Cara Maria says Laurel 'replicated past abuse' in 'Challenge' fight

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The challenge: battle of the eras, Season 40, Episode 5, “An Era Tradition.”

Cara Maria Sorbello lifts the curtain and tells how her fight with Laurel Stucky in this week's episode of The challenge Season 40 was worse than it seemed on screen.

The former friends became bitter rivals and again got into a verbal argument in Battle of the eras Episode 5, “An Era Tradition,” but Cara Maria revealed in a TikTok posted Wednesday night that there was so much more that wasn't shown on screen, including how Laurel “recreated past abuse” she had suffered, which led to Cara Maria seeing a therapist during filming.

“This is just an hour-long show with a ton of commercials in between, and there are so many people and so many stories and so many things happening that you'll never see,” Cara Maria said in the video. “With that said, I'm here to tell you what you didn't see. [see].”

Cara Maria Sorbello, “The Challenge”.

MTV

Cara Maria explained that at that point, a few weeks into filming for the season, she witnessed Laurel “constantly poking fun at” her co-star Michele Fitzgerald.

“Michele has said to me countless times, 'I don't know why Laurel is so mean to me. She just says the weirdest things, and then sometimes she's nice to me, and then sometimes she's really mean to me, and it's like walking on eggshells,'” she said. “Laurel has a way of dropping breadcrumbs, pulling you in only to stab you back down. She finds the people with the most sensitive hearts or who really want to please people, and those are the ones she then makes her own.”

Cara Maria added that she heard Laurel getting “heated” and “hateful” towards Michele, saying, “I'll never be your friend,” which was not shown in the episode. “I looked at Michele and said, 'I'll be your friend,'” Cara Maria said. “Because I wanted to get her out of that situation, because I've been through that before and no one should be spoken to like that… Michele tells me, 'I just wanted to go to the bathroom, Laurel stopped me and said, 'Just so you know, we'll never be friends,' and that's how it started.'”

Afterwards, Cara Maria and Michele went to the gym with Rachel Robinson to work out, and Cara Maria said that Michele started “sobbing.” Rachel then told Cara Maria that Laurel had “tried to turn everyone against her.” All stars 4, “not to trust” and that she was “a bad person.” Cara Maria thanked Rachel for not listening to Laurel and then went upstairs to thank Tina Barta as well, even though she knew Laurel was in the room, reigniting their argument.

“It just became a back and forth,” Cara Maria said. “I was like, 'You're a mean person. The way you treat other people in the house is not OK. There's something wrong with you and you're taking it out on everyone else, and I'm just not going to deal with it anymore.'”

Cara Maria said Laurel then covered her ears and started singing to ignore her. “It's literally like trying to talk to a toddler,” she added. “At that point, I just walked away… Here you can see the conversation I had with Emily as I was getting ready to dye my hair, Emily was getting ready to go into the elimination phase.”

Then Cara Maria met Michele again in the kitchen to give her a pep talk. “I'm telling this to Michele right now – who just finished training, that's why her face is red,” she added. “At that moment, Laurel walks in and says, 'Oh, you're talking about me? Do you have something to say?' I'm going to stand up for myself. I'm going to stand up for Michele.”

Cara Maria believes that was the moment when “Laurel realized she wasn't going to reach me” and the argument took a new turn – but she claims the edited version is not accurate.

Laurel Stucky, “The Challenge.”

MTV

“When she screamed, 'I had your back when…' and it goes on Rivals 1 Scene where she was nice to me once, 15 years ago, this conversation and what she yells at me about had absolutely nothing to do with it Rivals 1, She said: “This clip can be thrown in the trash and burned and never shown on screens again because there is no need, because it is totally irrelevant.”

She continued, “What she actually said is something I have to talk around here, and it's something that is not legally allowed to be shown on television. Essentially, she was mimicking past abuse that I've endured while she was towering over me and screaming at me… She was basically weaponizing my past trauma, pulling it out of thin air. What she did was trigger something deep inside me that I didn't even know was there. When she was yelling at me and mentioning things that had happened to me in my past that she knew about while she was mimicking it, it just let me go and I went into some sort of different mental space.”

Cara Maria said Laurel's decision to “weaponize” and “reenact” abuse trauma left her fainting and sobbing “uncontrollably” and “infuriated the whole house,” but the incident was removed from the episode “because it cannot be shown for legal reasons.”

“Security followed Laurel for several days afterward to make sure she stayed away from me,” she revealed. “And I asked to speak to a therapist because it triggered an instinctive reaction in me when she brought up the subject.”

Cara Maria rejected the “sister” narrative that has been used over the years to describe the dynamic between her and Laurel. “We're not sisters, we'll never be sisters… That's not how you treat someone you care about,” she said. “Sisters at least mean well for each other. She has no good intentions for me. Her intentions are to keep me small, to keep me beneath her, to play with my mind, to manipulate me, which I think was another reason why she brought up such a horrible moment in my life, one of my lowest points.”

She also called Laurel a “hypocrite” because she held a grudge against Michele for voting her into expulsion. Ride or Diebut then she promised Cara that she would not do that to her, at the beginning Battle of the eras only to immediately throw them into the first elimination of the season.

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“She says one thing and does another, and she plays a lot of crazy psychological games with anyone who is mentally weaker than her,” she added. “This is what I've seen, this is what I've had to endure, this is who she is. I don't know what she plans to do with me. I don't need to know what she plans to do with me. I just want it to go away.”

Cara Maria and Laurel are currently on the same team in season 40, but Cara Maria has a new philosophy for the future: “At the end of the day, Laurel will always be Laurel, and I think that's punishment enough.”

Watch Cara Maria’s full video below: