online comments and even one who made an angry phone call during a radio show, accuse Williams of being fake or superficial based on her affinity for athletes — and for blogging about the juicy details of her sexual exploits with them.
“Really, she’s very much herself and she knows who that is and she makes no apologies about it,” Weiss said. “She’s very sure of herself and it may just not be in a way that people are accepting about.”
Williams said now that Sweet Home Alabama is finally airing, she can begin to settle back into her old routine, which consists of bartending, working on a fiction piece inspired by the same breakup that brought her to Alabama and jet-setting to Los Angeles to visit a few friends — and a new man.
And as Williams jumps back into blogging and dating, her coworker Jen Gargano said she is not surprised a taste of reality TV did not faze her friend.
“I don’t think much would change Stef; she is who she is,” she said. “Even if one day her book or blog blows up and she becomes famous, she’s very grounded and humble and I don’t think she’d ever change.”
lurye@umdbk.com
