"They don’t care about the human beings who are dealing with the consequences. And there are huge consequences."

My first contact with Susan Rawlings (a Perth-based mining truck driver and one half of this season of Married At First Sight’s apparently sole dream couple) came after I wrote an article admonishing the series for its encouragement of group bullying and bad behaviour among the contestants.

Susan emailed to thank me and to clarify the situation in which 25-year-old contestant Cheryl was bullied by a group of male contestants. She seemed genuinely concerned by how the show — which was now airing sometime after her involvement in it — was being edited to misrepresent what had really gone on. She told me that producers had engineered the scenario, keeping sympathetic contestants like herself, Sean, Simon and Alene out of the room while Cheryl was being hounded.

It wasn’t all that surprising — I have watched UnREAL and I already knew that most of what happens on reality television is in some way constructed by producers and the crew on-site! — but it was disappointing. This season seemed to be raising more questions about the ethics and duty of care of reality TV than any of those in the past.

Susan and I exchanged emails about the show, but kept it private as she had signed a contract prohibiting public discussion of the series. However, as the show neared its conclusion on television, she got fed up. Then she offered to speak to me because she “felt like telling the truth”.

Early this week I rang Suan and, with the sound of a construction site in the background on her end, she and I spoke about her “bizarre” experience on the set of Married At First Sight.

Susan Is “Furious”

Susan answers the phone sounding nervous but friendly. After exchanging emails, I feel a little like Susan is my pal, and clearly she does too: we chortle through an exchange of pleasantries and she tells me she is on-site, and apologises for the noise. It’s not long before she tells me, voice shaking, that she is “furious”.

That morning Channel Nine’s TheFix had run an interview with Susan’s show husband, Sean Hollands, who is playing the scorned lover after the series finale was edited to appear as though Susan callously left him at the altar after he had declared his love to her. The article quotes an apparently despondent Sean saying, “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong”.

“Oh my god,” she says, “He just… I can’t believe he just–” She laughs, but seems genuinely hurt. Eventually, she concludes, “Channel Nine must just be like, ‘You have to say this’. It’s so bad.”

Sean is claiming that he was all-in on his relationship with Susan, who decided not to continue seeing Sean after the experiment was over. According to Susan, that decision was far more mutual than the show’s editors made it appear. “He knows all the reasons why I wasn’t into it,” she tells me. “He knows what happened because I told him so many times about things that upset me. And then he goes on the internet and says, ‘I don’t know what I’ve done’. But he does know; he completely does.”

She goes on sadly, “I don’t understand why someone who’s supposed to have so much integrity is just completely lying.”

We talk a great deal about her off-screen relationship with Sean, who is a cowboy from rural Queensland. Susan and Sean — though it did not appear so on screen — disagreed about a few key topics: his job as a cowboy (which Susan, an advocate for animal safety who is “completely against” rodeos and calf roping, was uncomfortable with), their compatibility as a couple, and their plans for a future together.

Susan explains wearily, “Everything I spoke the truth about they don’t want to put in at all, because they don’t want it to seem like there was anything wrong with me and Sean. They wanted it to seem like we’re just awesomely happily in love and everyone in Australia should want us to be working out.”

She’s very clear about one (vexing) aspect, though. “Not one person has asked me if I’m okay with it,” she tells me as she explains how the show has been edited to misrepresent her relationship with Sean. “Not until yesterday, when they called me and went into damage control.”

I ask her why she signed up for MAFS in the first place, and she sighs. “I didn’t think about production, I didn’t think about TV, I didn’t think about fame — I didn’t think about any of it. Obviously I should have.”

She continues, “I figured if the matchmakers got to know me — and I have to admit there were a lot of psychological tests and a lot of paperwork to fill in, which is great — I thought if they really get to know what I was looking for and what I’m like as a person, and if they got the match right, it might work. And if they got the match wrong, surely I’m not a worse off person. Obviously I got that wrong as well.”

“Wasn’t It Awesome How We Made Cheryl Cry?”

Eventually we move on to talk about the process of filming, which Susan calls “absolutely exhausting”. She talks more about what was edited out of filming — the hours she spent alone exploring Sydney, for example, because Sean was unwilling to go with her on these adventures.

It’s confirmed (as I’m sure many of us suspected) that everyone on MAFS was edited to suit the show’s narrative. Susan explains something that surprises me, which is that Anthony, who seemed borderline sociopathic throughout the show, is actually a pretty nice and funny guy, who had lots of great times with Nadia and the rest of the contestants. However, his other side (the arrogant, foot-in-mouth side) showed through just enough to encourage the producers to give him a Villain’s Edit — which is what we, the viewers, see and respond to.

“That’s what I said to the psychologists yesterday,” she explains. “How are we supposed to deal with all the hurtful comments on Facebook saying, you know, ‘Susan’s made the biggest mistake of her life’ and things like that?”

Susan tells me about the notorious couples’ dinner parties, a bizarre affair where the couples would be sequestered in a dining room and plied with alcohol, while the MAFS experts (John Aiken and his cohort of psychologists) and 20 or so others watched on monitors from behind a curtain — which sounds intriguingly like a kind of Wizard Of Oz redux.

“The only [other] time you saw [the psychologists] was on the couch at the commitment ceremony,” Susan explains. “We didn’t have any other interaction with them ever. Never ever.” Very different to the cosy expert/contestant relationship that’s portrayed on TV.

Susan agrees that there was a definite “boy’s club” attitude among the male contestants, which was fostered by the producers of the show. She tells me Sean “loved it”, and that this is often how they found out what went on when they were kept out of the room for filming.

“After we were made to leave the dinner, two of the boys were messaging saying, ‘Wasn’t it awesome how we made Cheryl cry?’.”

“There Are Huge Consequences”

Finally, I ask Susan the hard question: does she regret her time on the show?

“I suppose positive things are having friendships with people that I just truly adore, like Simon and Alene. And in May I’ve organised a trip over to Brisbane and I’m going to catch up with Nadia and Cheryl. I feel like that friendship with them really is a massive positive for me,” she explains. “And my wedding dress, which I got to keep.” She pauses, then concludes, “But yeah, not too many other positives.”

“They don’t even care about the human beings who are dealing with the consequences,” she says. “And there are huge consequences”.

Susan tells me she is stopped in the street by people in Perth who are eager to tell her she has made the wrong choice. She even received text messages from close friends, who perhaps should know better, admonishing her decision to leave Sean in the finale.

“Surely this has to stop,” she says desperately, “With social media getting so much bigger. Surely it has to stop somewhere.”

Since Susan first spoke out, Endemol Shine Australia — the company which produces Married At First Sight has issued a statement saying “all participants have access to psychological support”. “Our production is also in regular contact with the participants and are diligent in reporting any concerns to our psychologist. We take our duty of care extremely seriously.”

Still, Susan is determined to share her experience. She told me briefly that most of the other contestants were afraid to do the same (understandable considering the threat of contracts and lawyers). It makes me more certain than ever that Susan was perhaps the most genuine thing about MAFS: a generous and kind woman with strong values, desperate to stand up for truth and justice no matter the cost.

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Matilda Dixon-Smith is a freelance writer, editor and theatre-maker, and a card-carrying feminist. She also tweets intermittently and with very little skill from @mdixonsmith.