Love Is Blind’s Monica debunks Stephen’s ‘drunk at a sleep test’ excuse for se.xting another woman

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Love Is Blind season 7, episodes 1-9.

When Stephen Richardson told Monica Davis he was sexting another woman because he was “drunk at a sleep test” on Love Is Blind, you probably had one of two reactions: 1. What sleep test allows the patient to drink alcohol? Or 2. What the heck is a sleep test?!

Stephen’s excuse for why he was sending sexual messages to another woman doesn’t make sense … because it’s not exactly true. Monica tells Entertainment Weekly that while Stephen was actually at a sleep study (a.k.a. a polysomnogram, which can be done at home, a sleep clinic, or a hospital to record data about your body’s activity while sleeping in order to diagnose and treat disorders including sleep apnea), he wasn’t actually drunk. Mainly because you can’t drink alcohol or be drunk during a sleep study, since it would mess with the results.

“That’s been the most hilarious thing that I’ve seen online today is so many people being like, ‘Wait, what’s a sleep study?’ And then everyone else being like, ‘Wait, he was drunk at a sleep study?'” Monica tells EW. “He’d had this sleep study planned for a while, something related to military, being a veteran and his disability, and it was a night test. He went really late — 10 p.m. you show up, or whatever it was. So we’d had a date that day, had some drinks. Stephen was not drunk.”

She debunks his excuse as just that: An excuse. “It’s not like he was drinking there without me,” she adds. “I know what he drank and what state of mind he was in when he went and we’d had a couple drinks that that evening. I think that he was just using that as an excuse for his behavior.”

Monica discovered the inappropriate messages off-camera, but confronted Stephen about them on-camera in episode 8. Stephen told her, “At this point, I don’t think there’s anything I could say that you would believe.” He then went on to say he “did make a completely stupid mistake while being drunk at a sleep test with somebody who texted me.” Monica immediately called him out for lying because “the really gross [texts] were today.” He denied texting the woman that day, but then told Monica he couldn’t prove it because he deleted the texts, and then claimed, “I honestly don’t remember texting her today.”

The conversation ended with Stephen saying he was packing up his things and was going to leave her alone, but Monica made him pay her back on Venmo for expenses she had covered for him.

“He certainly didn’t cheat on me,” Monica tells EW. “Well, let me be clear — he was at a sleep study. I definitely couldn’t say for sure if he [cheated], I don’t know. I would like to think not, and I don’t think so. But you know, he’s lied to me before, in that moment.”

She does confirm that Stephen wasn’t lying about being at a sleep study when he didn’t spend the night in their shared apartment provided by Love Is Blind production — because she validated it for herself.

“He was there because he’d sent me a picture the night of, ‘Hey babe, look at me, I’m tied up to the machine,'” Monica says. “But I remember thinking in that conversation, when things were coming to a head, ‘Is that even real? Maybe that’s an old picture that you sent me to throw me off.’ But I was able to verify, through the location and time and all that, that he was actually at a hospital center.”

Monica reveals that the woman Stephen was sexting is someone he had a history with, and so she doesn’t believe this was a “one time thing.”

“I think that it would have come out [eventually],” she says. “The universe so handed it to me in that moment. The universe knew that I needed to see this information before [continuing this process].”

While the discovery of the texts was “devastating,” Monica admits she had doubts about their relationship already, which she didn’t hide from the cameras.

“Any doubts were what you see in some of these episodes, some of the comments that you see, the jokes which I thought were jokes,” she says. “You can see it in my face at times. You love this person so much, but you’re still learning them, and what are you willing to sleep under the rug? I really wanted to make it work.”

She is, of course, referring to the moment when Stephen said offhand that “in a year,” a “bunch of women” would be in his DMs, “wanting to suck my d—,” among other things. “That’s one example. That’s one good one,” Monica says. “He says the women in his DMs thing, and he’s talking to Taylor and I, and then all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘I’m gonna get a french fry.’ I’d had enough of that conversation at that point. There’s a scene of us sitting on a couch, and he’s like, ‘You could treat me like raw meat,’ like kind of out of nowhere, and I’m like, what? What’s happening? How did we get here?”

As for whether this breakup scene is the end of their onscreen journey this season, Monica remains tight-lipped. “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 says. “The reunion itself is going to be wild. There’s just so much that’s happened. There’s a lot more to come. It’ll also be nice to maybe get resolution in some cases.”

New episodes of Love Is Blind season 7 drop Wednesdays on Netflix.