Below Deck's former chief stew, Hannah Ferrier has been accused of stealing her online course from fellow cast member EJ Jansen. The former bosun is finally speaking out about how his business idea was hacked by the fan-favorite. Below Deck fans may recall EJ from when he was a bosun on the franchise. He has been in the yachting industry for years and has worked on yachts in the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Central America, and the entire East Coast of the U.S.
Since leaving the show, EJ has been working on his own business, YachtyCrew, which is a training site that helps aspiring crew members to learn the secrets of the trade. The reality TV star's hope is to help form a standard for the trade. Now, he's speaking out about Hannah's move to infringe upon his success.
During his time on Behind The Velvet Rope With David Yontef podcast, EJ spilled some tea about how he believed Hannah copied his established yacht course and “made it her own.” YachtCrew.com was the brainchild of EJ and has been an established online course for some time. Hannah has recently released her program called Ocean International Training Academy, and the two are butting heads over it. EJ went on to say that “I never really met her, but she literally word for word copied my Yacht University course and made it kind of her own.” EJ couldn’t hold back when he revealed that her program is exactly the same as he's saying, “Look, it’s in the same kind of layout and like, whoa, hopefully, she didn’t buy my a course and then just copy all that stuff, because it’s copyrighted.”
This type of behavior does not shock fans since Hannah has never been one for the rule books as she showed on her last season when she brought drugs on board. Naturally, he tried confronting the disgraced stew, but she went “ballistic.” Sadly, for EJ this was not his first time having to confront others about trying to rip off his class, which has been established for eight years. He tried reaching out to Hannah to see if they could work together but she immediately became defensive and told him to talk to her lawyer.
If Hannah did copy the course, she did not try to hide it well, as EJ pointed out that she used the same exact photo that he has for his course in her own ads. Hopefully, the two can figure out the whole mess and there will be some kind of justice for EJ.