Love Is Blind boss explains why they aired *those* TikTok claims about Ben mistreating women

Love Is Blind showrunner Chris Coelen has explained why season eight decided to air the allegations of Ben Mezzenga mistreating women that were first unearthed on TikTok.

The season has been a little lacklustre compared to earlier instalments of the franchise, but season eight is FINALLY starting to heat up thanks to the encroaching influence of social media. Taylor Haag and her fiancé Daniel Hastings had that Instagram drama, and now Ben has been forced to address the claim he mistreated women.

In one of the recent episodes, when challenged on the claims put forward by TikTok influencer Andra Berghoff, Ben told his girlfriend Sara Carton that he was not in the wrong.

“I haven’t talked to her in over four years,” Ben told Sara. “She’s already making stuff up. She was like, how I manipulated and did all these different things.”

Here’s why Love Is Blind decided to air Ben’s allegations

Whether it’s Love Island or Married at First Sight, Singles Inferno or Celebs Go Dating, dating shows have a habit of drudging up concerning statements, strange past lives, and the bitter exes of its participants. Love Is Blind is no different, but usually, they don’t go airing TikTok rumours and speculation for the world to see.

Explaining their reasoning behind including the TikTok drama, the show’s creator Chris Coelen told Entertainment Weekly that the show documents whatever is going on in the lives of its cast.

“Well, the video was real. We saw it on TikTok,” he said. “We saw it, and the cast, the participants, saw it, and it was something that they had to deal with. We had to think [about] how do we deal with that for our participants?

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“I think our commitment to them is just, we’re going to document whatever you’re doing, whatever is going on in your life. If there’s something going on in your life that’s an issue for you, or it’s affecting you in any way, our commitment is to just tell the story of what’s happening, whatever that is.”

Though it probably wasn’t the case going back a decade or more, Chris argued that social media is a huge part of everybody’s daily lives. It simply wouldn’t be authentic to gloss over what people are seeing with their own two eyes.

He added: “We live in a world that ever increasingly is that this social media stuff creeps into people’s lives. And people are out there. They seek attention. Not everybody, but a lot of people seek attention, and if they think that they have an opportunity to latch onto something to get attention, some people are going to try to hitch themselves to that.

“I don’t know anything about the person who posted the video and I don’t know anything about it other than what we documented,” Coelen says. “All I know is what we documented, so we see her discover it, and then we see Sara and Ben talk about it, and we see them deal with it and decide what they’re going to do about it, if anything.

“I love that about making the show — that something happens, we’re just going to follow it, and try to lean into the authenticity of it.”

Love is Blind season eight is now streaming on Netflix. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image credit: Netflix