He’s setting the record straight! There has been a ton of drama surrounding 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days couple Karine Martins and Paul Staehle over the past couple of days, but there’s one innocent person who is caught in the crossfire — an Instagrammer named Joe Devito. Earlier this week, Paul took to Facebook to publicly accuse Karine of cheating on him with Joe in a series of now-deleted posts. Paul also put Joe on blast and branded him as a homewrecker. But Joe has exclusively revealed to In Touch that he was unfairly dragged into their drama and he’s clearing his name once and for all.

Joe explained that he didn’t know about TLC’s hit reality TV franchise 90 Day Fiancé until Karine started following him on social media one day and his friends pointed out that she was one of the stars of the show. Shortly after following him, Karine sent him a friendly message to say hello and that’s how their first conversation started.

“She was with Paul at the time — which I didn’t know she had a husband when I started talking to her either,” he said, confirming 90 Day Fiancé fans’ suspicions. Joe said that Paul and Karine did get married in Brazil and she refers to Paul as her husband — but she’s also hinted at divorce quite a few times. You can see their alleged wedding photo, here.

After meeting on Instagram, Karine and Joe developed a friendship and most of their conversations consisted of Karine asking Joe for fitness advice — with Joe speaking primarily in English and Karine using an app that translates from Portuguese to English. “I’m not a trainer, I’m just a fit person that’s on Instagram so it was flattering that she came to me,” he said. Joe offered her some workout tips but she eventually found a trainer.

Paul was involved in Karine’s fitness journey from the start and he even paid to hire a trainer for her, but that trainer had allegedly asked Karine for nude photos. She turned to Joe for advice, and after talking with him, she decided to fire the trainer. After that, Karine found another trainer that Paul agreed to pay for but that didn’t work out either so she turned to Joe for help. He said he made videos for her showing her how to do a squat and even sent her a video of a circuit routine — and he stressed that Paul was aware of his friendship with Karine throughout this time.

“In November, [Karine] had told me Paul was freaking out a little bit about who I am [so] I reached out to him on Facebook and I was like, ‘Hey, just so you know — I’m a gay guy who’s training Karine and giving her fitness advice.’ He thumbs-upped it, and that was really it.”

Joe said Karine went on a social media hiatus from December 2017 until about mid-January 2018 because she was dealing with some personal issues, and when she came back she reached out to Joe to tell him that she was okay. They went back to their online friendship — which mostly consisted of liking and commenting on each other’s posts.

But things took a dramatic turn when Paul reached out to Joe about three days ago asking him what was going on between him and Karine. Joe reminded Paul that he is a gay man who is in a happy relationship and has been for the past six years, which seemed to calm Paul down — until he went on a social media meltdown and accused Karine of cheating on him with Joe. But Joe says that’s simply not true.

Joe Devito and his boyfriend of six years.

“I feel like I was a person in her life that she could confide in and ask for fitness advice. In no way shape or form was I trying to befriend a ‘star,'” Joe said. “Disclaimer: I never signed up to be a part of this show. I never subscribed to being put out in the way. It’s really messed up for someone that’s a public figure to use their social media platform to attack somebody that’s not involved in the show at all. I don’t need [the] spotlight.”

In various Facebook posts, Paul claimed that after confronting her about Joe, Karine had called the police on him and kicked him out of Brazil. But Joe said it is all false — and he provided In Touch with a screenshot of the conversation between him and Karine where she denied that the police were involved.

Screenshot courtesy of Joe Devito.

90 Day Fiancé fans have already learned that Paul does have a tendency to freak out, but it’s hard to understand why he would make up such a dramatic story about his wife cheating on him, kicking him out of the country, and then blast it on social media. But Joe has a theory — he thinks Paul did this as a ploy to try to get his storyline with Karine picked up for the next season of the show since the couple has been filming on and off with the camera crew.

“He already had to leave Brazil because of federal law because his visa expired,” Joe said. “It’s just been a whole big spin-up of drama, in my opinion, to secure his place on the next season of the show.”

Joe said that Paul already had his flight back to the states booked since last week, and he had seen screenshots of the itinerary. The plan seemed pretty elaborate, and Paul tried to make it seem believable when he claimed he had screenshots of photos and conversations that would prove Karine was cheating with Joe, but Joe said that is also false.

“Are there sexually explicit images of me that were passed between Karine and I — no,” Joe said. “There are none.”

“Most of the screenshots that Paul had been sharing, they’re all part of a 90 Day Fiancé group,” Joe said. The public Facebook group served as a forum for fans to discuss the show, and someone shared a screenshot of Karine’s comment on one of Joe’s selfies and teasingly referred to her as his “girlfriend” as a joke. But Joe reiterated that he did not have an affair with Karine. “I would be a really bad cheater if I was posting in a group of thousands of people about my ‘relationship’ with somebody,” Joe said.

There’s one more bombshell that Paul dropped during his social media meltdown, where he claimed that Joe had posted revenge porn of Karine — but Joe said that’s also extremely false.

“Karine has let me know that somebody had told Paul that she had pornographic videos online. And Paul I guess had contacted a lawyer to try to get them removed from the site. But she also divulged that there are many more videos on his computer and on his phone that she’s asked him to delete but he won’t delete,” Joe said. Paul had previously said that Joe was the one who released those videos and photos of Karine and Joe wanted to make it very clear that he did not do that. “That’s really bad for him to say and I’m not going to let someone damage my reputation by saying that,” Joe said.

Now, both Karine and Joe are trying to distance herself from the drama, and she hinted to Joe that Paul “always” pulls stunts like this, and the whole thing was orchestrated by her husband. “I don’t want to be involved in anybody’s marriage,” Joe said. “It seemed like this entire marriage has been manipulated to support some storyline on the show.”