The Married At First Sight (MAFS) 2026 retreat turned into a complete disaster after Bec Zacharia made a joke about Steven Danyluk “finger-banging” Rachel Gilmore, causing Rachel to storm off in tears. Everything escalated from there, with Juliette Chae Fava telling Bec she was a “c*nt” and a “f**king freak” multiple times.
While Bec seemed to hold up well and left the Retreat early with her husband Danny Hewitt, he tells Chattr viewers didn’t get to see a true representation of what happened. “It wasn’t actually portrayed on camera, true to how it was. Like Bec literally lay in bed crying for two days, like she was just laying in the dark room, and I was really the only one there for her, Sammy [Stanton] was there for her as well,” Danny says.
“We were basically excluded from the group. I didn’t want to go and hang out with the group, because then I’d just be leaving Bec by herself… it was way worse [than viewers saw].”
Danny believes if viewers could have seen what Bec went through, there would be more people showing her empathy and sympathy. “She sort of held her head up in front of the cameras, and then behind the scenes, she was just laying there, you know, [a] crying mess, and I was just the one trying to help her through it,” he recalls.
“The Retreat was easily the worst part of the experiment for me by a mile, because [it involved] my wife on the show… you don’t want to see [anybody] that upset, especially a female.”
The groom adds that Gia and Juliette poured fuel on the fire, and was baffled by how the “finger-bang” joke got blown out of proportion. “If this joke was cracked five or 10 years ago, I don’t think there’d be a problem with it whatsoever. But we do live in a world nowadays where we’ve got to be very careful [with] what we say,” he notes.
“It’s more [that] Juliet and Gia have gone back and sort of amplified everything that was being said,” he adds, before claiming the pair used Rachel’s hurt as a way to attack Bec. “I’m pretty sure Rachel just wanted it to stop, stop being talked about, but by default, [it] actually got talked about more.”
Did Danny tell Steven to ‘finger-bang’ Rachel?
During the retreat, Bec couldn’t understand why Rachel continued to hold a grudge after the comment was made, especially since she claimed Danny told Steven to “fingerbang” Rachel and get intimate.
While the groom says he did have conversations with Steven about intimacy, he never used that crude term.
“I wouldn’t sit there and be like, ‘I think you should fingerbang her’,” he says. “The conversation was more just like, ‘How’s it going on the intimacy side of things with you and Rachel?’, a conversation like that.”
All we can say is… release the tapes! We want to see these unaired convos for ourselves.
Married at First Sight (MAFS) 2026 airs Sunday – Monday on Channel 9 and 9Now.
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