Laurel Stucky Opens Up About ‘Draining’ Friendship With Cara Maria Sorbello

MTV Laurel Stucky and Cara Maria Sorbello

There have been many major feuds in past seasons of “The Challenge” and one of them was between two big characters on the show, Laurel Stucky and Cara Maria Sorbello. The two first met on “Fresh Meat II” and started a rivalry, but after they were forced to work together as partners on “Rivals,” they developed a friendship, although it didn’t last for long afterward.

Recently, Laurel was a guest on Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio’s podcast, “Death, Taxes and Bananas,” and she opened up about her relationship with Cara Maria over the years and where it went wrong. Bananas asked Laurel the reason why they were rivals in the first place and Laurel answered simply, “Just that she annoyed me.” He said it seemed as though they were still best friends on some seasons despite that and asked if there had been a blowup between the two.

Laurel said the term best friends “never came out of my mouth” and said the friendship between the two was played up in the edit as a storyline. “Cara was so absent-minded to the production element of the show that she’s like, ‘yeah, my best friend this,’ and I’m like, ‘don’t you have any other friends?’ I have best friends that I’ve had forever and I just met you, you’re not my best friend.” She said that was “fundamentally something that annoyed me about her.”

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Laurel Said She Believes That Cara Doesn’t Know Who She Is & Pretended to Be Not as Smart as She Really Is

Laurel explained that she didn’t like how Cara was “playing this role of vapid, I-don’t-know girl” as though she didn’t know anything about the world. She said that’s false and Cara is actually really smart. Bananas told her he thought Cara Maria was a “shapeshifter,” someone who took on different personalities based on who she spent time with.

“I think it’s just that Cara didn’t really know who she was,” Laurel explained. She said she doesn’t know Cara anymore but back in the day she used to be a very nice person but “it was really frustrating to me to watch her not be herself.” She said the whole situation is very complicated but what bothered her the most, she said, is that she “doesn’t know who she is and it was too draining to be alongside that.”

Bananas brought up how things changed on “Free Agents” and Cara Maria had an entire storyline about standing up to Laurel. Laurel said that was something else she didn’t like, because she would have preferred it if Cara approached her personally to talk about it instead of making it into a television show.

“I don’t appreciate that at all and I would never do that to someone I called a friend,” Laurel said. “I would talk to them one-on-one and if the f****** cameras happened to catch it, good on them.” She said Cara Maria is very influenced by those around her and that was one of the main reasons she made their relationship into a storyline.

Laurel Told Bananas That They Will Never Mend Things But She Wishes Cara Well

“We do not talk now but that does not mean that I do not wish her well and hope that she has happiness and finds happiness,” Laurel concluded. “It was a reality TV relationship, friendship gone wrong… it was doomed from the very beginning.”

Johnny said it sounds like they “might be cool” at some point in the future based on Laurel’s concluding comments but she clarified, “No, I don’t think so. I think, no. I just wish her well. I want her to find happiness and I think that she was a strong individual before she got labeled as a strong individual… I just personally think that Cara got manipulated by television and it did not do well for her.”

When “War of the Worlds 2” was airing, Cara explained her perspective with their friendship, telling People, “In her good moments, [Laurel’s] been the kindest, most beautiful soul imaginable. She has been by my side literally the worst of the worst times — there’s so much heart and love in her. In other times, it’s like as soon as I don’t need her, if I’m confident in what I’m doing, that’s when she tries to push me back down… I feel like her thing is she wants to make me smaller.”

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