Cara Maria says Laurel 'mimicked past abuse' in unseen footage from “The Challenge” season 40 fight

"Security followed Laurel around for several days to make sure she stayed away from me, and I asked to speak to a therapist," Cara Maria Sorbello reveals.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Challenge: Battle of the Eras, season 40, episode 5, "An Era Tradition."

Cara Maria Sorbello is pulling back the curtain on how her fight with Laurel Stucky in this week's episode of The Challenge season 40 was worse than it appeared onscreen.

The former friends turned bitter rivals got into yet another verbal confrontation in Battle of the Eras episode 5, "An Era Tradition," but Cara Maria revealed in a TikTok posted Wednesday night that there was so much more that wasn't shown onscreen, including how Laurel "mimicked past abuse" she endured, which resulted in Cara Maria seeking out a therapist during filming.

"This is just a one-hour show with a whole lot of commercials in between, and there are so many people and so many stories and so many things happening that you're never going to see at all," Cara Maria said in the video. "With that said, I'm here to tell you about what you didn't [see]."

Related: Horacio insists he actually won controversial The Challenge season 40 elimination against Derrick

Cara Maria explained that at this point, weeks into filming the season, she had witnessed Laurel "constantly digging" at fellow cast member Michele Fitzgerald.

"Michele has told me countless times, 'I don't know why Laurel's so mean to me. She just says the weirdest things, and then sometimes she's nice to me, and then sometimes she's really mean to me and it's like walking on eggshells,'" she said. "Laurel has a way about her of dropping bread crumbs, pulling you in only so that she can stab you right back down. She finds the people that have the most sensitive heart or really people pleasers, and those are the ones that she'll go after."

Cara Maria added that she heard Laurel "getting heated" and "hateful" with Michele, saying, "I'm never going to be your friend," which wasn't shown in the episode. "I looked at Michele and said, 'I'll be your friend,'" Cara Maria said. "Because I wanted to take her out of that situation, because I've been there, and nobody should have to be talked to like that... Michele tells me, 'I was just trying to go to the bathroom, Laurel stopped me from going and said, 'Just so you know, we're never going to be friends,' and that is how it started.'"

After that, Cara Maria and Michele went to work out in the gym along with Rachel Robinson, and Cara Maria said that Michele began "sobbing." Rachel then told Cara Maria that Laurel had "tried to turn everybody against" her on All Stars 4, "not to trust" her and that she was "a bad person." Cara Maria thanked Rachel for not listening to Laurel, and then she went upstairs to thank Tina Barta as well even though she knew Laurel was in the room, which reignited their fight.

Related: The Challenge's Tony fires back at Averey for claiming he wanted to leave season 40

"It just turned into a back and forth," Cara Maria said. "I'm like, 'You're a mean person. The way you treat other people in the house, it is not okay. You have something wrong inside of you, and you are taking it out on everybody else, and I'm just not going to deal with it anymore.'"

Cara Maria said that Laurel then covered her ears and began singing to ignore her. "It's literally like trying to speak to a toddler," she added. "At that point, I just walked away... That is where you see the conversation that I had with Emily as I'm getting ready to dye my hair, Emily's getting ready to go into elimination."

That's when Cara Maria met back up with Michele in the kitchen to give her a pep talk. "I'm in the process of telling this to Michele — who literally just finished her workout, that's why her face is red," she added. "At that point, Laurel walks in and said, 'Oh, you're talking about me? You got something to say?' I'm going to stand up for myself. I'm going to stand up for Michele."

Cara Maria believes that's the moment when "Laurel realized she wasn't going to get to me," and the fight took a turn — but she claimed that the way it's edited is not accurate.

Related: The Challenge's Aneesa says she's in her 'petty era' after season 40: 'I'm just annoyed'

"When she yelled, 'I've had your back when ... ' and it cuts to that Rivals 1 scene where she was nice to me, one time, 15 years ago, this conversation and what she's yelling at me about had absolutely nothing to do with Rivals 1," she said. "That clip can can be tossed away in the trash and burned and never brought up ever again to screens because it doesn't need to, because it's completely irrelevant."

She continued, "What she had actually said is something that I have to dance around here, and it's something that cannot legally be put on TV. In essence, she mimicked past abuse that I have endured, while towering over me and screaming at me... She basically weaponized my past trauma, pulled it out of nowhere. What she did do is absolutely trigger something deep inside me that I didn't even know was there to set off. When she screamed at me and threw things that have happened to me in my past that she knew about, while mimicking it, it just unleashed me, and I went into like another mental space."

Cara Maria said that Laurel's decision to "weaponize abusive trauma" and "reenacting it" caused her to black out and sob "uncontrollably" and "set the whole house off," but it was removed from the episode "because it legally can't be shown."

"After that, security followed Laurel around for several days to make sure she stayed away from me," she revealed. "And I asked to speak to a therapist because of the visceral triggering reaction that that pulled out of me when she brought that up."

Related: The Challenge's Averey slams Tony for 'super selfish' move on season 40: 'Don't mess with me'

Cara Maria rejected the "sister" narrative that's been used to describe her and Laurel's dynamic through the years. "We're not sisters, we'll never be sisters... This is not the way that you treat you treat somebody that you care about," she said. "Sisters, at least, have good intentions for each other. She does not have good intentions for me. Her intentions are to keep me down, to keep me below her, to play games with my head, to manipulate me, which I think was another reason why she would bring up such a horrible moment in my life, one of my lowest moments."

She also called out Laurel for being a "hypocrite" for holding a grudge against Michele for voting her into elimination on Ride or Dies, but then promising Cara she wouldn't do that to her at the beginning of Battle of the Eras only to immediately throw her into the first elimination of the season.

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"She says one thing and she does another, and she plays a lot of demented psychological games to anybody that has a weaker mind state than her," she added. "That is what I've seen, that is what I've been subjected to, that is who she is. I don't know what her thing is with me. I don't need to know what it is with me. I just want it to be gone."

Cara Maria and Laurel are currently on the same team for season 40, but Cara Maria has a new philosophy moving forward: "At the end of the day, Laurel is always going to be Laurel, and I think that's punishment enough."

Watch Cara Maria's full video below:

Representatives for The Challenge did not immediately respond to Entertainment Weekly's request for comment.

The Challenge: Battle of the Eras airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on MTV.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.