This year’s Married At First Sight was one of the most dramatic seasons in the show’s history. And now that the cast once again have full access to their social media accounts, more drama is brewing.
Case in point: Jesse Burford – who was caught up in the infamous cheating scandal after his bride Claire kissed one of the other MAFS grooms Adam – recently took to Instagram to do a Q&A. And he did not hold back.
WATCH: Married At First Sight’s Jesse doesn’t hold back during a Q&A
One fan asked him, “Where did you and Claire go wrong? From the reunion [the final 2023 Married At First Sight episode] it seemed like you guys were close.”
And Jesse responded with:
“What you’ve said here, ‘From the reunion it seemed you guys were close.’ That is the f**king power of this edit, dude. Like, don’t get me wrong. Me and Claire were friendly with each other at the reunion but [laughs] there’s no romance there dude. What the f**k?”
“They stitched these moments, where she’s pulling a nice face and I’m pulling a nice face, and then make it look like – none of that happened, dude. Claire and I at the reunion, we said hello to each other, we hugged, and we didn’t really speak to each other for the rest of night,” he continued.
Jesse reiterated that the final episode of MAFS was heavily edited when another fan asked, “Was the reunion commitment ceremony all set up? You guys looked like a couple again.”
“No, it wasn’t set up. That’s what I’m telling you, man. It’s the power of this edit. My sentence at the reunion on the couch, the commitment ceremony, my sentence was, ‘I don’t have any final words for Claire because I’m gonna see her in Perth soon because she’s coming for Lyndall’s birthday party.’ But they didn’t include that [last] bit in my sentence,”Jesse said.
WATCH: Married At First Sight’s Jesse on the couch during the finale
“Claire was never coming over to Perth to continue romantically with me. God, no. She said to me, at some point at reunion, that she was coming to Perth for Lyndall’s birthday. And they took that bit, when I told the experts that, and made it look like there’s hope.”
The 30-year-old marriage celebrant also said during his Q&A – when he was asked, “On MAFS you seemed to forgive Claire but now don’t have [many] positive [things] to say about her. What changed?” – that he felt pressured by Married At First Sight producers to forgive Claire and that he doesn’t have anything positive to say about MAFS in general.
“I definitely felt the pressure from production to stay in the game, to forgive, to put it behind you, to move forward. And that was all happening; they wanted that to happen at a rate of speed that was way quicker than I could possibly compute. Right? Couldn’t do it. But I still tried. I still f**king tried,” Jesse shared.
“And it didn’t help me not having much support there. The family visit, where me and Claire had lunch with her dad, that was not helpful for me…”
“There’s something I wanna also say about not having [many] positive things to say about Claire. Listen, forget about Claire. I don’t have much positive to say about MAFS altogether. So, when an interviewer is asking me a question and the answer to that question is inherently negative, that’s not because I don’t have anything positive to say. That’s because that’s just the truth; that’s the answer to the question,” he continued.
“I’m sure there’s heaps of positive things about Claire. I met plenty of her friends at the wedding and they all seemed like great, upstanding, respectable people. And I think Claire and I, within the experiment, were quite limited with how much we were able to get to know each other fully and perhaps, we both missed out on being able to learn more about each other’s positives.”
