“The Price Is Right” model Manuela Arbelaez has spoken out about her major gaffe on Thursday’s episode of the CBS game show, during which she accidentally gave away a $22,000 car to a contestant.
Arbelaez’s immediate reaction after making the goof? In a word, “mortified.”
“I was mortified!” Arbelaez told Inside Edition. “I was mortified because I thought a) this is my last day at work, b) it’s going to get taken out of my paycheck every week.”
The model made major headlines on Thursday after she accidentally revealed the correct price of the car, making the contestant’s prize-winning guess exceedingly easy. But despite Arbelaez’s fears that her pay would be docked in a major way, she said that host Drew Carey and the show’s producers “could not have been more supportive.”
“They came up to me and they loved it. They thought it was the funniest moment and they embraced it,” Arbelaez recalled. “Because we all make mistakes, you know? At the end of the day, we’re only human and I obviously made a very expensive mistake.”
So how did the $22,000 screw-up happen?
“I thought [the contestant] only had one chance to guess the price of the car, and after I heard the buzzer, I’m like, ‘Alright, game over,’” Arbelaez explained. “When someone loses our natural reaction is to reveal the remaining tags to show the audience and the viewers the correct price. What I didn’t realize was that she had two more chances to guess the price and I totally messed up.”
The upside of the whole mortifying experience, Arbelaez said, was that “I made someone very happy!”
Watch Arbelaez explain herself on Friday’s “Inside Edition.” In the meantime, in case you missed the incident yesterday, watch it all unfold in the video.
