Married At First Sight veterans Tahnee Cook and Selina Chhaur have made the bombshell claim the series experts are fed lines by producers.
The pair discussed the Channel Nine dating show on their Back to Reality podcast this week, and said when they appeared on the series they could hear producers speaking to the experts through an ear piece.
‘The scary thing is not even the experts talking. I don’t think the audience know,’ Selina began.
‘They wear an ear piece, you can hear it [producers talking to them].’
Tahnee added she was able to hear the exact words the experts were being fed, which made getting their advice a strange experience.
‘You can hear, it’s so jarring. You’d sit there, probably the same distance we are now, and you can hear it,’ Tahnee said.
‘You can literally hear what’s being said in the ear piece.’
Selina appeared on season nine of the show in 2022 and Tahnee starred on the series 10 the following year.
The show’s expert panel, which currently consists of John Aiken, Mel Schilling and Alessandra Rampolla, have in the past denied claims they are fed lines through an ear piece.
In 2019, the show’s trio of relationship experts insisted their role remains sacred and they are not told what to say by producers.
Meanwhile, clinical neuropsychotherapist Trisha Stafford, who died in 2023, denied claims by former contestants the panel was ‘fed lines’ during commitment ceremonies.
‘It’s an unscripted television show – that’s where it’s an experiment, and like any experiment you throw in different variables,’ she told TV Tonight.
‘We don’t do anything [to advance storylines], we observe them and talk to them.’
Dean Wells, a contestant from the 2018 season of MAFS, also alleged in January that the experts were instructed what to say via an ear piece.
‘These experts are supposed to give you information and guide you through stuff and whatnot,’ he said in a YouTube video.
‘But when you actually sit down and talk to them, you ask them a question, they don’t answer you straight away,’ Dean added.
‘They stop, pause and go to their little headset, wait for the producers to tell them what to say, then they talk to you.
‘It’s not actually [them] really talking to you. It’s all coming from a headset. They just sit there and get told what to say by the producers.’