‘The Bachelorette’: The Real Reason Clare Crawley Canceled that Group Date

Former bachelorette DeAnna Pappas (now Stagliano) was a guest on Clare Crawley’s brief season of The Bachelorette. Fans will remember the women chatting mostly about Crawley’s connection with Dale Moss. That same day, the lead was supposed to go on a group date with some of her contestants. She canceled the date, and it was never really explained why. In a recent interview Stagliano did with The Domenick Nati Show, she explained why the controversial lead opted to cancel the group date and go straight to the cocktail party.

DeAnna Pappas Stagliano talks about how much of ‘The Bachelorette’ is staged

During their interview on Nov. 13, Stagliano was asked by the radio host just how much of the show is “staged.”

“So something that I didn’t realize when I first went on the show is that the producers are trying to tell a storyline for each person,” she began. “Each contestant has a storyline. And that’s not something that I really knew when I first went on the show.”

At the end of the day, The Bachelorette is a TV show, and its producers are trying to make it entertaining. That’s why every season is filled with stock characters.

“What I didn’t realize at the time, what I failed to get a grasp on, is the fact that they are telling a story,” Stagliano continued. “Hopefully, it’s a love story in the end. But they’re trying to tell a story. Each person has their own story. There’s always the one who’s lost a parent and they have that connection or someone has a daughter at home and they’re nervous to tell that or there’s the virgin. Or whatever that is.”

Why Clare Crawley really canceled the group date, according to DeAnna Pappas Stagliano

Bachelorette fans will remember when Crawley told her contestants that their group date was canceled. It seemed as though they’d been waiting for hours. The looks on their faces can only be described as politely defeated.

Stagliano says Crawley didn’t cancel the date on a whim, even though that’s how it might have looked. She wanted to spare her contestants from another “goofy date.”

“We were supposed to film a date that day that I went to Palm Springs to film but we pulled the date because it was another kind of goofy date,” she said. “She’d already done the dodgeball date, where it was strip dodgeball, and she just didn’t want to do that to the guys again. She was like, ‘You know what, I have a good group of guys. I don’t want to put them through something silly again. What I really want is just to hang out and get to know them and talk.'”

DeAnna Pappas Stagliano says Clare Crawley was protecting her ‘Bachelorette’ contestants

In an Instagram Live video Stagliano did after the episode aired, she elaborated more on the potentially embarrassing date Crawley saved her men from.

“The day portion of our date — because it was going to be this game show thing talking about vaginas and whatever and where do babies come from — Clare was like ‘Listen, I just put them through this goofy date the other day and I really don’t want to do that to them again. It was a lot of fun and I think they had a lot of fun, but I’m not going to do this again and embarrass them. What I want to really want to do is be able to talk to these guys, get to know them, and have real and genuine conversations,’” she said.

In her Nov. 13 interview with Nati, Stagliano said she “commend[s] Clare for standing up for what she felt and really pushing that aside to protect the guys.”

Still, the former lead wants viewers to remember they’re not seeing everything.

“But, you know what, on a television show you don’t see that,” she said. “Everybody just, like, gives Clare crap. Like, she just spent time with Dale, shame on her. It’s not at all how it was.”