New Married At Fight Sight companion series MAFS: After The Dinner Party debuted its first episode on Wednesday night on Stan. And, boy, did it deliver!
Hosted by Laura Byrne, Brittany Hockley and Jules Lund, the show offered rare insight into the most explosive and divisive Dinner Party we’ve seen on MAFS so far this season.
Joining the hosts on the couch were brides Alissa and Stella, and grooms Chris and Danny, we revealed all the inside goss – from the behind-the-scenes drama we didn’t get to see to the Mean Girl gang-up and Brook’s shock pregnancy announcement!
Here’s everything we learnt from episode one of MAFS: After The Dinner Party.
Brook’s bait and switch shock
Our hosts couldn’t believe that the sweet and innocent girl we met on her wedding day is the same person launching vicious attacks on her fellow brides during the Dinner Party.
“The character assassinations that we’ve seen … towards other people, the way she is so malicious … it was shocking and actually really hard to watch for me,” Brittany says.
“It took me back – I felt like I was at school and it was just bullying in the schoolyard.”
Laura noted that she agreed with online commentators that Brook had undergone a “full personality transplant”.
Stella and Alissa relive nightmare Dinner Party attack
Having beared the brunt of much of Brook’s anger, Stella and Alissa joined the couch to share their side of the story.
Showing a clip of the disastrous Dinner Party takedown, Laura told the women, “For everyone, that was really hard to watch.”
Asked how they were able to keep their cool during the furore, Alissa said she was shocked into silence. “I couldn’t believe the behaviour that was in front of me that was going on,” she says.
“How dare they! It was utterly disrespectful,” she continues. “We’re there to work on a relationship, to build a relationship, to find love, and this girl gang are all sitting together – we’re sitting next to our husbands – and they’re just ganging up on us.”
Brittany told the women the problem was they “handled it too well” and were “grace under fire”.
“It looked to us like it came out of nowhere … and Brook just came at you,” Brittany notes. “What are we not seeing?”
Alissa says she’s “baffled” by the question herself, as the women “don’t know me”. “I’m confident, I’m a bit loud, but I’m not a nasty girl,” she says.
Exclusive footage reveals premeditated attack
While Brook swanned in late to the Dinner Party, having previously left Chris and flown home, she came in all guns blazing, with a clear agenda.
In previously unseen footage, it’s revealed she plotted with the other women to take down Stella and Alissa.
“Should I start it now? Should I kick up the Stella thing now?” Brook is seen asking Gia. She responds, “F*** yes! ’Cause I’m ready.”
Checking to make sure Gia and Mel are going to have her back, she then launches her attack.
“I just wanna know, Stella, what is your problem with me? I’m not calling you out in front of a whole circle of people and making you out to be the bad person, because I see someone like you, ‘I’m so deep, I’m so deep.’ I don’t think you’re deep, I just think you’re f***ing dumb.”
As the clip rolls on, we see Gia and Brook take a walk, during which Gia announces that she has “another target” for them: Alissa.
“Babe, can you please throw that bread roll,” Brook then asks Gia back at the table.
“Throw it at Alissa and I’ll back you,” Gia says, as Mel giggles. As Brook encourages her, Gia says she can’t. “I’ve already f***ed her up too much tonight, babe.” Brook then calls across the table to engage Alissa in her next attack.
Back on the couch, Stella and Alissa are gobsmacked, and Stella begins to cry.
She says that while she may look tough, she’s highly emotional and empathetic, and seeing people treat each other badly hits close to home.
Alissa confirms that what was shown on TV was just a snippet of what actually went down, with much of the footage cut due to bad language.
“It’s 10 times, 20 times worse,” she reveals.
While Stella says the “apologies came in” after the fact, neither she nor Alissa bought them, with Alissa calling them “inauthentic”.
Asking for her phone, Alissa reveals a message she received via Instagram five weeks after the Dinner Party showdown – from Brook. She says she took no accountability as she read it out. Indeed, she threw the show’s producers under the bus, insisting they “push that I should go for you and Stella that night, and keep stirring s*** up.”
“That apology, we all agree, is pretty lame,” says Jules. “Blaming producers.”
Asking if the producers are even involved in the Dinner Parties, the girls confirmed they aren’t. “It’s just us sitting around a table,” says Alissa. “The crew is there filming, but the producers aren’t in the room.”
Laura reveals that invitations were extended to Brook and Gia to join them on the show, and while Brook declined, Gia was set to appear, but bailed at the last minute.
Brook’s nasty name for her rivals revealed
In further unseen footage, Brook can be heard talking to a producer, calling her adversaries the “NBLs” – Natural Born Losers.
Asking them who they classify as the NBLs, Gia says it’s “the whole other table. Except Rach.”
Completely unaware they’d been labelled as such behind their backs, Stella and Alissa call the whole thing “stupid”.
“I’ll admit that I’m a pain in the arse, but I’m a good pain in the arse!” Alissa declares.
Jules says he thought they would see some wild and crazy behaviour from Alissa, but he was pleasantly surprised to discover she’s not at all.
“With Alissa, you either take it or leave it,” Stella says diplomatically. “It’s either people are going to love her or people will probably dislike her.”
Alissa insists she’s “very empathetic” and “loves with her whole heart”, but what you see is what you get.
“I’m very dry, I’m very direct, but I’m not nasty and I’m not malicious,” she says. “I’m funny, I’m the funny one.”
Gia’s a no-show as more Mean Girl behaviour is exposed
It’s little wonder Gia decided not to face Stella and Alissa, as more previously unseen footage reveals more explosive comments made about the pair.
Talking with producers at the Dinner Party, Gia and Brook rip into their fellow brides once more, geeing each other up and making rude hand gestures.
“Get f***ed, Stella,” Gia tells the camera. “Literally, she’s full of s***.
“She has a huge victim’s mentality and she’s a f***in pick-me. That’s Stella’s MO, that’s all she is. If there’s a way she can be the victim in a situation, she’s gonna do it.”
Brook weighs in that she “knows for a fact” that viewers will watch the show and see that “Alissa is a fake, f***ing b**** with those ratchet hair extensions”.
Everyone is shocked, citing the hypocrisy spewing from their mouths.
Asked if they believe there was any possibility that Brook came back for Chris, the women are unanimous.
“No! She just wanted to tear down other women – that was her goal, it was to sabotage everything,” Alissa declares. “It was like she was possessed.”
And Alissa teases that that’s not the end of the drama. “More to come!” she says.
Chris addresses Brook’s pregnancy reveal
After Brook confirmed to our sister publication Woman’s Day earlier this week that she is indeed pregnant and engaged to her ex-boyfriend, Harry, rumours have been swirling that she reunited with her ex while still in the experiment.
Bringing Chris out to address the speculation, the jilted groom broke his silence.
First talking about how he entered the Dinner Party a broken man, after Brook flew home, he said that watching the episode brought it all back.
He admitted that when Brook first walked in, he felt a “little bit of hope” that she had returned for him, to save their relationship. But he quickly realised that was not the case.
“Everyone now knows Brook’s pregnant and back with her fiancé, or now-fiancé. I thought she didn’t get back with him till maybe three or four weeks after,” he says.
Several non-approved trips back to the Gold Coast during production are also mentioned, as Chris explains he was led to believe one trip home was because of her cats, while the second was when she “ran away”.
“On weekends, it’s pretty much your time alone to get to know each other better,” Chris explains. “’Cause obviously during the week you’re flatout filming, you’re doing tasks, challenges, whatever, together. So I think the weekends is where most couples, in my opinion, blossomed.”
Asked if he thinks Brook was still in a relationship or in contact with her ex during filming, Chris admits his feelings have changed.
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d say no, I didn’t,” he says. “Ask me today, I’d change my opinion.
While Brook has insisted she and Harry were not in a relationship while she was in the experiment, she admits she did think of him while partnered with Chris.
In some unseen footage, Brook revealed to her husband during a challenge that she had had sex “two days before the wedding”.
Speaking with producers, she said it was with “someone in my life”, though she insisted it was in the past and she was “here for Chris now”.
When the topic of the last time she had contact with her ex came up in another challenge card, she admitted it was when he tried to buy her flowers and she told him, “You do realise I’m married now?”
Asked by producers if he had any concerns that Brook had had contact with her ex so recently, Chris insisted it wasn’t an issue as he “knows Brook pretty well”.
In hindsight, Chris says he’s seeing things a “little differently”.
As for his own behaviour, this season’s “villain” insists he wasn’t acting out of insecurity, but rather immaturity and not being smart.
Asked outright if he can now see how horrific his “fatphobic” comments were, Chris says he can. “Yeah, definitely,” he says, adding that he’s embarrassed watching himself back on the show now.
Jules says he’s not buying this new good guy act, citing his inappropriate jokes about fat girls on Instagram just last week.
“At the end of the day, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion,” Chris says, adding that he’s impulsive and unfiltered and always has been.
John weighs in on Steve’s shock ‘personality change’
Relationship expert John Aiken was next up on the couch, putting “older couple” Rebecca and Steve under the spotlight.
With Steve also having undergone a “personality change” in recent episodes, the group ask John for his insight into what’s going on.
John admitted that they didn’t see it coming, as they only get to sit in on the Dinner Parties and don’t get to see what goes on within the relationships during the rest of the week. Then they do the Commitment Ceremonies the following night.
“When he first met Rebecca, [Steve] was quite high on her, and we were really excited about this,” he says. “But then you start to see him have doubts that he then shares with the boys only, and not with her. When I’ve seen that in past experiments, that’s when you really start to worry, because he’s keeping a lot hidden and, at times, also blaming her for certain things.”
John says so many contestants coming in with a long list of criteria, then dropping their partner when they don’t meet all of them, “isn’t going to work”.
“My worry with Steve when he started talking about red flags is that he’s ruling her out without even giving her a chance,” he says. “And he wasn’t the only one, either.”
Calling out Steve’s rude behaviour when talking to expert Alessandra Rampola during the Intimacy Workshop, saying he wasn’t being fed lines via and earpiece and alluding to the fact that she was, John agreed it was beyond rude.
“We were outraged,” he says. “Because if someone’s coming at the experts like that, and kind of being disrespectful at times, then you know, ‘OK, what is their buy-in to this experiment?’”
Danny fights flirting allegations
After Danny became the subject of some damning rumours during the Dinner Party, he’s brought to set the record straight.
Of course, as viewers will recall, Gia revealed to Bec that Danny had told her she was “his type” – a claim he staunchly denied.
While Laura is on his side, believing that the whole thing was a set-up by Gia, Brittany says she doesn’t think he ever even told her she was his type. Jules isn’t “buying what he’s selling”.
Given the floor, Danny insists he never uttered those words to Gia. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Watching it back I cringed, ’cause I was like, I didn’t deny it properly. But imagine if someone had just lied about you, I was a rabbit in the headlights.”
Unclear why Gia and Brook would lie about the conversation taking place when Danny insists it didn’t, he can only speculate as to why they would spin that narrative.
“To get at Bec, I think is the biggest thing,” he says.
Admitting he handled it “horrendously”, Laura and Brittany call him out for gaslighting her.
“Why should you believe either of us? Talk is cheap. I’ll tell you what’s not cheap: lie detectors,” Danny says, adding that he’ll take a lie detector test right then and there to clear his name! He’ll even put $100,000 of his own money behind his innocence being proven.
Steadfast that there was nothing that could have been misconstrued, Danny puts all the blame on Gia, calling her “obsessed” with him.
“What I think it was, was Gia made a drunk comment to Brook, saying, ‘Oh, Danny said I was his type,’ that’s all I can make of it. Then it’s got legs,” he says.
Getting to the bottom of what Danny’s “type” is once and for all, we’re shown a previously unseen clip from Danny’s audition interview with John.
Asked what his ideal partner is, he says, “Just someone who’s real, someone who’s got good energy, a good soul, and a personality. I sort of do like more of a natural girl.”
He goes on to cite “too much makeup” and having lip filler as his turnoffs. Case closed!
