’90 Day Fiance’: Did Stephanie Matto Actually Meet Erika Before Filming Began?

We’ve finally gotten to the point of 90 Day Fiance: Before the 90 Days where the cast is meeting their significant others. Some of the members of the cast have been talking for months, sometimes years without ever meeting one another in person, so this is a pretty big deal.

Unfortunately, some people on the show are not always truthful. Being on 90 Day Fiance comes with a lot of perks and semi-fame after the fact, so it makes sense that some people might blur the lines between fact and fiction to get on the show.

Now, people are calling out Erika and her girlfriend Stephanie Matto for possibly lying about when they met.

Stephanie and Erika’s relationship

Matto is a 29-year-old social media influencer living in New York. She and Erika started messaging online and fell in love. On Sunday night’s episode, Matto revealed that she was going to visit Erika in Austalia but failed to tell her mother that she was bisexual.

The trip caused Matto’s family a lot of concern as she has a rare bone marrow disease that makes it very dangerous for her to travel.

Have Stephanie and Erika met before?

In previous seasons, other cast members have been accused of meeting before they actually appeared on 90 Day Fiance. When fans began to speculate if Erika and Matto had done that, an Instagram account called FraudedbyTLC did some sleuthing to figure it out.

“One of Stephanie’s old IG posts showed her in a plane with her mom (second part of video),” the post read. “This picture made people speculate that 1. Her filming was in Jan 2019 and 2. Her mom went with her to AU to meet Erika.”

“I decided to dig into this one to see if it was true. What I came up with to answer this was: Stephanie flew to LA from the east coast with her mother.
Stephanie spent time in LA with her mom, and then continued to Australia alone. She flew there to meet friends – not Erika; she documented this trip via her YouTube channel, and was actually dating someone else at the time- who she broke up with shortly after her trip.”

The account also claimed to have heard from inside sources.

“Additionally sources close to her informed me that she filmed ’90 Day’ around Oct 2019,” the post continued. “So she went to Australia twice in the same year, but different parts.”

Why did Stephanie agree to go on ’90 Day Fiance’?

Matto and Erika are the first same-sex couple to be featured on the show. Fans have pointed out how weird it is that Matto would want to go on the show when she is hiding her sexuality from her parents. But Matto has a reason for coming out in such a public way.

“I felt like this was a way of doing it that was so gutsy and just so crazy that there would be no possible way for me to go back because I’ve had one foot out the closet and one foot in the closet for so many years,” Matto told Entertainment Tonight. “I almost came out so many times.”