‘Married At First Sight’ Legit Paired An Assault Survivor & An Ex-Brawler

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Published

May 1, 2016

You can build a television show around the concept of marrying two strangers.
You can film them as they try to eke out a weird, weird life.
Hell, you can even ham up their inevitable bust-up for ratings.

But maybe you shouldn’t be pairing an assault victim with a bloke who was ordered to attend an anger-management course after a brawl, hey?

Still, that’s exactly what happened during the festering mess that was Married At First Sight.

It’s come to light that test-subject Jono Pitman admitted assaulting another dude in 2008 during a pub fight, but the show’s psychologists and producers still saw it fit to hitch him with Clare Verrall, who survived a random violent attack last year.

What’s more: Verrall has spoken openly about her PTSD and emotional fragility in the aftermath of that incident, and made those factors pretty clear in the lead-up to filming.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, she said “I was very disappointed… knowing I had joined the show earnestly trying to put myself out there to find love, the show and psychologists partnered me with someone who had known anger management issues and who has been arrested for violent behaviour.”

A spokesperson for the show said that Pitman didn’t have a mark against him on his criminal record, and that the pair also discussed the whole deal on their, uh, ‘honeymoon.’

Regardless, in the aftermath of the whole sitch, Verall made her opinion on the show pretty obvious: