On Wednesday, itinerant The Challenge star Paulie Calafiore was seen with Demi Burnett, a future Bachelor contestant. Per Us Weekly, the Texan interior designer was hanging with Calafiore because she wanted his sound advice on what to do when you've arrived in reality TV-land.
Burnett picked an interesting person for a mentor: Calafiore is currently in the middle of one of The Challenge's biggest romantic disasters.
I'll allow him to explain. Last Thursday, December 28, Calafiore hopped on Instagram Live to clear up a few things:
"As you all are aware, in Final Reckoning, Cara and I got together. [But] I was in a relationship with Danielle. I loved Danielle going into the season. I loved her throughout the season," Calafiore explained. He was trying to explain what happened during filming for The Challenge: Final Reckoning, an MTV reality show which aired from July to December of 2018, as well as the subsequent fallout. And he was doing so because, on December 28, that same day, the two women he mentioned laid all the information on the table.
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Calafiore had, for months, been dating both Danielle Maltby (also of The Bachelor) and Cara Maria Sorbello of The Challenge. He'd done so by working the "It's all for show" angle. On December 18, Maltby came forward first, speaking to Sorbello via People.
Said Maltby, "[Calafiore] told me he’s never letting go of me or of us. That [Sorbello] knew exactly what the relationship was and wasn’t. [Sorbello] knew it was only for the show. He was trying to work on himself and that we had to let this time play out so that he could change the media’s perception of himself so that we could be together."
She directly addressed Sorbello, explaining just exactly what had been happening: "He told me you two went your separate ways on the show and it was done. That you brought nothing positive into his life, again it was all game related. Anything on social media wasn’t real."
Meanwhile, Sorbello and Calafiore were carrying on a blissful social media couplehood (see above). They were posting cozy photos accompanied by inspirational quotes! In November, they even appeared on How Far is Tattoo Far?, the reality show that asks couples to get relationship-inspired tattoos.
On How Far Is Tattoo Far? Sorbello claimed that the relationship was not exclusive. ("The status of their relationship may be vague, but they're ready to take it to the next level," the voiceover announced on the show.) Calafiore got a tattoo of Sorbello on that episode while Sorbello got a Game of Thrones crow on her ribs.
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But Calafiore was with Maltby as recently as September 2018, when he visited Maltby in Nashville. "We talked and fought and he told me about the tattoo and how angry he was about it," Maltby told People.
Eventually, Sorbello spoke out, too. (This was on December 28, the same day as Calafiore's Instagram Live.)“There were two completely different realities,” Sorbello revealed. “I lived in one. Danielle lived in the other."
Said Sorbello, "I never knew all the things he was telling her especially after filming this season. I believed everything he told me because he never treated me badly. He was loving and physically and verbally affectionate. I’ve never been more happy and in love.”
Now, Calafiore is insistent that he is deeply in love with Sorbello, and that this was just a "tough fucking situation." He claimed that he'd only seen Maltby for 10 days throughout this whole ordeal. And, making a somewhat logical argument, he pointed out that, even if he'd wanted to be intimate with Maltby during that time, he already had a massive tattoo of Sorbello on his thigh.
"I wanted to stay in touch with Danielle because every time I would talk to her on the phone, she would be broken and she would say, 'Please tell me it's not true. Please tell me that you and Cara are a thing,'" he claimed, adding that Maltby had lost weight during this period. "I did that to her!"
His main point, though, was that he was in love with Sorbello and not in love with Maltby, whom he portrayed as a broken women in need of his help. (Hm.)
Regardless, Sorbello and Maltby appear to be friends, while Calafiore is stuck with a massive thigh tattoo. Said Maltby to People, "I’m thankful I was finally able to speak with Cara and we came together as two strong women looking for answers and we were able to give them to each other."
Now, how does Demi Burnett factor into all of this? Hopefully, not by much. Calafiore is, per a source who spoke to Us, "always there to help people if they want to chat." Still, in a few months, 'twould be interesting to see Calafiore on How Far Is Tattoo Far? getting a workup of Burnett on his shoulder.