Jacob Harder is speaking out after his honeymoon with new wife Haley Harris came to a nasty end during last week’s Married at First Sight. The Season 12 couple got into a fight after Jacob accused his new bride of also having a boyfriend back home, but Jacob insists in a new statement to PopCulture that there was more behind the “regrettable” situation than just jealousy getting the best of him.
Haley recalled the fight to MAFS cameras the next day. “I was texting with the girls and ended up meeting a couple of them for a drink. And I texted Jake to let him know and he kind of blew up on me and then accused me of having a boyfriend back home, which is freaking news to me,” she said in a self-shot confessional, adding that her new husband didn’t apologize in the morning.
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Jacob recalled his side of the fight in a new statement, saying that while he regrets “escalating the way they did and raising my voice,” he only asked if Haley was “seeing someone else” because he heard fellow MAFS co-star Clara Fergus discussing with her the previous night “how they left [Haley] cozy with someone at a club at 3 a.m.” a week before their wedding. “Which of course had me thinking a whole lot about her behavior up until this point with a different perspective,” Jacob added.
He continued that after texting her on their last day in Vegas asking if she wanted to get dinner and “try and reset,” Haley initially seemed up for the idea, but came back later than expected with Clara and her husband. While the two couples had “a good time,” Jacob said he knew Haley brought back company “to avoid” talking about their problems. “So once they left of course I brought up the elephant in the room and Haley again tried to avoid talking about it so I then asked her if she’d been seeing anyone else,” Jacob continued.
Jacob claimed he “tried to keep most of those details off-camera to protect [his] wife,” but wanted to be “open, honest and apologetic” about what happened “as a result of the fight exploding the way it did and the impact it has on my personal character.”
Haley, in last week’s episode, denied categorically having someone else she was seeing at the time, telling the camera, “Just because we’re not connecting right now, does that automatically [mean he can] assume that I have a boyfriend back home? Like, I just don’t get it. I’ve been single for seven years. I didn’t just pop one out of thin air right before I went on this show.” Married at First Sight (produced by Kinetic Content) airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on Lifetime.
