The Bachelor alum Alicia Mae Holloway is sharing her adoption story.
“[My parents] used The Jungle Book. They were like, ‘You know how Mowgli is adopted by the animals? That’s how you were adopted,’” Holloway, 29, told People in a Tuesday, May 5, profile. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK, makes perfect sense.’”
Holloway was adopted as a baby by a couple in West Virginia, which often led to questions about her family history.
“I just remember sitting on my dad’s lap crying,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Do my birth parents remember me? Does my birth mom know about me?’”
By 18, Holloway’s parents shared details about her birth mother’s identity, revealing she was a woman named Beth. (Beth had connected with Holloway’s parents through a psychic amid their own hopes to expand their family.)
“Every six months, she had been sending her letters updating her on my life,” she told People, noting she finally was able to meet Beth in person days before her 18th birthday. “I asked her if her family knew about me, and she told me, ‘No,’ that she had told them I was stillborn. Yes, that’s heavy, but I found that out at 18. It didn’t affect my life in the way people think.”
Holloway continued, “That was traumatic for her, not for me. I had my family. I had the best parents and the best friends. I was whole.”
Holloway, who previously appeared on Matt James’ season 25 of The Bachelor in 2021, previously detailed her upbringing in a series of now-viral TikTok videos.
“[My birth mom] begins to tell me how she was married, she had three kids, and then at some point in her marriage, she ended up having an affair with a Black man,” Holloway explained in a 2022 upload, detailing her first conversation with Beth. “She proceeds to tell me that she ends up getting pregnant with me [and] knew it was my birth father’s baby, not her husband’s.”
According to Holloway, Beth said that she planned to give up the baby for adoption because her family “couldn’t afford another” child and her husband wouldn’t “raise someone else’s kid.”
“She pretty much explained to me that I would not have been welcome in her family,” the influencer recalled, citing Beth’s allegedly racist relatives as a contributing factor. “She did not want to have an abortion, she wanted to place me up for adoption.”
Holloway further explained that Beth had no intention of confessing her affair, instead letting her friends and family believe she was having her husband’s baby. After giving birth, Beth told her loved ones that the baby died.
“She told her middle daughter, at one point in time, about me. I think she was about 15 years old,” Holloway recalled of her half-sister. “They never ever talked about it again, and then flash-forward many, many, many years later. I found my biological [family] on Instagram.”
