Given the opportunity, recently eliminated Bachelor contestant Emily O'Brien would have stripped down in front of Ben Flajnik like Courtney Robertson did on the February 13 episode.
"I don't have a problem with it; I think it sounded like fun," PhD student O'Brien, 27, said on a conference call Thursday. "I think we probably would have liked to have done it maybe as a group."
O'Brien wishes Robertson, 28, would have felt the same way. "I understand the motivation behind wanting to do that with a guy that you like, but I still think you should have some element of respect for the other people there," O'Brien said. "I think it sort of clouded Ben's judgment a little bit because I think he had that sort of physical intimacy on his mind instead of taking things with each woman one step at a time."
"He's obviously very attracted to Courtney and wanted to take advantage of that opportunity, and I understand that," O'Brien continued. "I just wish he had been a little bit more respectful of us and taken a second to think, 'Hey, maybe this will keep my mind clear and help me to make the decision I need to make to get to the point where I need to be, which is looking for a life partner, not someone to hook up with.'"
Despite being sent home just weeks before Flajnik, 29, hands out the final rose, O'Brien doesn't have any regrets about her time on the show.
"My respect for Ben has gone down, certainly, since the show has aired and since I've gotten some perspective on things. I've had some people say that I've dodged a bullet. I've had others say that I dodged a locomotive with a nuclear bomb strapped to it," O'Brien said. "I'm not sure that I would put it that way, but I think for sure we were not meant to be together, and he was not the right guy for me."
