Maura Higgins and the final betrayals in The Traitors Season 4

Warning: major spoilers for the Season 4 finale of The Traitors. maura higgins — the Irish TV personality — reached the final five but found that trusting the wrong person can be fatal in the game’s endgame.

Final five and the staged “murder”

Maura made it to the final five after Dancing With The Stars performer Mark Ballas was the final player to be "murdered" in front of the group. That left Olympic skating besties Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir as Faithfuls pitted against singer Eric Nam and snake-wrangling hearthrob Rob Rausch, who were Traitors. All eyes turned to Maura Higgins as she began second-guessing whether her closest ally and fellow Love Island alum, Rob, had secretly been playing her all along.

Maura Higgins at the roundtable

At the final roundtable, Maura listened to both sides and trusted her gut in making a decisive choice. The sequence of votes followed: Johnny Weir was voted out in a 3-2 vote, and later Tara Lipinski was voted out in a 3-1 vote. With those eliminations, the remaining Traitors, Rob and Eric, had successfully steered the game toward a Traitor victory — though the game was not yet finished, as two players chose to banish again.

How the last banish played out

With only three players remaining, Maura and Rob voted to banish Eric Nam, a move that left Rob as the last remaining Traitor. That final alignment awarded Rob the total prize pot of over $200, 000. Rob Rausch thus became the sole winner of The Traitors Season 4.

Rob Rausch’s place in the show’s history

Rob’s victory carries historical weight: he is the first Traitor to win the U. S. edition since Cirie Fields’ victory in Season 1, after two recent seasons had seen multiple Faithfuls take the prize. Rob entered the season as a 27-year-old professional snake wrangler and reality TV personality from Alabama, and he began the game allied with former Real Housewives of Potomac star Candiace Dillard Bassett and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum Lisa Rinna in the Traitors’ turret.

Strategies, duplicity and confessions

Several strands of gameplay and personality ran through Rob’s arc. He had previously risen to fame as a Casa Amor bombshell in Season 5 of Love Island and returned as a primary star in Season 6, where he shared romances with contestants such as Leah Kateb and Andrea Carmona. He recruited Eric Nam as a Traitor and later double-crossed him to secure the win; when asked about that decision he said, "Can you imagine if I let a Traitor that was there for three days beat me in the game and win the whole thing?" and added, "Hell no, I'm not taking that chance. I'm getting out of here with the money. "

Rob Rausch on the farm

Away from the castle, Rob’s life in Florence, Alabama, offered a stark contrast. He spends hours on the 200 acres of his family’s land, where he was photographed feeding cows gathered en masse at the gate; the animals mooed, and he moos back. Pointing out a single spotted cow, he said, "That one's my favorite, " and named her Darlin' because "she's a darlin'. " Darlin is the only cow who doesn’t tip her horns forward and rush at him when he lets them into the field.

On the farm he favors sturdy canvas jackets, light-wash jeans and worn-in cowboy boots rather than the denim overalls he once wore; "I used to wear overalls in the summer every day, but now I can't even wear them, " he said, calling them "like a fuckin' Halloween costume. " He joked with a straight face that the cow field was littered with landmines to pull a leg, a reminder of the practical joking and the lying that served him well on the show. He described his ability to bluff as a core skill in a format where Traitors survive by not getting found out and with a jackpot that can reach up to a quarter million dollars.

The family land has been in his family for generations. He has a wooden table he handcrafted and a vintage red Ford F150 his grandfather bought in 1993. Bullet shells litter the outside of the trailer on his property, where he and his sister run their clothing

The Traitors format and cultural reach

The Traitors traces back to a Netherlands origin in 2021 and was adapted in the U. K. in 2022, where Claudia Winkleman became a beloved host. The U. S. edition, hosted by Alan Cumming in theatrical attire, premiered in 2023 and shoots, like the U. K. show, in a Scottish castle with scenic rolling hills and historic locations. As Season 4 wrapped, the show’s latest premiere had sparked a 15% increase in vacation rentals in Scotland. Viewers watched Faithfuls try to suss out Traitors amid treachery, deception and betrayal in the castle’s halls.

Rob Rausch’s gameplay—playing chess, quoting Mark Twain, staying mentally grounded by lessons learned on Love Island, and staying physically energized with hard-boiled eggs—helped him outlast co-conspirators and even survive Traitor-on-Traitor violence to claim the pot. He said the win felt "so weird, in that moment, " adding that while he won the game it was "very bittersweet" and not an immediate celebration. He also said he remains "super tight" with both Eric Nam and maura higgins.

Celebrity appearances throughout the season included Donna Kelce, the mother of Jason and Travis Kelce, who served as the first "secret traitor" whose identity viewers did not learn until the end of Episode 3. The season also highlighted castles such as a 16th century castle Lomond situated along a river and Carnell Estates, a small castle with walled gardens dating back to 1435.

In the end, a string of votes, a final roundtable decision and a late-game banish left Rob Rausch as the last Traitor standing and maura higgins among the final players to confront the consequences of misplaced trust.