Spoiler warning: This post contains spoilers for the winner(s) of The Traitors’s third season.
Bambi. Gaggy. Ciggy Mommy. Newlywed. America’s Sweetheart.
Former Bachelorette star and podcast host Gabby Windey has, at times, embodied all those ideals, and now she can add one more title to her bio: Traitors season three winner.
Windey, along with fellow “faithfuls” Real Housewife of New Jersey Dolores Catania, professional brother Dylan Efron, and lesser royal Ivar Mountbatten, out-maneuvered the remaining “traitors” — Big Brother’s Danielle Reyes and Britney Haynes — to win Alan Cumming’s game show. Besting an assemblage of other reality TV stars and slightly random minorly famous people at a castle in the Scottish Highlands to take home a quarter of the $204,300 prize pot is no small feat.
Winning the murder mystery almost feels like icing, though, because Windey had already charmed, entertained, and won the hearts of so many of us watching at home. With 832,000 followers on her own TikTok, a growing podcast, and the fascinating popularity of Gaggy remixes, the throaty-voiced former cheerleader and her caustic high-femme persona are exploding on social media, promising to be a presence well after this latest foray into reality TV.
How Gabby Windey became America’s favorite Ciggy Mommy
Loving Gabby Windey is like loving a professional sports team.
You clear your schedule at 9 pm on a Thursday for weeks on end. You brace yourself for her making the wrong calls on the show and striking out. You find immeasurable joy in her good performances. And for the rest of the week, you’re on various websites, mainly TikTok and her podcast Long Winded, to see what she’s up to, all in an effort to kill the time between episodes. And like a true fan, you start to speak her language — lethaaaaargic, ciggy mommy, I’m not dumb — so much that it becomes both shorthand between friends and a litmus test for potential ones.
Windey first appeared on TV screens as a contestant on The Bachelor, becoming famous for rejecting Clayton Echard’s offer to walk her out. She followed that with a stint as one of two The Bachelorette(s) for that show’s season 19, and followed that by coming out as gay on The View in 2023. Somewhere in between, she was the runner-up on season 31 on Dancing with the Stars. She recently revealed her surprise marriage to her first girlfriend, comedian and writer Robby Hoffman. Previously, Windey worked as a nurse and Denver Broncos cheerleader.
Still, Windey came into The Traitors third season arguably overshadowed by bigger, flashy, reality TV personalities like Survivor’s Boston Rob and Real Housewives’s Dorinda Medley. But with each confessional, each roundtable, each banishment, Windey’s shimmery outfits, sharp wit, and airy baby voice made it clear she was the show’s big star.
Whether it was sitting alongside a castmate she believed to be a “cold. blooded. killer.”, raving about the Scottish breakfasts and criticizing her male castmates’ rowing technique, or forgetting that Ivar Mountbatten was in the room, Windey made for excellent television. In one fantastic, contentious moment, Windey shut down Danielle Reyes, the traitor who had seemingly spent the show’s entire tenth episode saying she was going to “annihilate” Windey.
At the roundtable, where contestants try to sniff out and eliminate traitors, Reyes was gunning for Windey as cover for her own season-long deceit. Windey made it clear she saw through Reyes’s plan, saying that it was easy to frame her. “I’m an easy target, I take everything on the chin,” Windey explained.
“I don’t think you’re an easy target, I think you’re super smart, Gabby,” Reyes shoots back.
“I’m not saying I’m dumb,” Windey replies, silencing her alleged “annihilator.” “I think I could have been kept around for this long for this particular moment.” Previously, Windey overheard Reyes and her fellow traitor, Survivor’s Carolyn Wiger, plotting in one the castle’s secret rooms, a fact she never revealed.
On TikTok, Windey added commentary: “Yeah I heard you back there, you lyin’, cheating, traitor.”
Early in the season, Windey, Selling Sunset’s Chrishell Stause, and WWE’s Nikki Garcia became an alliance and called themselves the “Bambis.” The group of doe-eyed bombshells believed no one took them seriously — and they weren’t totally wrong. But it’s Windey’s self-aware, unapologetically crafty bimbo persona on the show and self-deprecating humor on her TikTok and podcast has made her a fan favorite.
She’s a beautiful woman with no interest — in attitude or actuality — in appealing to men. She’s also a smart woman with no interest in convincing anyone that she is. You get the sense that she knows she’s already wasted too much of her time trying to be understood by people who didn’t get her, and found it boring.
So Windey is just herself.
Sometimes that happens to be adorable, other times it verges on hostile. Watching Windey move through the show with skill, sassing self-serious gamers from Survivor and Big Brother and absolutely confounding Zac Efron’s brother, you can’t help but want to know how she sees the world. One can find these insights on her TikToks, which are like if Legally Blonde’s Elle Woods mind-melded with Larry David.
One seminal moment was putting to words an aesthetic known as “Ciggy Mommy.” It’s a vibe that lies at the intersection of leopard print, pearls, silk chiffon, Diet Coke, and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“I’ve ripped some heaters,” she says on her podcast. “I was raised by wolves … I do wish you could order half a martini.”
Despite her glamorous aspirations, Windey also knows the pains of everyday people. On the subject of her own work ethic, she has boundaries.
“No, I have business hours. What are you doing calling me after 3 pm?” she says in a TikTok bemoaning the work day and the inevitable post-lunch comedown. Windey’s monologue has since become part of pop culture’s rapidly growing lexicon of emotion, with tributes coming from the likes of director and actor Elizabeth Banks, a cappella band Pentatonix, and Pixar. “I’ve lost all my confidence. I’ve just had lunch. I’m lethargic,” she adds — drawing out the three vowels that “lethargic” contains and turning it into a word that takes four seconds to say.
It just feels better, more soothing, to say it like Windey.
Unfortunately for Windey’s fans, The Traitors ended on Thursday, which means ostensibly less Windey on TV. But Cumming loves to bring fan favorites back, so there’s always next season of Traitors. In the meantime, we know where to find her.
Recent Comments