If you’ve been following the “American Idol” fallout after Pia-gate (the stellar singer and fan/judge favorite Pia Toscano was voted off the show last week), you, like virtually everyone else in the country watching the show, assumed Pia was a frontrunner in the votes due to her vocal prowess. But, according to Entertainment Weekly, “American Idol” Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe said she wasn’t.

The website has a video from Yahoo!Music of Lythgoe answering on-the-spot questions about Toscano, and in the interview he states the singer was constantly behind in the votes. He said that while he was saddened by the turnout, “I know the [voting] results, so I know she was never a frontrunner…[t]he fact of the matter is that it appears that Pia didn’t connect with the audience as much as we maybe think she did. And she wasn’t voted through.”

That may be true, but, TVLine’s Michael Slezak said in his weekly “Idoloonies” show that while some of the other male contestants, like Paul McDonald, Jacob Lusk, Scotty McCreery, and James Durbin, have had a lot of focus on their personalities, but most of the female contestants haven’t had that type of attention. “Looking back over the five or six weeks, James and Paul got their Hulk Hogan moment, Scotty got rushed by girls…he got that manufactured moment…Casey got the Judges’ Save and got mentions of being tweeted by Kelly Clarkson…there are these subtle cues that give them more moments, make them more human.. more likable, but if we look at the treatment the three girls have been getting, we see Lauren Alaina falling down the stairs, we see Haley get her work ethic questioned…and Pia has pretty much gotten no moments, no packaging, no focus on her personality whatsoever. So it’s unfair when people say ‘she’s boring’…”

So what do you think about Pia-gate? Listen to Nigel’s interview below and come to your own conclusions in the comments section below.

Nigel Lythgoe Discusses Pia Toscano Elimination from Yahoo! Music on Vimeo.