‘The Bachelor’ Alum Says Going on the Show ‘F*Cks You Up’
Going on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette looks like a great time. Even if you don’t fall in love, you get to spend weeks in a mansion or on a resort, eating and drinking for free, and hanging out with people. Then, when you leave the show, if you gained enough popularity, you can quit your job and focus on Instagram promotions full-time. But some alums have opened up about the dark side of going on the show that you don’t see.
Going on ‘The Bachelor’ can mess with your head
Lately, more former contestants have been talking about the mental toll that being part of the franchise can take on people. Former Bachelor contestant Jacqueline Trumbull went on Us Weekly’s Here for the Right Reasons podcast and spoke about what her experience has been like post-Bachelor.
“The show feels finally behind me. The first few years after are really rough,” she told the outlet. “I have several friends from the show and it f*cks you up in all sorts of ways. And I talked a lot about that at the time. You realize that, like, you become envious of other women and other edits. You don’t expect that necessarily, and other people won’t admit to it, so then it can feel like a very lonely experience. There’s a lot of anger, there’s a lot of anger toward fans and people on social media who are mean and there’s a feeling of being chronically misunderstood. All that paired with, ‘Oh, my gosh, so fun, that experience was amazing.’ I mean, my experience filming was, like, almost 100 percent — I remember it as very positive. You have all these new friends, you have all these new opportunities.”
Jacqueline, who competed on Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s season, sent herself home to continue pursuing her career. A move that brings her comfort.
“It’s a really confusing, chaotic time,” she said. “And I feel like my life is definitely settled from that [but it took] two years. It also took getting into — I’m at Duke University for my PhD — and it took that because I left for my career and that was a gamble. And the gamble paid off. That brought me a lot of peace.”
Some stars feel manipulated
Some former stars have come out about feeling manipulated by producers. Jed Wyatt, who competed and won Hannah Brown’s season of The Bachelorette, got a notoriously bad edit. During the season, rumors spread that Jed had had a girlfriend, Haley Stevens, the entire time he was on the show and he became public enemy number one of Bachelor Nation. He recently opened up about his experience in a video on his Instagram Stories.
“I will actually be going into deeper detail but the facts are this: That, yes, I was highly manipulated and from it deeply mentally affected from the show, and 2. No, I never cheated. Ever. On Haley or Hannah,” he said.
Some contestants feel used after ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette’
Around that same time, former contestant Dylan Barbour went on a Twitter spree about how the franchise treats contestants.
“You gotta understand the game,” he wrote in since-deleted tweets in January. “They get paid off you doing sh*t that warrants screen time. It’s easy to make a bad person look worse, it’s hard to make a good person look bad.”
“They had that whole spiel on hating bullying, then purposely edit things to warrant bullying. Sh*t is wild,” he wrote.
“My last thought: they need you until they don’t,” he wrote. “Each person is a pawn in a larger scheme, and they do not have contestants [sic] best interests in mind. Mental health is not a concern. Multiple people develop issues post-show and they do nothing to help. If anything, they fuel hate.”
