Heidi Mae, an influencer and reality TV star, has detailed her family’s “traumatic experience” as contestants on the ABC series Wife Swap on social media. Her TikTok video, published Tuesday, has received over 477,000 views, 97,000 likes, and 1,500 comments since being shared on the app.
Each episode of Wife Swap follows the same basic framework: for a two-week stretch, two families, often with significantly different lifestyles or ideas from one other, would “swap” their house’s wife/mother. For the first week, the wife would attempt to follow her new family’s regulations, and during the second week she could make whatever adjustments she wanted. The show originally aired on FOX from 2004 to 2010 and generated several spin-offs.
Mae was equally as jaded by the show’s lighthearted tone. “To this day, my heart still races when I think about it,” she declared in an email to Newsweek. She dubbed the experience “being trapped in an exploitative hell for ten days of filming.”
Mae, who was 20 when the episode was filmed in 2010, claims that she was misrepresented as a “protected and controlled” person who had never been on a date.
“The program employed extensive editing and cutting together of audio to shape the narrative of a religious sheltered family that required outside assistance in order to enter society and heal,” she explained.
In Mae’s current viral clip, she states plainly: “My family was on ‘Wife Swap’ and it was the worst mistake of our lives.”
“They made us sign an NDA to be on the show. It’s been almost ten years, so I said, f**k it. I’m just going to talk about what occurred, what it was truly like being on the show, and the terrible things that happened to me while they were filming.”
Mae added, “To be on the show, you had to take a 700-question psych [evaluation] and then have an hour-long interview with a psychologist. They stated it as ‘This is what we need to ensure that you are mentally healthy enough to appear on the show.’ “
The TikToker said that the psychologist went over numerous questions with her, including one in particular: “What is something that genuinely makes you sad, which causes tears?”
Mae said she would “get really lonely sometimes” because she’d “grown up traveling full-time.”
Mae described how she felt during her interview “When I’m alone, it makes me cry. It’s really upsetting.”
Mae stated in her video that after the first “conversation” between her and the new mom soon descended into a quarrel, her response to that delicate issue came up early in the filming process.
“She looks me straight in the eyes and says, ‘You’re all alone. Nobody cares about you. You have no friends,’ ” Mae said. “I just…broke down because this was my breaking point.”
“They exploited my pain for television after discovering it on the psych [evaluation],” she finished in the video.
Mae went on to tell Newsweek about the incident described in her video. “When she said that to me, I ran into a room and locked myself inside crying,” Mae recalled. Mae claims that the psychologist who performed her evaluation was the only person who knew about her sense of isolation—in a session that she expected would remain “private.”
Meanwhile, Mae claimed that her mother, who was temporarily staying with the episode’s other family, “was miserable…and couldn’t eat because she was so stressed out.”
Mae Mae went on to explain, “It wasn’t until after four years of therapy and counseling that I realized I had to tell my story about what my family and I had gone through on the show.”
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