The woman Bachelorette winner Ed Swiderski slept with one week after getting engaged tells Usmagazine.com she sympathizes with Jillian Harris — and fears he'll play her as well.
"I feel terrible," Lindsey Johnson told Usmagazine.com Thursday — the day after Us Weekly exclusively revealed Swiderski was intimate with Johnson and sent flirty text messages to another woman, Bethany Steffen, after proposing on national TV.
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"As Bethany has said, Ed has a way with words and this is what he did to both of us!" Johnson, 29, continues.
Johnson says she alerted Swiderski — whom she'd been dating for a year — the Saturday night before the July 27 finale that she was going to tell her side of the story.
"He said, 'Lindsey, please do if it's going to make you feel better to get your side out and the truth out,'" Johnson says.
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Later that day he changed his mind, texting her: "I think you should just talk to me if you have any questions."
They haven't communicated since an Aug. 1 text in which Swiderski wrote "I thought you were over this?" that Johnson did not reply to.
Now that Swiderski has denied their relationship (he and Harris said they were being "targeted" because they're "happy" during a Wednesday appearance on Good Morning America), Johnson says she's "disappointed in him.
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"But if he can live with what he said on his conscience, that's his problem because he knows the truth and I know the truth and our friends know the truth," Johnson says. "I mean, he doesn't have to deny it all and he doesn't necessarily have to confess everything either on national TV. He could have taken a middle road and said something more truthful."
She says she thinks Swiderski and Harris will stay together "to prove that they are the one happy couple to make it."
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And she doesn't blame her.
"That's actually what Bethany and I both did when we were dating him despite what people were saying about him to us," Johnson recalls. "There were so many signs. His friends used to say to me all the time, 'Lindsey, he does not deserve you. You deserve better.' And I would ask, 'Why would you say that? Ed is one of your best friends, and he is a great guy.'But they would never tell me why. Now I know!"
For more on Swiderski's cheating ways — including how he tried to woo Steffen with "beer and condoms" after proposing to Harris, his steamy e-mails to Johnson and Steffen and how he promised to propose to Johnson by year's end — pick up the new issue of Us Weekly today!
