MAFS' Melissa breaks her silence on 'shocking' online abuse

Season 10 MAFS contestant Melissa has broken her silence on 'shocking' online abuse.

Video transcript

MELISSA SHEPPARD: Wow, the negativity, the trolls-- no one can prepare you for that. So I'm a strong, confident person. I'd like to see myself as that. And I couldn't even prepare myself for that.

The worst for me was coming off the show and seeing it firstly aired and then seeing what the trolls would say online. That was the worst. No one can prepare you for that. I read them, obviously. The biggest thing that people would say is just don't read them. I mean, come on. What? Just be naive and pretend that doesn't exist?

What was most hurtful is, like, I am reading these messages about myself, regarding a character I feel like that I was playing with a script that I never read before. And these people are coming for me, that has the face, has the body, has the voice of this person that I'm not. What did happen, which was the scariest thing.

So I have a hairdressing salon. And when we were filming, they weren't supposed to air where your location is. Well, that's what-- that was to my knowledge. So when the season was aired, there was a big section of my salon and the address and the email and the phone number. And it was a snippet. But that wasn't long enough for the trolls to know where I worked.

So I had-- I couldn't tell you over 10 to 12 different emails, sexual emails of men and actually women coming to me, offering their sexual advances to myself. The biggest memory for me of that was a man that was 64. He had a penis pump. And he was happy to take me away for a weekend and pay for the dirty weekend.

And yeah, disclaimer, use a penis pump so that I could-- oh, I don't even have sex with him as long as I needed to. I was shocked, like, that was one of the emails.

There was another couple of incidents that gentleman came to my place of business, but I wasn't there. And my business partner was there. And I have staff that work with us at the salon. And they just stormed into the salon and asked if the freak in the sheets was there.

I have a twin sister. Obviously, we look-- we're identical, but we look a little different. When you get us together, you can see that we're different. But from the first glance, you know, she could be me. And this gentleman said to her, "Oh, you're not her." And thank god and my clients and the community that I live in are so phenomenal. They looked at this gentleman and said, "get out." And, you know, he fumbled his words. And he left.

The gentleman wanted-- he wanted to meet the freak in the sheets. And he want to basically have sex with the girl on TV-- the girl that's made up, the girl that is ready to have sex with anybody. But that's not what I was on "Married at First Sight". I was there to have sex with my husband. I was there to be intimate with my husband. Not, it wasn't a free for all for the public to think that I would have sex with everybody else.

Like, I was shocked. I had never had a gentleman or a guy or a woman say anything like that preshow to me. Maybe because of my edit and the way that they kept showing the sexual side of myself. Yeah, these men or these people thought that they could approach me that like that.

Since the show going out, people have been great. If anything, they come and embrace me now and give me a hug and say, "we loved you. We loved your personality." You know, "please don't doubt you shined."

I'm a curvy, size 12, you know, sexual person. And please, I'm trying to empower people with that. I'm trying to lead. I'm not trying to intimidate people. I don't want to offend anybody or trigger their insecurities by being a positive, curvy, size 12. I really want to work with people to, yeah-- to be positive, not to make this a negative.