Stephen’s ‘Love Is Blind’ Cheating Scandal Explained—Here’s How Monica Found The Texts

In the latest episodes of Love Is Blind Season 7, Monica Davis called off her engagement to Stephen Richardson after discovering he had been sexting another woman during their relationship.

At the end of Episode 8, cameras captured the fallout after Monica found “sexual” texts between Stephen and another woman, which he claimed were sent while he was drunk during a sleep test the night prior.

“I did make a completely stupid mistake while being drunk at a sleep test with somebody who texted me,” he admitted on the show. “I know that it was a stupid decision.”

Monica confronted Stephen about whether he continued texting the woman the next day, after sending “disgusting” messages about “fetishes” and other sexual topics. She was also upset when Stephen claimed he only sexted the woman after “the conversation that we had last night,” during which Monica said she wanted to wait to have sex after he admitted he wasn’t 100% sure about marriage.

“Don’t you f—-ing blame me at all for you being gross,” Monica said before asking Stephen to Venmo her for the money she covered for him over the past couple of days. “I’m almost embarrassed about how much of my heart I’ve given you. You were gonna shake my dad’s hand this weekend? While you were planning on cheating? I don’t understand.”

“I can’t do anything to change this, I will live with this,” Stephen said before leaving their apartment. “I truly am sorry for hurting you, for wasting your time, for coming on the show and doing this to you. I shouldn’t have come on the show.”

Monica and Stephen are now sharing details about what happened off-camera, including how she found the texts on his phone and what they said.

Monica told Entertainment Weekly that she discovered the texts “just by total coincidence.” She explained, “We were in our apartment that day, and in the morning, Taylor and Garrett had sent all of the couples a text that said, ‘We’re going to be baking fall goods for everyone, and we’re going to drop them off later tonight.’ We were expecting them to come by soon, and he had to go the bathroom, so he left his phone, and it lit up.”

Because she and Stephen had such a wonderful day together, Monica said she didn’t think twice about looking at his texts to read Garrett’s message. When she clicked on Garrett’s text, she was in Stephen’s text messages, “and there was one at the top right under Garrett that was a girl’s name, and I could see some writing, and it was just … yeah,” Monica said. “It was such a quick decision, but I was like, ‘Push,’ and yeah, I saw a bunch of texts.”

Monica went into “detective mode” and started reading through the messages thoroughly. “I was scrolling to the top because I wanted to see when they started, and they started some time ago, certainly before he left to do this [show],” she continued.

“It was like a dagger to the chest in that moment. Five seconds after, Taylor was asking me, ‘What did they say?’ And I couldn’t even remember the girl’s name, but I do remember they were really very sexual,” Monica added. “I remember one specifically said, ‘No one’s ever been able to satisfy my kinks the way you do.’ And they were just going back and forth.”

The 31-year-old sales executive said she doesn’t know the details of her ex-fiance’s history with this woman, but she said there was “definitely a history there.” She also doesn’t believe he cheated on her during their post-pods relationship, but according to the texts, he was allegedly texting this other woman during that time.

When Monica confronted Stephen about the shocking texts, she said he “wouldn’t tell” her “much.” She continued, “In that moment, he wasn’t saying, ‘I’m not going to tell you,’ but he was trying to, very quickly, kind of shift some of the blame, just saying, ‘I’m a piece of s—-. You’re right,'” she added.

“That’s all I could get from him. He wasn’t really saying much… I was so devastated. I was completely caught off guard. One thing that you don’t get to see a lot of is how much Stephen and I talked about my past with infidelity, and how it’s been very brutal, and he promised… I felt so safe in knowing that that would never be an issue because of how open and honest I was about it.”

Ultimately, Monica wanted to ensure their breakup was filmed for viewers to see. “I just knew in that moment I was so disgusted and shocked that I needed him to be away from me,” she said.

Stephen recently spoke to People about the incident, admitting that the biggest thing he learned from his time on the show is that it’s “probably smart to put a password on your phone.”

“But in all seriousness, the main things are self-talk, self-reflection, and a lot of the things that I believe I said it in the pods, where it’s like you don’t know if you’re fully healed until your next relationship,” he explained.

“And you see a lot of people talking about, ‘Well, you should have completed therapy before you entered this.’ And I’m always like, ‘Is therapy a completion? Do you complete therapy?’ No, it should be an ongoing thing because you’re always growing and learning and there are traumas that might’ve affected you that were never a problem until your thirties or forties.”

“And you might think that you had that under wraps and then suddenly you’re faced with something where you’re like, oh, okay, I see this, now that I recognize it,” he added. “I need to do something to fix it. And that’s essentially what this whole year for me has been.”

Monica did not confirm whether her relationship with Stephen was officially over. Instead, she encouraged viewers to watch the reunion episode. “When viewers tune into the reunion, they’ll get to hear more about what’s happened since then between him and I and the current state of our relationship,” she said.

Meanwhile, in his interview, Stephen confirmed that they were not together. Now, the 34-year-old electrician said that he wants to use what happened with Monica as a learning experience for the future.

“Not even just from my mistake, but the experiment of Love Is Blind, it really did show me that when you take everything else away from the world and it’s just you and an individual, it does truly only take 10 days to fall in love with someone,” he said.

“I can confidently say no matter what, as a cynic that I fell in love with Monica within 10 days. I fell in love with her in those pods, 100%. There’s no doubt in my mind that I did. And it was easy because of the way that the experiment was set up for us.”