The Bachelor ladies loathe Vienna Girardi — and so does her ex-husband, who tells the new Us Weekly (out now) that she withdrew his last $5,000 from his bank account to pay for breast implants while he was deployed in Iraq with the Marines.
But Bachelor host Chris Harrison is defending the unemployed, 23-year-old former Florida Hooters waitress.
"She is not a villain," he tells UsMagazine.com. "She is really not. She is a sweet girl. Jake [Pavelka, the Bachelor] loves her, I love her. She just rubs the women the wrong way."
He says her occasional "little jabs" by themselves are not "a big deal, but add them up, and it's a big deal, especially in this pressure cooker of the Bachelor. There are those little moments where she says, 'I want the last conversation.' Jake even realized, 'Back up a little bit. Don't go out of your way to throw it in the girl's faces.' But she is not there to make friends. She loves Jake and that's it."
Girardi and Pavelka, 32, are actually "very similar," Harrison tells Us."I think people read Vienna as this antagonist. She is not the antagonist, and you have to see it when she is with Jake."
When she is with Jake, Harrison says, "she is a very soft, gentle, loving woman."
