On Monday, though, reality TV and reality collided, revealingly: Isabella became the latest celebrity chef to be accused of sexual harassment. The allegation came from Chloe Caras, formerly a top manager at Mike Isabella Concepts, the company that oversees the chef’s 11-restaurant empire. In the suit, Caras alleges that Isabella and his business partners called her “bitch” and “whore”; “routinely subjected” her to sexist comments and insults; commented on her body; and touched her without permission. Taha Ismail and another business partner, Nicholas Pagonis, the suit alleges, included Caras in a group chat that contained sexually graphic images. Isabella and Ismail, Caras claims, both grabbed her from behind and simulated sex with her.

The experiences, Caras tells The Washington Post, whose Danielle Paquette first reported the story, led her to develop anxiety. In the suit, the Post reports, she is seeking unspecified damages from Isabella, Mike Isabella Concepts, and four of his business partners, including Ismail and Pagonis. Isabella and those partners are denying the accusations.

Isabella is a celebrity chef of a particularly modern strain: He went on TV and then became famous as a chef, rather than vice versa. He owes his empire—and the power that Caras claims he abused so blatantly—in part to a cultural paradigm that tangles professionalism and pageantry in the guise of a genre that goes by “reality.” On a show like Top Chef, in particular—which ostensibly tests, and rewards, real-world craft and skill—one’s person and one’s persona become commercially indistinguishable. Contestants go on the show, they will readily admit in talking-head interviews, to gain the kind of fame that will almost inevitably help their careers. The characters and caricatures they create—and embody—to that end will follow them through a post-show life that will often involve, for the most successful of the chefs, restaurant openings, regular appearances at cooking exhibitions, write-ups in Food & Wine, and cameos in future Top Chef episodes. The single mom; the determined immigrant; the assistant with something to prove; the tat-sleeved bad boy with a heart of gold: Their characters will be their currency.

Isabella’s character? A brash-but-charming jerk. The guy on the show was loud and seemingly proud about his own machismo, seeming to understand intuitively that his job on Top Chef was to serve not only perfectly medium-rare tenderloins, but also perfectly well-done dramas. Gail Simmons, one of the show’s judges, noted of Isabella’s a girl shouldn’t be at the same level that I am comment that she “was shocked and disappointed when I recently viewed this first episode and heard Mike Isabella’s sexist commentary. Hot-tempered and foulmouthed indeed. He may have cooked us a delicious dish, but his attitude left a bad taste in my mouth.” And when Isabella’s competitor Robin Leventhal, after her exit, gave an interview about the bullying she had received on the show—bullying, of course, that Bravo had gleefully edited and aired—TVGuide.com asked her, “Who would you say was the ring leader of this anti-Robin club?” Leventhal replied, “That would be Jersey Turnpike—Mr. Mike Isabella. He really loved to hate me.”