The winner of the CBS celebrity competition show was crowned on Sunday.
*Caution: Spoilers ahead!*
After weeks of heated competition, double-dealing and deft manipulation, the winner of the first season of Celebrity Big Brother has been crowned.
The final two came down to season-long friends and co-conspirators Ross Mathews and Marissa Jaret Winokur, who had both had to break a lot of promises and tell their fair share of white lies that rubbed a lot of members in the evicted jury the wrong way during their time on the show.
Nonetheless, Marissa was named this year's big winner and won the $250,000 grand prize!
After Omarosa Manigault was evicted midway through the two-hour season finale, the final four came down to Marissa, Ross, Mark McGrath and Ariadna Gutiérrez.
When Marissa won the next Head of Household competition, which allowed her to decide the final two evictions, the writing was on the wall. Mark and Ariadna resigned themselves to their eviction, leaving the two friends to face the jury side-by-side.
When asked their regrets, Ross got candid about how he manipulated situations in the past, telling the jury, "My biggest regret was being naïve on day two of this game, and thinking that I could keep my word on day two when it was such a different world on day 22."
In the end, however, Marissa managed to win over the jury with her passionate speech and season-long integrity. Though Ross' brilliant gaming allowed him to get to the final two, he burned too many bridges to earn the votes needed to win.
Shannon Elizabeth -- who had been a strong contender early in the season before getting voted out -- held a lot of animosity toward both Ross and Marissa for the role they played in getting her evicted. However, the actress ended up casting her vote for Marissa because "Ross played a dirtier game."
"I just didn't respect the game he ended up playing as much," Elizabeth told ET's Brice Sander after the live finale. "They both stabbed me in the back, but he guided it for sure… so I had to choose between the two of them and that's just the way it went."
For more on this wild and crazy season of Celebrity Big Brother, check out the video below.
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