“Two Exes In Question”: This Huge Missed Detail Might Change How MAFS Fans View Sara’s ‘Cheating’ Scandal

This week, Married At First Sight Australia's Sara Mesa made headlines after admitting that she had "emotionally cheated" on her on-screen husband, Tim Calwell.

In previous episodes of MAFS, Sara has confessed to meeting up with her ex while the show was filming — and lying to Tim about it. Then, it was revealed that she had slept with her ex only a month before the experiment began, prompting some people to believe that she had done the same at her mysterious meet-up.

Sara says that during the honeymoon, she had explicitly told Tim that she was friends with some of her exes and that she had hooked up with one of them a month before the experiment — something we had all seen addressed on the show. It was then implied that it was this same ex that Sara had met up with during the experiment. But according to her, what we've been shown on the screen isn't exactly how everything went down.

"The whole ex thing came out at the dinner party and obviously, I wasn't at the dinner table when Tim had said to everyone that I had hooked up with the ex a month before the experiment," she tells Refinery29 Australia. "What Tim doesn't know is that the ex in question was actually not the same ex. So when he said that, he thought it was the ex in question."

"I genuinely did not hook up with the ex in question," she continues. "But I realised at that point, that that's what everybody thought. So I was like, You know what, I'm just gonna let everyone think it's this ex. I'm not going to explain that there is another ex."

Now looking back, Sara realises that she should have clarified to everyone in the moment that the ex she had met up with and the ex that she had hooked up with were two different people. "I should have just brought it up and it would have shut everybody up," she tells us.

"There are two exes in question; however, on the show, I just agree that it is the same ex because it just saves me a lot of explaining other things that no one else knows about."

"Now, it looks to everybody that my ex had a girlfriend at the time of me hooking up with him and that's not the case. This has ruined his relationship, which has been really hard."

Since she's broken down in tears, I ask Sara if she's feeling stressed about the public's perception of her. "You have no idea," she says. "I know I've put myself in the public eye, but I didn't think I would ruin other people's relationships."

Sara clarifies that the ex that she had met up with during the experiment was indeed in an on-and-off relationship, but says that the way the situation unfolded at the dinner party all seemed like her trying to avoid questions. "It kind of looks like it's just a deflection, but all this stuff is stuff that I had told Tim," she says. "Especially the thing about hooking up with the other ex a month before — that was something that I told him in confidence."

"You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't," she says.

When asked to clarify what actually went down in the night that she met up with her ex during the experiment, Sara shares that it was a big group gathering and explains that she is close friends with a lot of his friends, who were also at the event. "When I first moved here, me and my ex got together and I didn't really have a lot of friends when I moved here," she explains. "So he actually kind of brought me into his like big group of friends and they're still my really good friends to this day. So whenever he is around, we do see each other."

Sara clarifies that while her and her ex don't communicate often, they do talk casually if they know they'll be in the same city. "Whether me and my ex communicate often, that's not the case. It's more so when he is around," she explains. "He found out that I was going on the show, so he did message me saying, 'Are you actually getting married?' and that was the conversation that we had."

"We all went out to a pub, had a few drinks, I was home by curfew, and that was pretty much it," she explains. But when it comes to hiding the meet-up from Tim, Sara admits that she didn't tell him because she didn't want him to feel sad about her being with an ex.

"Obviously, I didn't tell Tim," she says. "I didn't feel — and this is obviously the wrong thing — but I didn't feel like telling him was going to make him feel any sort of good feelings, because obviously, who wants their partner to be hanging out with an ex? But I guess my situation is so complex, that I just left it out."

While Sara admits that there are a lot of things she would have done differently with hindsight, her decision making came down to the fact that she was on national television and didn't want anything to be blown out of proportion. "The fact that we're on national television also played a big part in it," she says. "I was like, I don't want this to be some sort of storyline that they can twist and turn into whatever they want.

"I mean, in hindsight, it came out anyways, so I should have just been honest," she says. "But that was kind of what I was trying to avoid."