Love Is Blind star Jessica Batten is giving her side of the story on all the drama surrounding her ex, Mark Cuevas, and his breakup with another cast member on the show, Lauren “LC” Chamblin.
During the Netflix dating series, Mark and Jessica got engaged but broke up when she dramatically left him at the altar during the show’s finale. After production wrapped, Mark began dating LC, but the two broke up last June. LC reportedly learned — via a post on Reddit — that Mark was dating someone else without her knowledge, though Mark told ET at the time that he and LC were never in an exclusive relationship. However, LC told ET that they did talk about being exclusive, and that she’s learned that she deserves “to be treated like a priority, and not an option.”
Meanwhile, Jessica later commented on an Instagram post alleging that Mark was sleeping with multiple women at the studio he trained at during the show, writing, “Wow. News to me. I only know about one.”
The season 1 cast of Netflix’s hit show recently reunited for a two-year anniversary party celebrating success stories Cameron Hamilton and Lauren Speed, and Matthew Barnett and Amber Pike. In an interview with ET’s Rachel Smith, Jessica talked about what went down between her and Mark during the show that viewers didn’t see — including that Mark was already dating another woman.
“When Mark and I were back in Atlanta, he mentioned on a couple of occasions that he had spent time with another woman. And I didn’t like that, obviously, because I was still trying to see this whole thing through,” she says. “I was also working 40-plus hours a week, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to be, you know, still swiping left and right on people and and I really wanted his whole heart to be in it, so that was off-putting.”
“Our wedding planning, and, you know, all of these kind of hoops that we had to go through, he was spending time with another woman who he ended up dating for a year and a half actually after the show wrapped,” she continues. “I knew about that, but I didn’t want to pull that into the show considering the feelings I felt, and you know, I was kind of coming out with, like, ‘I don’t know that I’m feeling this sort of way for you. I think I got way in over my head here.’ So, I kept that information to myself.”
Jessica has no regrets when it comes to not putting that information out during the show so that she would be perceived better by viewers, but she told ET that she did reach out to the other woman he was dating.
“I actually reached out to her and asked her what her feelings were when I was getting so much hate and she never responded to me, but I did once LC and Mark dated. … I don’t know exactly what happened there, but there was another woman,” she says. “That whole thing went down, then I learned that there were multiple other women during the filming of the show, which I had an idea of that, but that’s when that came to fruition and I had a couple girls reach out to me who I’ve become friends with now that gave me some of that information.”
Still, Jessica has no ill feelings toward Mark.
“I think Mark’s a good person, you know, I think he’s going through life,” she says. “I think there was a lot going on, and I think there’s a lot of ego right when I was coming to him saying in Mexico, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not feeling this,’ you know, and it looked really bad, my side, and it felt really bad, right, so that probably hurt, and I think that’s why he then felt like he had to go out and do other things.”
Mark is now engaged to his fiancée, Aubrey Rainey, and the two welcomed a baby boy in April. Jessica has not reached out to him or spoken to him recently, which she says “might be a little inappropriate” considering their past. She does, however, admit that she wished Mark would have attended the reunion party.
“He is the life of the party and he gets along with everyone,” she notes. “I did want to tell the whole story and I wish he would have shown up and had the courage to do so. I think he would have had to face up to two women who were looking for him to validate our truth a bit and I also think he is managing a new relationship that got off to a very quick start, so I think she was pregnant by the time that show happened — by the time we were filming — so I think they were just trying to manage that.”
